Robin Hood

by Rennison, Nick

  For more than twenty years after the last of the 143 episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood was broadcast in March 1959, it had no major TV successor, although ITV continued to show repeats throughout the early sixties. The Legend of Robin Hood from 1975 has its merits and its fans. Following a consecutive narrative across six episodes rather than having separate, largely self-contained tales proved an interesting innovation. Diane Keen makes a good Maid Marian and Paul Darrow, later famous as Avon in the BBC cult science fiction series Blake’s 7, plays the Sheriff with some panache. However, few would claim it as TV’s finest version of the legend. Martin Potter makes a stilted and uncharismatic Robin and the series now seems creaky and desperately old-fashioned. In some ways, it was too respectful of both the real history of the late twelfth century and of the traditional stories. What was needed to revitalise and reinvent Robin for TV audiences was a series that was unafraid of turning its back on conventional ways of portraying him. Robin of Sherwood, when it arrived nine years later, did exactly that.

  The aim of Richard Carpenter, the creator and most regular writer of the series, was to reinvigorate the tradition for a new generation and fuse it with other myths of the English greenwood such as Herne the Hunter. The horned Herne becomes mentor to Michael Praed’s Robin in the first episode and he continues to emerge regularly from the mist-shrouded trees to help the hero throughout the series. Robin becomes Herne’s adopted son. It is telling that ‘Sherwood’ appears in the very title of the series since the forest plays as significant a role in it as any of the humans who inhabit it. Sherwood is not only a place of comfort and safety for the outlaws, it is also a place of magic and enchantment. It is the setting for pagan rituals overseen by Herne, antlered and clad in shaggy skins, and an arena in which the old gods and the old ways can be celebrated. Sorcery and the supernatural are deeply woven into the series’ overarching narrative of the struggle between good and evil. In that same first episode in which Herne adopts the outlaw leader, Robin’s principal antagonist is not so much Sir Guy of Gisbourne or the Sheriff of Nottingham but the Baron de Belleme, a master of the black arts. Slain by Robin at the end of that first episode, the Baron returns later, brought back from the dead by one of his witch-like handmaidens who puts the outlaw leader under a powerfully malign enchantment. As the series progressed, Carpenter continued to up the stakes in the primal confrontation he placed at its core. The two-part episode ‘The Swords of Wayland’ has Robin coming face to face with the Devil himself, conjured up by a powerful abbess, played by Rula Lenska, who has gone over to the dark side. Even Lucifer proves no match for the greenwood hero. Only death itself can down him and this comes at the end of the second series when the Sheriff’s soldiers surround him and he chooses to sacrifice himself in the hope that Marian and Much will escape. And yet, if even Robin cannot quite survive death, he can at least be resurrected. In the third and final series, Robin of Loxley is no more but his place is taken by Robert, son of the Earl of Huntington, played by Jason Connery. Cleverly making use of both the earlier tradition that Robin was a yeoman and his later gentrification by writers like Anthony Munday, Carpenter has his hero first as man of the people and second as exiled nobleman.

  According to taste, the mysticism and the myth-making in Robin of Sherwood probably make or mar the series. Yet they are not all that fuel the narrative. Inextricably linked with them is a strong awareness of the injustices and inequities of the society in which his hero operates. Carpenter’s Robin is not just Herne’s champion in a struggle against spiritual evil; he is also a crusader for the poor and the dispossessed, for all those scorned by the oppressive regime of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Within the constraints imposed by making a primetime TV show, Robin of Sherwood is a gritty, authentic portrayal of medieval life. The series is also full of innovatory twists and additions to the story. Not the least of them is the character of Nasir, played by Mark Ryan, a Saracen swordsman who appears in the first episode as the enchanted servant of de Belleme. After Robin kills de Belleme, Nasir is released from the spell under which he had been placed and decides to join the outlaws in Sherwood. The Muslim Merry Man, or indeed Woman, has since become a regular feature of recent re-tellings of the story. In the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Morgan Freeman plays the almost impossibly wise Moor named Azeem who accompanies Kevin Costner’s Robin on his return from the Holy Land to England; in the BBC TV series which began in 2006, Anjali Jay is Djaq, the rescued Saracen slave who dresses as a boy and joins the gang in the greenwood.

