Robin Hood, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Really Bad TV Shows

Warning: contains heavy spoilers. But look at this like this, if you haven't seen the show, you're not going to watch it now. If you have seen the show, you already know what happens and you're definitely not going to watch it again. Also, I'll get back to Doctor Who soon. Promise.

In a state of the boredom/nostalgia/procrastination mash-up that I call Netflix Ennui, I wound up watching a few episodes of the BBC's 2006-2009 Saturday evening action adventure fare, Robin Hood. Or rather, re-watching. Y'see, I was a rather ardent fan of Robin Hood back in the day, until the third and final season when everything took a resounding nosedive from 'so bad it's good' to 'so bad it's oh god get it away my eyes my eyes'. Like, I really hope nobody from HBO ever watched this show, because I'm getting second-hand embarrassment just thinking about it. I was surprised to discover that there were quite a few things I'd forgotten about it, my memory consumed by the reckless shark-jumpitude of the final series. And it strikes me that the show had quite a lot of potential at the beginning, if it weren't for a few, damning things:

Things I Had Forgotten About Robin Hood That Fucked Up an Otherwise Solid Show:

• Robin strolls casually in and out of Nottingham, lounging around the town square and infiltrating the castle, week in, week out, with precisely zero effort to disguise himself. Nary a hood in sight. At one point, he rocks up in the Sheriff's bedchamber after dark for some light flirting and doesn't even tie him up or anything when he leaves. I mean – not like that – oh forget it. The point is, this is marginally plausible only because the Sheriff is clearly an unpredictable psychopath and one suspects he quite likes having Robin Hood around in his anachronistically tight trousers, but still doesn't explain why the eponymous hero made no effort to come up with a getaway plan beyond “Walk out of the castle, maybe wink at someone”.
• The attempts to make the setting 'relevant' and 'modern', despite the slight snag of being England in the 1100s. One of the things I do remember about the show is the clothes, which were a) bafflingly anachronistic (Marion in trousers, Marion's camouflage-print dress, Robin Hood being more Robin Hoodie ohIseewhattheydidthere, Guy of Gisbourne's leather daddy get-up, more on which later) and b) laughably cheap. I recognised jewellery from Primark and Accessorize more times than I could count. There's a kid in one episode who they just didn't seem to be able to find a costume for at all, I swear you can see the zip on his hoodie.
• The clothes were part of a wider problem, though, which was that the first series clearly just had no budget. It was filmed in Hungary for cheaps, which is all fine until you realise that the thing nagging away at you every time they cut to the forest is the awkwardly obvious lack of oak trees, i.e. the one thing that English forests are pretty pro at. It also means that 1100s England is full of clearly Hungarian extras who don't speak English, just nod with a look of polite confusion in their eyes. This reaches its nadir in the second episode when Allan a Dale's brother pitches up with two of his own men who have, we are told, had their tongues cut out. Why the script even called for the ill-fated Tom to have his own bros in the first place, I'm not sure, but the production damn well wasn't going to pay for them to have lines. Out with their tongues, cue baffled Eastern European locals looking uneasily from actor to actor, wondering who they're supposed to be agreeing with.
• The modernisation aspect also manifested itself through the camerawork. Each episode ends with a triumphant black and white freeze frame like an 80s brat pack movie. It's a bold move, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't jar with the decision to film the rest of the show on shaky handycam, with a baffling over-reliance on dramatic zooms when a character is about to saying something profound. It feels slightly like the producers were trying to make it an actual mockumentary, before someone suggested that maybe that was a little too anachronistic, even for this show, and they hastily recut all the footage.

And Some Things It Did Ok:

