In the television listings magzine Look Westward for the week starting August 3 1963, a half page feature on Roberta Leigh and fellow writer Jean McConnell (Smugglers' Cove) appeared on Ted Nichols' entertainments page. Here is the section on Roberta Leigh reproduced in full along with the picture of her used to promote it.


Backstage Beauties

Not all the pretty girls who work in television appear before the cameras. This week, I met two attractive women who are the "brains" behind two new children's serials.

Creator of Friday's Space Patrol series is Roberta Leigh, a young writer with a vivid imagination whose earlier characters, including Twizzle and Torchy, are already well known.

She told me: "No one seemed very keen on the idea two years ago when i began to think about Space Patrol. I was aiming at something that would appeal to adults as well as children, but my advisers said it just wouldn't work.

"I couldn't accept this and enlisted the aid of Colin Ronan, Vice President of the British Astronomical Association who said he'd be willing to give me guidance."

So Roberta set to work. Her imagination and Colin's blue pencil sometimes met head-on, but the results were kept within the realms of possibility. Fantasy was out.

The series takes viewers forward to the year 2100. Rockets as we know them are kept in museums, and spaceman Larry Dart and his team journey to the stars in "galaspheres," a kind of flying saucer.

The city in Space Patrol is itself a fascinating project. It took designer Derek Freeborn six months to build. There are no fewer than thirty buildings, linked by monorails carrying "monobiles," the bullet-shaped car of the future. The model covers an area 30 ft. by 20 ft.

The puppets stand about 20 inches high; some are electrically operated and others are worked by hand. "These puppetss aren't dolls," says 33-year-old Roberta, "they're works of art."


© 1963 Look Westward & Ted Nichols

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