Robin Hood Was Real

In a smart PR move to promote UKTV Gold now running BBC1’s Robin Hood, the company commissioned some research which has resulted in worldwide coverage.
Seemingly teenagers think that Winston Churchill didn’t exist and that Robin Hood was real.
When I read about something like this, I immediately want to read the full press release, which isn’t something easily done. I found this reference to the poll on UKTV’s site. And it pointed out what some of the press reports hadn’t – that the research was conducted amongst 3000 under 20s.
OK, so 3000 seems like a pretty robust sample. So which research firm carried out the questionnaire, and exactly how were the questions framed?
I can’t find a source. Was it YouGov or similar? There’s no questionnaire either.
Can I suggest that using whatever methodology they did (and I’m guessing, but stand to be corrected) that it wasn’t a usual research company given the unnecessarily high sample size, they just presented a list of historical figures, factual and fictional, and asked people to say which was which.
The tenth placed fictional character who was thought to be factual was Robinson Cruesoe with 5%. King Arthur was top, but then since UKTV Gold’s sister channel UKTV History pumps out as many documentaries as any other channel about the “truth” of Arthur, Merlin, Camelot et al, this perhaps isn’t so surprising. 58% claiming Sherlock Holmes is real seems very suspicious. Hence I really want to know the details.


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