• Women. Ok, it doesn't pass the Bechdel Test by a country mile, seeing as there are only two women in the whole of Nottingham, apparently, and I think they stand in a room together, like, once. Djaq, the Token Girl Outlaw, is pretty boss – all dressing up as her dead brother and doing Advanced Saracen Science and stuff – but I could have done without her horribly mangled love triangle that just sort of faded into a love...duangle in the second series, at the end of which she announces that she's staying in the Holy Land to take advantage of be-cheekboned jailbait Will Scarlett. And Marion is all kinds of smart and self-reliant – they actually make a pretty decent stab at a spy narrative for her, trying to work the system from the inside to protect her father, compromised loyalties, etc etc – of course, if the show had been made by HBO for grown-ups, instead of the BBC for families, it would have been much more sophisticated and also much more naked. C'est la vie. I also remember hating Marion with a passion when I was sixteen; watching now, I'm not entirely sure why. She's not a great actress, sure, but she's not offensively bad – about the same level of charisma vacuum as Robin himself, which fortunately means you can just ignore the romantic leads and get on with the business of the fine supporting cast.
• And I do mean fine. This is something the show did gloriously right – I swear to god, the burgeoning knowledge of my sexuality that was triggered in my youth by Johnny Depp diving off a cliff in Pirates of the Caribbean was completed here by Richard Armitage swaggering around in black leather and guy-liner*, pinning Marion against castle walls** saying things like “Do you not understand? You mean everything to me”, all accompanied by a gaze so smouldering that you could see the stone melting behind her head. Normally when you have a dastardly villain trying to run off with a blushing damsel, you applaud the hero swooping in on a rope to save her. Richard Armitage, on the other hand, would go around casually stabbing peasants and you'd just think, “Oh, well, he probably had a really difficult childhood.” Maybe that was why Marian was such a terrible actress. Could you keep your sang-froid convincingly in the face of all that?
• And it wasn't just Guy either. Long before I was making jokes about Merlin's Knights of the Round Table being a kind of Medieval Boy Band, the Outlaws were hanging around the forest posing for passing paparazzi (“Just a quick woodcut, be a darling”). Robin is ok in a Justin-Bieber-wishes-he-was-more-grunge sort of way but the show kept insisting that Robin was the most bodacious bachelor Sherwood had ever seen by having women throw themselves at him every two seconds, when this was clearly nonsensical because dude, Alan a Dale and Will Scarlett are right there. Actually, Will Scarlett was my favourite before I saw the light glinting off Guy's black leathers, and then his “What is this thing you call a girl, let me turn my head so you can see the way the shadows fall against my cheekbones, no I don't think my eyes can get any more big or green, I didn't realise my bottom lip was trembling” schtick got a bit wearisome. Alan had to become my favourite in the third series because everyone else good had gone and Guy's hair had taken a drastic turn for the worst, but his twinkly-eyed nonsensically-cockney conman routine was really very diverting – besides, he briefly dumps Will for Guy in the second series and starts wearing black so we're very much on the same page for a variety of reasons.

So thinking about it, maybe the best thing the show did was to arrange a buffet of attractive actors. But hey, that's not be sniffed at – there was clearly something that kept us watching through the bad times and the very bad. I'm inclined to pin it on the accidental sexual tension that seemed to emerge between every single character at some point (I'm talking a Sherlock level of possible permutations), but especially the Guy-and-Marion thing which, by the way, isn't really in the script at all but when you cast Richard Armitage, you cast a tsunami of hormones too. That's probably the area of the script that had most potential: a woman torn between her childhood love that she still carries a torch for, an outlaw on the run, any day could be his last, and a dangerous new man, brooding, cruel, but with a fascinating spark of good in him, a desire for redemption that only she holds the key to, complicated by the fact that he could be the only man truly capable of protecting her. Fuck, that sounds like a good show. I think I might write it. Sadly, the Guy/Marian/Robin triangle came to a rather undignified end when Guy ran her through with a sword that was in no way phallic at the end of Series 2.

The thing is though, I wouldn't want it to be any different. The reality is that if the bad things had been fixed, it still wouldn't have been a great show. It just would have been a much, much more boring one.

*This is actually a really good joke as his character's name was Guy of Gisbourne.

**Oh, maybe that's why I hated her.

The Hobbit: Dwarves are Heroic and In No Way Intrinsically Hilarious Because of Their Height (spoilers)

Spoilers! Heavy, heavy spoilers for The Hobbit.  But it has been around for 60 years so it's your own fault, really.

I swear to god, I have three draft posts sitting in my Posts folder, none of which were good enough to publish, even by my admittedly lax standards.  Please don't hurt me for my accidental five month hiatus.  I'm very sorry and it won't happen again (maybe). (To cut a long story short, life happened in the form of me starting an MFA and even when your MFA is in professionally playing Let's Pretend - or as it is officially known, Theatre Directing - it is still an MFA and demands much more of your time than watching X-Men cartoons and smoking out of your bedroom window.  Who knew?)

But I'm here! I am back this New Year because there has just been so much pop culture of late and I cannot possibly let it go by without whipping up a few rounds of my signature cocktail of capital letters and inappropriate drooling.  Where to begin? There's last autumn's telly-land, which saw The Hour pick up steam after a shaky start dicking about with an organised crime storyline that was somehow less believable than having a Soviet spy in the midst of a fairly inoffensive BBC news programme (um, spoilers?); however, after hanging in there only to see what the offspring of Anna Chancellor and Peter Capaldi might be like and how soon it would be taking over the world, the last two episodes were absolute barn-stormers.  Merlin ended for good with both a bang and a whimper and this truly is a tragedy for those who stuck with it from the beginning.  Although I don't think Arthur took his top off once last season, so maybe it is time to move on.  There's a whole new Twilight film to mock, coming hand in hand with the blessed knowledge that there are to be no more, hallelulah praise the Mormon Jesus that spawned this dust-bunny of menopausal fantasies and unfulfilled life prospects in the first place.  Christmas Doctor Who was tentatively promising for the coming season, starring not only a new companion but Lesbian Silurian and Lesbian Cockney, who are much more likely candidates for a spinoff than John Barrowman ever was.