  In conclusion, although the series has its faults, Robin of Sherwood remains one of the greatest of all screen presentations of the legend. More than a quarter of a century after the last episodes were made, its influence lives on. Fan clubs flourish and conventions gather. Websites devoted to it proliferate. The occasional rumour that another series (or a one-off film) is to be made still emerges, only to be quashed. It seems likely that it will continue to be remembered with affection for decades to come.

  Any admirer of the more traditional screen presentations of the outlaw who had been irritated by the mysticism of Robin of Sherwood would have been thrown into an apoplexy by The New Adventures of Robin Hood, a Franco-American production which ran for four seasons on Turner Network Television in 1997 and 1998. Starring Matthew Porretta as the hero in the first two series and John Bradley in the role for the last two, this was more travesty than transformation of the legend. Set in the 1190s but in ‘an era of chivalry and of magic’ that few historians of the period would recognise, The New Adventures mixes the Robin Hood stories, fire-breathing dragons, echoes of Arthurian mythology, kung fu fighting, miserably unfunny wisecracking and very bad special effects into one truly dreadful brew. It may have had guest stars of the calibre of Christopher Lee, who appeared in a number of episodes as a white-bearded forest sage, but nothing could disguise the fact that this was a real stinker, a cynically manufactured confection that had little to do with Robin Hood and a good deal more to do with a (failed) desire to match the kitsch charm and ratings success of what were then popular shows like Xena: Warrior Princess.

  By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there was a need for a series that would reinterpret the legend for a new generation of TV viewers in the same way that Robin of Sherwood had done twenty years earlier. In 2006, the BBC broadcast the first in what were to be 39 episodes of Robin Hood, starring Jonas Armstrong in the title role, Lucy Griffiths as Marian, Keith Allen as the Sheriff and Richard Armitage as Sir Guy of Gisborne. The series was transmitted in the Saturday evening slot just vacated by the revived Doctor Who and it aimed for the same mixture of adventure and wit that had made the SF stories so successful. The main creative force behind this incarnation of Robin was Dominic Minghella, brother of the film director and playwright Anthony Minghella, and previously known primarily as the co-creator of Doc Martin. This was not to be a Robin Hood that would be hamstrung by tradition or a reverential attitude to previous versions of the story. The very titles of some of the episodes (‘Who Shot the Sheriff?’, ‘Peace? Off!’, ‘Dead Man Walking’) are enough to indicate that this is meant to be a knowingly cheeky, even flippant re-interpretation of the legend. Another title, ‘Lardner’s Ring’, given to an episode from the second series, pays a sneaking tribute to Ring Lardner Jr, the blacklisted American writer who provided many of the scripts for the 1950s series. Wisely, the writers (Minghella and others) make no attempt at all at authentic medieval language. It would have been necessarily unsuccessful and could only have sounded woefully stilted. Instead, the characters speak often enough in the idiom of the twenty-first century. ‘In your dreams,’ Marian tells Robin when he is prematurely planning her inclusion in his gang of outlaws. ‘I’ll show you my purse if you show me yours,’ Robin says teasingly to an attractive visitor to Sherwood who turns out to be the Sheriff’s sister. And meanwhile Keith Allen, as the Sheriff himself, seems set on making Alan Rickman’s performance in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves look su
btle and restrained in comparison. He’s certainly given the lines to play the pantomime villain. ‘Come on, chop, chop’, he admonishes an executioner who is being slow in doing his job.

