By Gordon's Beard

Recently, I have written a few things about editing on the BBC's 2006-09 version of Robin Hood. These posts feel a bit like they've come from a fansite in a parallel universe where the show survived the departure of nearly all of its original leads, ran for a few more series and left a bigger cultural footprint than it actually did, so I've been quite pleased with the audience they've found.

One of the most famous stories about the series, though, concerns the August 2006 theft of some master tapes. Although the majority of the material was apparently recovered later on, there is some reshot material in the broadcast episodes. But nowhere tells us exactly what.

Here is Little John, as played by Gordon Kennedy, when he makes his first appearance in the final moments of the first episode, "Will You Tolerate This?" (original TX 07/10/06):

Here he is in his first scene of the second episode, "Sheriff Got Your Tongue?" (TX 14/10/06), sporting a beard which looks much the same for most of the episode:

(Episodes 1 & 2 were filmed in the same block, and on the DVD commentary for episode 2 showrunner Dominic Minghella identifies the scene where Marian tries to rescue Robin from the dungeons, half an hour into episode 2, as the very first to be filmed.)

But when we get to the castle scenes later on, Kennedy is visibly close to clean-shaven in the scene where the other outlaws arrive to help Much with his rescue attempt (apart from this shot, he's only seen in wide shots for the rest of this scene, and the lighting also suddenly changes at the point the others arrive, as if it's been put together from two different takes):

Shot for Shot

On 29 December 2007, the second series of the BBC's latest adaptation of Robin Hood came to an end with a highly contentious finale where Guy of Gisborne stabbed Marian to death in a jealous rage.

It's perhaps not the most interesting thing about these episodes, but although produced as two 45-minute episodes, titled A Good Day to Die and We Are Robin Hood, they ended up originally airing as one single 90-minute compilation, on account of the BBC deciding to strip their Oliver Twist adaptation across five nights from Tuesday to Saturday, meaning no episode of Hood aired on the 22nd December.

All subsequent repeats, home media releases and streaming versions presented the story as the original separate episodes, so the compilation version -- only seen on the first UK broadcast, literally in the same week BBC iPlayer was launched and off-air copies of things started becoming a bit harder to come by -- became rather obscure.¹ However, I've been furnished with a copy of that original airing by Jim Lynn of VHiStory, and I am tremendously grateful to him for making this post possible. Because it isn't quite the case that they just stuck the two episodes together.

In the Hood

In October 2007, the BBC's Robin Hood TV series returned for its second series. Amongst a number of changes, the entire title sequence was completely overhauled, with a lot more colour, variety, shots of forest scenery interspersed with clips from episodes and whatnot. A visual summary of all the different credit screens would look more or less exactly like this:

Episodes 4, 5, 8, 9, 10 and 11 have an extra screen between the director and series producer credit for Jane Hudson, with the other production credits shortened slightly to fit it in:

This same title sequence was the basis for the one used in the third and final series. However, whilst Series 2 kept the same cast throughout, the regulars were constantly changing throughout for S3, and the opening was updated to account for this -- in fact, with two exceptions, the sequence was never the same two weeks running.

The Man With a Tadpole Stuck Up His Nose

Between 1989 and 1994, Tony Robinson wrote and starred in four series of the hugely popular Children's BBC series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, reinventing the legend of Robin Hood as a sitcom for children which posited that Marian was the true leader of the outlaws, and the foppish Robin of Kensington was little more than a vain incompetent whose greatest contribution to proceedings was designing the gang's costumes.

Robinson very much did not stop at the small screen, however; eight MMaHMM comic albums, adapting the TV episodes, were published between 1989 and 1992, with two being released simultaneously every year. The first two batches coincided with the broadcast of the first and second series, but after the Autumn 1990 transmission of Series 2 the show took an extended break until January 1993, and the third and fourth sets of books were released in the interim (with the final two books actually being published well before the Series 3 episodes they adapted were broadcast!)

If you were writing a sitcom or a children's television serial around this time, then a novelisation was still pretty common, but Maid Marian (a show slap bang in the middle of that particular Venn diagram, and hence more or less obligatory) might be a unique example of an albumisation. It seems like these adaptations were a real passion project of Robinson's, but it's hard to imagine the show translating so well to text (one other book based on the show was published, which contained the playbook for the stage musical based on the show that Robinson wrote with two of the series' cast members, Mark Billingham -- yes, that Mark Billingham -- and David Lloyd).

The artwork for the albums was provided by Paul Cemmick (also responsible for the show's animated end credits, as well as original illustrations for the musical's programme when it was staged by the Bristol Old Vic in 1996, which you can see at the bottom of this page), who worked from Robinson's original scripts (in the earliest cases before he'd even had the opportunity to see any of the show itself, with the only visual references he had being photos of the cast taken at the initial readthrough). A total of nine episodes from across the first three series were translated to print in total; the first two books adapted the first two episodes, which form a loose two-parter, but after that they go all over the place, with the eighth and final volume, "Driving Ambition and Keeping Mum", adapting two episodes in a single book. There was also a serialisation (with the panels modified or redone totally to fit) in the Daily Telegraph's imaginatively titled supplement for younger readers, the Young Telegraph.

A sitcom written by Tony Robinson, aiming to get demographically inappropriate humour in wherever possible, is a very funny show indeed. But such a sitcom adapted into a format that has no need to worry about what's feasible on a children's television budget is something else entirely. There are at least seven examples on any given page of this, so I decided to narrow things down to one in particular.

That 1190s Show

The second episode of the second series of the BBC's notoriously anachronism-prone 2006-09 Robin Hood series, "Booby and the Beast": The plot of breaking into the Sheriff's booby-trapped strongroom bears an uncanny resemblance to the 90s gameshow The Crystal Maze. (It's kind of hard to sum this up in a single screengrab, so you might want to just watch the episode.)

The sixth episode, "For England..!": The setpiece of Robin and traitorous Merry Man Allan-a-Dale being forced to fight each other over a pot of boiling oil bears an uncanny resemblance to the 90s gameshow Gladiators.

The eleventh episode, "Treasure of the Nation": The plot of a treasure hunt around Sherwood with devious cryptic clues bears an uncanny resemblance to Treasure Hunt, which was actually a gameshow from the 80s, but oh well. (It would also seem remiss in all this to not note that Little John is played by the original host of the National Lottery draw, Gordon Kennedy.)

So, clearly someone on the production team, quite probably one of creators Dominic Minghella and Foz Allan, was taking inspiration from somewhere, even if it was kind of an odd place to find inspiration for your Robin Hood series tasked with providing a contemporary feel to the legend.

And would you believe that the thirteenth episode, "We Are Robin Hood!", features an actual Gladiator, Mark "Rhino" Smith?

Just Ask for Forbes Collins

Exhibit A: Forbes Collins as Henry von Falkenberg in the 1988 film Just Ask for Diamond, a spoof of the hard-boiled detective genre for children adapted from the 1986 novel The Falcon's Malteser, often specifically spoofing The Maltese Falcon.

Exhibit B: Forbes Collins as King John in the 1989-94 CBBC series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, a spoof of the Robin Hood legends for children, often specifically spoofing the 1984-86 series Robin of Sherwood.

Robin and the Three Hoods

Maid Marian and Her Merry Men -- Tony Robinson's take on the legend of Robin Hood as a sitcom for children, running for four series on Children's BBC between 1989 and 1994 -- was in many ways a direct sending-up of Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood. (Nowhere is this more apparent than in the episode "The Whitish Knight", where the mysterious knight has his own song which is clearly a specific reference to RoS' theme music.)

However, you can draw a straight line -- like an arrow, if you will -- from Sherwood, to Marian, to later adaptations of the legend. The character of Barrington, the Rastafarian Merry Man in the latter, was a reference to Sherwood having a Saracen (Nasir) join the ranks of the outlaws, and may be what really popularised the idea for later adaptations; is it even possible, however unlikely, that Robinson parodying the idea is part of what led the writers of the 1991 Prince of Thieves film to believe Nasir was not a character solely created by Carpenter, but the idea went back much further, forcing them to change the name of their own Saracen to Azeem mid-shoot when they found out?