There’s an era of television production, on both sides of the Atlantic, which the Tour calls ‘proto-TV,’ where the landscape of what could and could not be done was evolving so rapidly that what seemed staid, even stage-y, for that’s what a lot of early TV was, one year would be supplanted by something slicker and more ambitious months later.
The best would (hopefully) survive and be remembered even to this day. But those early constraints, budget, technical, time, and so on, not to mention the enormous workloads and episode counts (remember that Doctor Who in the ’60s averaged 40 episodes a year), meant that the seams quite often can show in the cold light of DVD or binge-watching.
Our example of this today is ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ which ran four seasons between 1955 and 1960 and produced 144 episodes. Their method cranking out these episodes was to have a large enough cast that not everyone was in every episode, but it also cultivated a rotating ‘stock’ company of guest actors which would play a different role each week. John Dearth, who appeared in the Pertwee swansong Planet of the Spiders was one of these guys, seldom playing the same character twice, so was Paul Eddington, whose illustrious career spanned many decades but also appeared as many different characters for awhile on ‘Robin Hood.’
Then there’s Patrick Troughton, Yep him again. He didn’t appear nearly as many times (9!) as some other actors but there he was in an episode titled ‘The Friar’s Pilgrimage’ which aired on Christmas eve 1956 as a constable. It’s typical Troughton insofar as it’s heavily laden with accent of make-up but it’s unmistakably him. In fact he would subsequently appear in three straight episodes later in 1957, each time as a different character. That’s just how television was done back then, probably assuming viewers wouldn’t notice.
But we did.
Of course Troughton did his own but of ‘Robin Hood-ing’ later on, but that’s a story for another time.
