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© Companions of the Longbow
What Was Wrong With Robin Hood Then? A review by Mark Tustian.
Robin Hood without a longbow is like a re-make of Apollo 13 using a space shuttle to get to the moon.
Let’s start with some hard facts. Robin Hood attracted on average around twenty to twenty five percent of the Saturday night audience for it’s time slot. That means over 6 million people watched it every Saturday. I’m partly to blame as I was one of the six million. And due to those pesky marriage vows that she was probably seriously regretting, my wife bumped up the numbers by another one. Okay she could have done something more interesting, but watching me throw things at the television is its own special form of entertainment.
But I’m digressing; let’s get back to the facts. With over 6 million viewers each week the show was considered a success and therefore at the time of writing this, series two of Robin Hood has been commissioned. So for all those people who read this review and ask the obvious question “If it was so bad, how come it’s got a second series?” I’d like to point out the 6 million reasons why.
So by now you’re probably aware that I wasn’t that impressed with Robin Hood. I don’t have 6 million reasons why I thought it was rubbish, but I think I can muster up couple of them.
What’s The Big Deal?
Some people I’ve spoken to wonder what the big deal is. Robin Hood they say is Saturday evening light entertainment, it’s just for kids and Robin Hood wasn’t real anyway, so who knows what it was really like. They’d be right in one respect. It’s not a big deal. It’s certainly not on par with world hunger, global warming or my overdraft.
But hey, this is a club about longbow, the clue is in the club name and this Robin Hood has had his longbow replaced for no good reason! It’s like watching a remake of the Magnificent Seven where the cowboy hats are replaced with baseball caps and the six shooters replaced with automatic pistols. It’s like watching a remake of the King Arthur legend where Excalibur isn’t a hulking great broadsword any more but a piddly little rapier. It’s like watching a remake of Apollo 13 where James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise try to get to the moon and back in a space shuttle. It’s just plain wrong. It’s not as though there are plenty of other hero’s who shoot the longbow is it? What did the longbow ever do to you BBC?!