Showing posts with label The Adventures of Robin Hood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Adventures of Robin Hood. Show all posts

Friday, July 29, 2022

‘There’s marrow in these bones’

    

It was before my time, and if not for YouTube I wouldn’t know about it, but ITV had a series (exported to CBS) from 1955 to 1959 based on the English folktale of Robin Hood. Episode 87 (the eleventh of the third season) of The Adventures of Robin Hood is titled “The Mark.” That’s as in a master mason’s mark.

Foot to foot and all that.

Philip Ray plays Walter, the operative master mason superintending the rebuilding of an abandoned church. As the paper thin plot plays out, we see Walter employ his mark for an unorthodox purpose, moving the story to its only inevitable conclusion. The writing is terrible and the acting is worse, but such was early television.

In a flagrant betrayal of Masonic secrecy, this TV show renders a funny shortcut in making a “mason of the mind.”

These episodes ran twenty-five minutes, but if you can’t do it, just pick it up seventeen minutes in.