Outlaws who created TV's first Robin Hood

A truly wonderful discovery in today's Guardian review section: one of my favourite TV series from the 1950s, The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Richard Greene, was written by 22 Hollywood scriptwriters blacklisted by the McCarthy witchhunt. Tom Dewe Mathews reveals that the series screened by the defunct British commercial TV company, ATV, was "conceived, written and produced" as a means of providing work for the writers, including Ring Lardner Jr. It was secretly orchestrated by a journalist, Hannah Weinstein, who worked for the Hearst press. Even the directors - such as Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson - were probably unaware of who wrote their scripts, and ATV's owner, Lew Grade, was "almost certainly kept in complete ignorance of the blacklist involvement". What a great tale! (Via Guardian Books)