![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
An occasional theme of my writing and conversation is my dislike of the 1980s. This is unfair. Many good people were born in the 1980s, including very many of those reading this journal. Hello to you!
One of the better cultural items of the decade was Robin of Sherwood (1984-1986), which I've now started to watch on DVD. I saw a few at the time of broadcast, and a few since at DSoc, TrekSoc (in its early years, in the days of Admiral Sue and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
king_pellinor, they showed a more eclectic range of stuff than was later and is now the case) and last year on ITV3. I've only watched the first three episodes (counting 'Robin Hood and the Sorceror' as two - it's been shown in both two-part and 'movie' formats) and am impressed. Despite suffering from the same potential problem that assailed Peter Davison's Doctor Who, where a young lead was placed opposite much more experienced actors as guest stars, Michael Praed convinces as a natural leader whose vulnerability in the face of danger never makes him look like a weakling. The script is intelligent with lots of good asides which point to what writer Richard Carpenter was trying to achieve. The old prisoner left behind in the cell at Nottingham when Robin, Much, Will, Dickon and Tom escape early in the first episode tells his pet rat Arthur that "They'll never get out," which is true: Robin and Much hope to get back to their old lives but this can never be, and throughout the series there is a sense of the forest as a refuge with defined limits: Robin holds Sherwood but England is under the Norman Yoke, and as soon as he is invested as Herne's son, Robin knows that his fight is not the less real for being largely symbolic. This message is helped rather than hindered by the limitations of the locations. Kirklees Abbey, where Marion is briefly a novice, is shot in a ruin with a false gate and there is little attempt to hide this; Robin of Sherwood is a retelling and reinvention of the story based on fragments of half-remembered legend, as, perhaps, the ruins of the middle ages represent the confused nature of the national memory. As Doctor Who's Terrance Dicks is fond of saying, television is a collaborative medium, and Robin of Sherwood knew how to coax its audience into being active collaborators without straining the illusion.
One of the better cultural items of the decade was Robin of Sherwood (1984-1986), which I've now started to watch on DVD. I saw a few at the time of broadcast, and a few since at DSoc, TrekSoc (in its early years, in the days of Admiral Sue and
king_pellinor, they showed a more eclectic range of stuff than was later and is now the case) and last year on ITV3. I've only watched the first three episodes (counting 'Robin Hood and the Sorceror' as two - it's been shown in both two-part and 'movie' formats) and am impressed. Despite suffering from the same potential problem that assailed Peter Davison's Doctor Who, where a young lead was placed opposite much more experienced actors as guest stars, Michael Praed convinces as a natural leader whose vulnerability in the face of danger never makes him look like a weakling. The script is intelligent with lots of good asides which point to what writer Richard Carpenter was trying to achieve. The old prisoner left behind in the cell at Nottingham when Robin, Much, Will, Dickon and Tom escape early in the first episode tells his pet rat Arthur that "They'll never get out," which is true: Robin and Much hope to get back to their old lives but this can never be, and throughout the series there is a sense of the forest as a refuge with defined limits: Robin holds Sherwood but England is under the Norman Yoke, and as soon as he is invested as Herne's son, Robin knows that his fight is not the less real for being largely symbolic. This message is helped rather than hindered by the limitations of the locations. Kirklees Abbey, where Marion is briefly a novice, is shot in a ruin with a false gate and there is little attempt to hide this; Robin of Sherwood is a retelling and reinvention of the story based on fragments of half-remembered legend, as, perhaps, the ruins of the middle ages represent the confused nature of the national memory. As Doctor Who's Terrance Dicks is fond of saying, television is a collaborative medium, and Robin of Sherwood knew how to coax its audience into being active collaborators without straining the illusion.Tags: