A dense, dark,
Sleepy Hollow-like tangle of woods and volcanic rock an hour or so outside Budapest, Dobogoko forest has long been a haven for outlaws and assorted rogues. In medieval days, gangs of them hid out here, lying in wait for gold-laden caravans en route to the cities of the Danube plains below. The limestone clearing that was the robbers’ favourite hiding spot is still known as Zsivany Szikla, Bandit Rocks. If you are lucky, so the local legend goes, you can still stumble across caches of their contraband concealed in its gnarled nooks and crannies.
Now lurking in the leafy glades is a band of BBC technicians. On the spot where the bandits of Dobogoko used to hole out, the BBC is quietly reinventing the legend of the most famous woodland resident outlaw of them all, Robin Hood.
“We wanted to make a drama that is earthy and rural, and this place has been the business in terms of the way it looks,” says the writer-producer Dominic Minghella of the Hungarian hideaway his crew have chosen to double for Sherwood Forest. “But it’s also been a good place to get away from things. We sense there are a lot of eyes on us, a lot of people waiting to see what we’re going to come up with. Being out here takes the heat off — a bit.”
The anticipation is high for several reasons. Minghella, brother of the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, is considered one of British television’s rising stars. His
last series for ITV, Doc Martin, starring Martin Clunes, delivered the beleaguered network one of its few ratings successes in recent years. It was largely on the back of this that Minghella and his co-producer at the production company Tiger Aspect, Foz Allan, were last year given a multimillion-pound budget to film 13 episodes of Robin Hood for the BBC, with further series almost certain provided ratings are respectable.
All this makes it a high-profile production, especially since it is the first show to be specifically targeted at what is now the holy grail of BBC programming. Robin Hood will go out in the same Saturday evening spot as Doctor Who, the show that is credited with reinventing the concept of Saturday family viewing. With this in mind, Minghella and Allan have been given the same “show runner” status as Doctor Who’s creator Russell T. Davies, overseeing every aspect from writing scripts and storylines to casting, filming and creating spin-offs.
This morning the forest set reveals the first glimpses of how Minghella and his team have reimagined Robin Hood. As you pick your way past the makeshift tents and canopies, the first thing you notice is that Will Scarlett and company are dressed not in shades of Lincoln green, but browns and khakis. There is not a pair of tights or a feathered hat in sight. Some are wearing crumpled scarves, others paisley leggings. Almost all the gang have hoods. They look as if they have been dragged through a hedge backwards.
The other thing that strikes you is their age. With the exception of the comic actor Gordon Kennedy, who plays Little John, the rest of the gang — Joe Armstrong as Alan-a-Dale, Harry Lloyd as Will Scarlett and Sam Troughton as Much the Miller’s son — are all in their early twenties. Crouched at the root of a tree, Robin Hood himself is perhaps the most strikingly youthful. The Irish-born Jonas Armstrong is just 25 but, if it wasn’t for the recently acquired stubble, he could struggle to persuade a nightclub doorman he is over 18.
Minghella reveals that all these choices have been carefully planned. Even the headwear. “Yes, I know, someone has already coined the phrase Robin Hoodie. We will, of course, be inviting David Cameron along to the launch so that he can hug one,” he says with a smile. “But we did want to get across the idea that, at one level, at least, it’s about a gang of smelly boys in the woods. “We wanted Robin Hood to be on the cusp between man and boy. We need to believe he has been off to war and is a leader of men, who has got past his youthful instinct to go off and fight and arrived at a more cerebral, intelligent position. But by the same token we need him to be someone who can hang out with the lads, backflip off the top of a building and snog a girl for the fun of it, too” Robin Hood’s mix of adventure and escapism, romance and political intrigue has been casting its spell over artists for centuries. Conventional wisdom has it that he first appeared in a medieval ballad, A Gest of Robyn Hode, early in the 15th century, when he was little more than a South Yorkshire cattle rustler (Doncaster is still vying with Nottingham for bragging rights as the hero’s real home). Since then Robin has reflected the shifting values and attitudes of the ages, evolving from a canny thief into a kind of Che Guevara of Sherwood Forest, fighting a guerrilla war against the oppressive King John while his master, King Richard, is off fighting the Crusades. At various stages along the line he has also morphed into a nobleman, Robin of Loxley and Lord of Huntingdon, become a veteran of the Crusades himself and adopted the proto-socialist idea of stealing from the rich to give to the poor.
The truth is that, as a figure rooted in folklore, Robin Hood will always be whatever anyone wants him to be. This was the first challenge facing Minghella and his collaborative partner Allan, when the BBC commissioned them in August 2005. Who is Robin Hood? What does he do? And what does he stand for? As it turns out, the first thing they decided was that the legend had been reinvented quite enough. “One of the reasons Robin Hood is enduring,” Allan says, “is that he is someone who gets things done. He has the superhero skills around the edges but the truth is he’s a bloke who says: ‘No, we need to do the right thing.’ So we ended up having no buts. It’s Robin Hood, it’s what it says on the tin, a guy who’s good with arrows and is a decent bloke.”
In this, Minghella admits he took inspiration from a distinctly modern hero.
“Jamie Oliver was one of our touchstones. Politicians through the ages have said we should improve school dinners then done nothing about it. Jamie Oliver came along and just did it.” This is, of course, far from the first Robin British television has attempted. Actors from Patrick Troughton — the first to play the role on the BBC in the 1950s — to Richard Greene and Jason Connery have taken on the mantle. With its misty-lensed look, ponderous action and ethereal soundtrack, the last major drama, Robin of Sherwood, starring first Michael Praed and then Connery as the hero, was a paean to a more spiritual world and an almost pagan connection to nature. “That went out at the height of Thatcherism and they made a decision to show that there was a spiritual side to life as well as a material one,” says Allan. “It tapped into something and went down rather well. But we have moved on from there.”
Today’s Robin isn’t worried by materialism. This time, Robin is a medieval Bob Geldof, a man driven more by his social conscience than his desire to redistribute wealth. “Our Robin doesn’t rob random rich people. His fight is with the Sheriff of Nottingham and his henchman Guy of Gisborne. That’s immediately a contemporary thing,” explains Minghella. “Not so long ago rich people in drama were automatically antipathetic. We don’t any more dislike people automatically because they happen to be rich. That doesn’t make them immoral.”
