Carpenter appeared in occasional films, but was mostly active on British TV in the 1960s as a character actor, on one occasion opposite Tony Hancock in one of his last shows for the BBC, commonly known as "The Bowmans".
Other TV shows in which he appeared in the 1960s included Z-Cars, Dixon of Dock Green, Gideon's Way, Sherlock Holmes and The Baron.
Carpenter earned international recognition and a Writers' Guild award for creating the cult children's TV series.
[3] During the 1970s, he wrote the series The Ghosts of Motley Hall (1976–1978), Dick Turpin (1979–1982), parts of the series The Famous Five and Doctor Snuggles, and 17 episodes of The Adventures of Black Beauty for ITV; and Cloud Burst, The Boy from Space and The King's Dragon as part of BBC's Look and Read (1967–2004) programme for schools, He presented all episodes of "Cloud Burst".
Mysticism was one of its distinctive ingredients, reflecting a renewed interest in paganism, as well as the concerns of the growing environmental movement and – through the idealism of the hero.Carpenter then worked on a number of series for children and families in the 1990s (The Winjin' Pom, Stanley's Dragon and Out of Sight), some of which (The Borrowers, The Return of the Borrowers and The Scarlet Pimpernel) were based on classic novels.