But before any of that, there is a film that must be talked about.  A film that I have looked forward to, not with the pants-wetting fist-biting glee of The Avengers, but with something far more likely to warm the cockles of my Middle-Earth-loving heart.  And boy, were my cockles warmed.  I'm talking, of course, about The Hobbit.

Un petit confession, as the French say.  I love Lord of the Rings.  That's not the confession.  The confession is that I love the films.  Burdened with an English student's guilt over enjoying an adaptation before reading the source material, I turned to the books at the tender age of thirteen and commenced a three-month project of staring in horror at the bricks of text in front of me listing rhyming dwarf-dad name after rhyming dwarf-dad name.  Why was there another song in Elvish? Was I supposed to read it? Sing it? Perform an interpretative dance to it? Had it really been going on forty pages and these people were still talking about events that not only had we never encountered, but never would and would have no bearing on the plot? Even I have a saturation point when it comes to fantasy.  I OD'ed hard on A Song of Ice and Fire, making a headlong dash through the three-and-a-half-thousand odd pages of the first four books only to have some kind of breakdown around the beginning of the fifth and hurl it across the room crying, "I simply can't bear learning any more awkwardly partnered Latinate and Anglo-Saxon names!  Bear me to the fainting couch, I believe I have the vapours! AND WHO THE FUCK IS ARTHUR DAYNE?" At some point, I will pick up the fifth one again.  When the screams of beloved murdered characters have stopped echoing in the wind.

As always, I digress.  I was saddened that I did not love reading Tolkien because I had very fond memories of The Hobbit being read to me as a child.  The Hobbit is a very simple children's story, certainly not one that seems a natural fit for a series of of epic films.  But Peter Jackson cottoned on to something very clever with the LOTR films, which is that Tolkien is simply not a natural storyteller.  The universe he creates is rich in character and landscape, the morality of the books cleaves to something undeniably decent and stirring.  But by Frodo's quivery bottom lip, he cannot string a story together in a compelling way.  Peter Jackson, however, can.  Peter Jackson can sustain a story as complicated and rich as this one over nine hours and not lose anything from it that was worth keeping.  (Except the Houses of Healing in Return of the King.  That could have been kept in favour of a bit of Liv Tyler looking wry, surely.)  So if Peter Jackson turns to me and says, "Y'know, there's a lot of stuff I wanted to put in those films but couldn't", I am actually more than happy to hand him my copy of The Hobbit and say, "Okay, Pete.  Go to town on this."

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is still Tolkien's Hobbit.  It is not, as some have suggested, Lord of the Rings 4.  Which would be silly anyway, as The Hobbit is set 60 years before. Tch.  At its centre is the comfort of home, the bigness of the world, the notion that it is small acts and small people that stand against the dark.  The Hobbit is a (relatively) small story set in an epic fantasy universe and that is exactly what Jackson delivers.  When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he could not have known what it was the beginning of, what Middle Earth would grow to be.  Most of us reading The Hobbit for the first time did not know either - it is rare to find someone who read Lord of The Rings before its predecessor.  But we do know Lord of the Rings now.  Either we have read it or seen it or simply become unavoidably aware of it through pop cultural osmosis.  It would almost be impossible, I think, to create a version of the Hobbit in which we weren't watching it looking for the links with the story and universe we already know, and in which I wasn't asking the question, "Does Benedict Cumberbatch look sexy as a dragon?"*  Jackson has embraced this and turned The Hobbit into a kind of three hour bubble-bath for Lord of the Rings fans with a butler on hand to drop a chocolate into your mouth every now and then.  It is audacious, visually stunning, funny and, above all, surprisingly charming.  Sorry, just gagged on my own gushing there.  Let's fix that.

It's not perfect by a long chalk.  I've seen it twice and it doesn't stand up to second viewing in the way that the LOTR films yield endless delight, especially if you are a bit drunk and making once of your friends drink every time Gollum switches personalities.  After the initial thrill of being introduced to a whole new raft of characters to shout "take your shirt off" at during inappropriate moments, the second viewing had me checking my watch during the long (long, long) first hour and a half.  Then it starts getting really good (like, really good) and it's all slightly obscene looking Goblin Kings and Andy Serkis and fire and eagles and eagles on fire (except the last one) and then it ends.  Gah.  So the second one better be really good is all I'm saying because I remember the plot of The Hobbit as being there's some short dudes who go and get a slightly shorter dude and there's a dragon and some trolls and some goblins and a ring and then the dragon dies and everyone drinks lemonade. Most of those plot points have already been covered in great detail.  Peter Jackson better have something fucking spectacular up his sleeve (actually we already know he does, it's called LEGOLAS).  So if you weren't a fan before then you definitely won't be converted by this but if you were, then see it once in the cinema and then wait for the DVD so you can identify hilarious moments of homoeroticism with your friends (they really need some more women in this universe).  Also, see it in 2D and normal frame rate.  It seems much more like a film and less like a game of 'That was CGI, that was pyrotechnic, that was CGI'.

