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ROBERTA LEIGH, who has died aged 87, wrote romantic novels and children's stories under a variety of noms de plume and in the 1960s was successful as a creator and producer of popular puppet series on ITV.
Fiftysomething women who were little girls in the early 1960s will probably remember Sara and Hoppity (1962-63), a 50-episode television series about a little girl and her mischievous doll with one leg shorter than the other. Men of a similar vintage will recall Space Patrol (1963, Planet Patrol in America), a 39-episode science fiction series incorporating elements of Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation techniques. It sold around the world, achieving the highest ratings of any children's show up to that time, and even featured on the cover of Variety magazine.
Roberta Leigh began as a romantic fiction writer, and she did so at the age of 14 while still a schoolgirl at St Mary's convent in Rhyl, after being evacuated to nearby Prestatyn during the war. There, as she recalled in a newspaper article in 1976, she had established a reputation among her friends for her ability to compose an instant plot, a facility that sometimes landed her in trouble: "The school was always freezing and I was standing by the radiator under the window when I saw Sister Mary Angela, the games mistress I loathed - she was always hoisting her habit with her rosary and running down the hockey field - walking arm-in-arm with a nice little priest half her size. For the benefit of my friends I made up a story that they were going to jump over the wall and be condemned to Hades, and the Pope wouldn't be at all pleased. Suddenly icy...