  Yet, beneath all the fun and the jokes and the self-conscious anachronisms, Minghella’s Robin Hood is, in a paradoxical way, the most serious of all the TV versions of the stories. Echoes of contemporary society can be heard in every episode; parallels with the modern world abound. Its writers and creators cleverly use Robin Hood not only as a vehicle for exciting tales of adventure but as a means of exploring ideas about tolerance, justice, the relations between the sexes, the interaction between Islam and the Western world, and the gap between rich and poor that are relevant to today’s reality. They do so to greater effect than many more overtly ‘serious’ dramas on the BBC. The series can certainly be irritating. The flipness and the writers’ relentless pursuit of knowing quips can become tedious. The characterisation is sometimes so skewed towards contemporary notions of social and political correctness that it risks appearing ludicrous. Robin and his followers are all new men and women, much given to introspective examination of their emotions and to expressing their love for one another. There are times when they seem, not so much a gang of outlaws in pursuit of loot to pass on to the poor, more attendees at a psychotherapy meeting in search of the next group hug. In one particular episode, ‘A Good Time to Die’, the band, trapped in a barn by the Sheriff’s mercenaries and facing near-certain death, engage in a truth-telling session that’s closer to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest than any traditional depiction of Robin Hood. Despite all this, the BBC series was undoubtedly a major success. It combined the kind of fast-moving family entertainment required for Saturday evening viewing with genuinely innovative re-workings of the familiar tales. It swiftly gathered a fanbase and it seems likely that its appeal will prove as long-lasting as that of Robin of Sherwood.

  Spoofs, Parodies and Pastiches

  The easiest stories to parody are those which everybody knows. If the characters in a narrative are familiar, then they can be readily subverted. Because the Robin Hood story and the characters in it are so immediately recognisable, they have long been open to pastiche and affectionate satire. They can be revisited in all sorts of guises. The outlaws can be shown as children, as they are in Robin Hood Junior, a Children’s Film Foundation production of 1975, starring a teenage Keith Chegwin in the title role. They can be transformed into Chicago gangsters. Robin and the Seven Hoods from 1964 is the Rat Pack as Merry Men, an amiable updating of the story to the Prohibition era in which Frank Sinatra is Robbo, the good-hearted gangster, and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr are his sidekicks John and Will. Peter Falk has fun as the villainous Guy Gisborne; Bing Crosby croons his way through several numbers as Alan A. Dale. They can be shoehorned into an SF series. In ‘Qpid’, an episode of Star Trek – The Next Generation, Captain Picard and his crew are despatched by regular adversary Q to a simulacrum of twelfth-century England where, as Robin Hood and the Merry Men, they are forced to participate in a life-and-death game involving the rescue of Maid Marian (played by one of Picard’s old flames) from the clutches of Sir Guy of Gisborne. They can even be made into the central characters in an erotic movie. Virgins of Sherwood Forest is a spectacularly dreadful, straight-to-video travesty of 2000, in which a female movie director is knocked unconscious and transported back to medieval times to enjoy a number of close encounters with merry men and others. (An earlier and very marginally better exercise in Sherwood soft-core is The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood from 1969 in which alleged actresses with names like Heidi and Bambi frolic in the forest with the outlaws.)

  The stories have, of course, proved a gift to TV sketch shows. From Morecambe and Wise, as Robin and Little Ern, and Benny Hill, unhilariously poking his arrows where he shouldn’t, to Dead Ringers mocking the anachronisms of the 2006 BBC series with scenes of Robin and the Sheriff breakdancing, the opportunities they offer to comedians have been regularly seized. In 1979, the Muppets devoted an entire show to Robin Hood. The twenty-third episode of the third series saw guest star Lynn Redgrave playing Maid Marian to Kermit’s Robin as a spurned Miss Piggy, offered only the hastily concocted role of ‘Sister’ Tuck, fumes and schemes in the background. Fozzie Bear plays Little John and Gonzo the Sheriff of Nottingham, accidentally inflicting torture on himself rather than the captured Marian. At the end of the show, Statler, one of the two elderly hecklers always in the Muppets audience, remarks, ‘The legend of Robin Hood will never die.’ ‘No,’ replies his friend Waldorf, ‘but it sure got wounded pretty bad tonight.’ The exchange more or less sums up the episode. (The Muppets have returned to the stories in print. There is both a 1980 Muppet storybook and a recent sequence of Muppet comic books in which Kermit is again shown as the outlaw leader and Miss Piggy, unhampered by Lynn Redgrave, can become a porcine Maid Marian.)

