A Rubovian Legend is a British children's television series created by Gordon Murray. It centers around a fictional kingdom ruled by King Rufus XIV and Queen Caroline, assisted by Albert Weatherspoon and the Lord Chamberlain.
The show takes place within a small, fictitious kingdom named Rubovia, ruled by King Rufus XIV and Queen Caroline. Due to its small size, Rubovia is easily managed, with a chicken named Henrietta, who lays golden eggs, negating the need for high taxes. This means that the King and Queen can focus on problems created by Albert Weatherspoon, the latter of which is officially the Royal Gardner, tending to Queen Caroline's prized cabbages, however whenever Rufus needs him to entertain a visitor, such as King Boris of nearby Borsovia, or solve a problem, he creates most of the problems faced in each episode attempting to use magic.[1]
Weatherspoon is also a keen inventor, having created the speaking tube, and any Royal Command, given by the Lord Chamberlain, that does not require use of magic will involve it. In those cases, Weatherspoon is not the cause of the problem, sometimes even being successful in solving it. These are usually caused by an Indian named MacGregor, who spends a lot of time outside the garden wall, plotting schemes for personal reasons. While Queen Caroline does not usually ask for Weatherspoon's help, she does dabble in various get-rich-quick plans of her own.
Created by Gordon Murray, who wanted to break the mold of British puppet shows,[5] the first four plays were transmitted live from 1955 to 1956. They featured the voices of Raymond Rollett, Violet Lamb and Peter Hawkins, with Philip Latham in the first play. Kim Allen designed the puppets used in this series, which were 1/5 in size,[6] and they were operated by Audrey Atterbury, Bob Bura, John Hardwick, Molly Gibson, Elizabeth Thorndike and Joan Garrick. Each of these three plays had a different settings and costume designer, with Gordon Roland for the first, The Queen’s Dragon, and Donald Horne for Clocks and Blocks. The third play, The Dragon’s Hiccups, marked the debut of costume designer Andrew Brownfoot's involvement with the series, designing every subsequent episode, although not being the main designer for this play.[6] After The Mystery of Rubovia Castle, Gordon decided to revamp, designing his own, 1/3 scale puppets.
In 1958 the first of twenty-five new, recorded plays were broadcast, sporadically running until 1964. Only Violet reprised her role from the previous plays, with Derek Nimmo, Roy Skelton and James Beattie now providing voices. Molly Gibson, Elizabeth Thorndike and Joan Garrick also left, leaving Audrey Atterbury, Bob Bura and John Hardwick as the only three puppeteers. Gordon would sometimes fund the plays himself if BBC budget was too low. Andrew based his model of Rubovia Castle from Bohemia and Moravia. During filming of the first of these plays, a remake of Clocks and Blocks, the castle prop was damaged by an electric cable.[6] A twenty-sixth play, entitled The Giddy Ghost, was never broadcast, due to colour television being just a few weeks away, with the BBC abandoning many of its black-and-white programmes.[7]
Like many BBC programmes of the 1950s and 1960s, little of A Rubovian Legend survives in the archive, save for a four-minute clip of the 1961 episode Knight for a Day which appeared in a 1988 episode of DEF II hosted by Stephen Fry.[8]
In 1976, following the success of Gordon Murray's Trumptonshire trilogy, A Rubovian Legend was remade in a similar style, simply renamed Rubovia, and vastly watered down in its writing compared to its predecessor.[9] Gordon himself, as well as Roy Skelton provided the voices. Although thought lost, all six episodes have shown up on YouTube from time to time. An LP containing the soundtracks of two episodes was released by BBC Records. It is rumoured the castle seen in Gordon's later series The Gublins is the same used here.[10]