But.  Enough beating about the bush.  No, that wasn't a euphemism.  Because I know what you really want, you filthy little blog-readers you.  I know what you have been waiting for all these months, and frankly, it disgusts me.  If you think I am going to make a fool of myself disclosing the most intimate struggles of my shattered psyche in the consideration of whether it is a crime against all that is right and good to look at Richard Armitage dressed up as a dwarf and wonder whether a new and disturbing fetish has been awoken in me, well you can look elsewhere for that kind of smut because you won't find it here.  Nor will you find musings on whether Peter Jackson watched North and South before filming started and was so hopelessly smitten with Mr Armitage that he decided to put in a frankly alarming quantity of shots in which Thorin Hardwood or whatever his name is stands atop a rocky outcrop brooding so furiously on his lack of kingliness that Viggo Mortensen is considering suing.  Nor will I comment on how the background music seemed to so taken with him that the Latinate (Elvish?) chanting during that bit at the end where stands up on the tree to take down the Orc-Video-Game-End-of-Level-Boss might as well have been shrieking, "RICHARD ARMITAGE! STANDS ON TREES! RUNS THROUGH FIRE! HE IS MANLY WITH MAN PAIN IN HIS MAN EYES!"  I'm sure at some point they were considering having him saving some baby orphans from the flames on his way to the fight but it was cut for time (it was the only thing cut for time).

Nor will you be hearing anything from me about the startling coincidence that sees the three most eligible dwarves - Thorin, Suspiciously Attractive Dwarf (Kili, played by Being Human's Aidan Turner) and his brother/boyfriend** Less Attractive but Still Doable Dwarf (Fili, played by Dean O'Gorman) - sporting a noticeably smaller quantity of prothetic nose and beard accessory than the rest.  James Nesbitt as Bofur, whilst hiding his everyman charm beneath a hat that I thought was going to take flight and a moustache that looked sad independently of Nebitt's own facial expression, could still legitimately have replaced all of his lines with "I'm James Nesbitt.  And now you want to have a pint with me."  Elijah Woods puts in a brief appearance as Frodo and I had to stop myself from standing up and congratulating Ian Holmes on having such a fine-looking nephew and asking if the cheekbones ran on the other side of the family and, if so, were there cousins? (I, by the way, was convinced that Elijah Woods has a painting in an attic somewhere looking like shit because as far as I could tell, he hasn't aged a day, but everyone disagreed with me on this point and said he looked haunted by the loss of times past.)  All this and the elves won't even make a proper appearance until Part 2.  (Although special points for Flight of the Conchord's Brett Mckenzie reprising his internet-stealing silent cameo from Fellowship of the Ring complete with a new elvish name that means 'singer' and even more special points for Lee Pace who you probably know as the guy who made pies and resurrected the dead in Pushing Daisies as LEGOLAS' DAD ON A FUCKING ELK LOOKING FABULOUS.)

So put that in your elongated Gandalf pipe and choke on it, good reader.  The various aesthetic qualities of the cast will emphatically not be reflected on in any way, not even how good Saint Cate Blanchett is at turning slowly in a shimmery dress (twice).  This is a new, more mature Jane Shakespeare and you can take your filthy gutter-dwelling minds elsewhere for that kind of thing.  Also Martin Freeman just deserves, like, ALL THE HUGS and those pointy little hobbit ears are really working for me.  He is everything you could want and more (less? There's a height joke in there somewhere) as Bilbo, and I very much admired his choice to play his scenes with Thorin as a particularly egregious rom-com. ("I'm just a hobbit.  Standing in front of a dwarf.  Asking him to love him.")

All in all, I really liked it the first time and bit less the second time but, as you can tell, I'm loving the prospect of cracking out the wine and settling down with the DVD to holler in a manner most women reserve for the stripper on their hen night.  Bring on Part 2.  In Pete We Trust.

*In the event, we will have to wait until the next film to find out, and yes, I am aware that Smaug will be CGI and not Cumberbatch in a dragon suit but it should be.
**Seriously, what's the deal here?  I'm pretty sure they're related in the book but they seemed to spend an awful lot of time going off to bond and then coming back looking flustered and out of breath.  Why were they the only two dwarfs up in the middle of the night tending the campfire?  Why were they sharing an eagle when there were clearly enough for everyone to have their own?  If they weren't looking out for the horses, then what were they doing? It's a conspiracy.