  In movies, we have had Hugh Paddick as Robin in Up the Chastity Belt, a 1971 British film starring Frankie Howerd, set ‘in the lusty days of yore’. Paddick, best known as one half of the duo Julian and Sandy in the radio series Round the Horne, plays a limp-wristed outlaw leader in charge of a band of men significantly more gay than merry. ‘Well, ducky, what do you think of our camp?’ he asks Howerd, playing the medieval serf Lurkalot, when they arrive in Sherwood and ‘camp’ is very definitely the operative word. John Cleese appears as Robin in Time Bandits, the 1981 Terry Gilliam film, sounding remarkably like Prince Charles as he engages in amiable chit-chat with the midget anti-heroes of the title. ‘And you’re a robber too, are you?,’ he inquires politely. ‘How long have you been a robber?’ Meanwhile, his Merry Men redistribute the spoils the Time Bandits have accumulated by handing it over to the poor. ‘The poor are going to be absolutely thrilled,’ he assures the central characters as they miserably watch their riches disappear.

  Reversal of roles was at the heart of the BBC TV children’s series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, originally shown between 1989 and 1994, in which the outlaw hero has become a handsome but cowardly and fashion-obsessed tailor, Robin of Kensington. The true driving spirit behind the fight against Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham is Maid Marian, played by Kate Lonergan. Merry Men include a pugnacious dwarf named Little Ron, a laidback Rastafarian and a large slob called Rabies. Written by Tony Robinson, Baldric in Blackadder, who also throws himself into the role of the Sheriff with great relish, the series was an energetic, pantomime version of the stories. In its own, unpretentious way, it was also part of the developing trend in the 1980s and 1990s to give Maid Marian a more important role in them.

  In addition to TV sketches and cameo performances in other comedy films, there are also two full length feature films which are based entirely on the idea of subverting earlier versions of the story. The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood starring George Segal dates from 1984. Any film that advertises itself in its title as ‘zany’ should probably be viewed with suspicion but this made-for-TV movie does have its moments. Peasants about to be rescued from Norman villainy regularly mistake the identity of their saviour. (‘I’m not Ivanhoe,’ Robin shouts at one point, ‘Ivanhoe dresses in black.’); the merry men leap on their enemies with cries of ‘Geronimo’; Will Scarlet, here a minstrel but an appallingly untalented one, is thwarted every time he tries to break into song. English character actors, including Roy Kinnear, Robert Hardy and Tom Baker as the villainous Sir Guy of Gisbourne, throw themselves into the spirit of the film without ever raising it above the level of mildly amusing slapstick.

  The opening for a definitive Robin Hood parody was still there and, nine years later, Mel Brooks released Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Brooks’s interest in the comic potential of the outlaw’s story had been revealed in the 1970s in an ill-fated American TV series he created called When Things Were Rotten. Filled with the kind of sight gags and knowing anachronisms that he had already then employed in successful feature films like Blazing Saddles, the show failed to find much of a TV audience and was cancelled by ABC a
fter only 13 weeks. In 1993, the recent release of the Kevin Costner version of the legend provided the ideal opportunity for Brooks to return to the subject. His penchant for poking fun at movie genres has produced some wonderful films (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein) and some films (Dracula: Dead and Loving It) that are frankly poor. Robin Hood: Men in Tights falls somewhere between the two extremes. It’s not brilliant and there are some jokes and sequences that fall woefully flat but it has enough good material in it to keep audiences laughing. Cary Elwes plays a poshly spoken Robin (‘unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent,’ he remarks in a pointed reference to Costner’s all too American tones in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) who returns from the Crusades to find his lands at the mercy of Mervyn, the wicked Sheriff of Rottingham, played by Roger Rees. Taking to the woods, he finds the Merry Men (‘We’re men/We’re men in tights/We roam around the forest looking for fights’) and becomes their leader in the struggle against the oppressive regime of the Sheriff and Prince John, neatly played by the New York stand-up Richard Lewis. Another stand-up, black comedian Dave Chappelle, plays Ahchoo, Robin’s Saracen sidekick; Matthew Porretta, later to play Robin himself in the dreadful 1990s TV series The New Adventures of Robin Hood, is Will Scarlet O’Hara (‘We’re from Georgia’); Tracey Ullman is a mad crone named Latrine; and Patrick Stewart, with a Scottish accent, puts in a cameo appearance as Richard the Lionheart at the end that parallels Sean Connery’s uncredited role as the king at the end of the Costner movie.