Richard Carpenter, the creator of 1980s Robin Hood drama Robin of Sherwood, had a tricky feat to pull off with the third and final season of his show: to make viewers accept a new actor in the lead role.
As fans of the series may remember, the previous season ended shockingly with Robin of Loxley’s death after the actor who played him, Michael Praed, got a Broadway offer he couldn’t refuse and pulled out of the show.
Luckily Carpenter succeeds. Rather than pretending that Michael Praed’s replacement, Jason Connery, is playing the same character as Praed, the renegade peasant Robin of Loxley, he has him play a new hero, Earl’s son Robert of Huntingdon.
Chosen by forest spirit Ferne to become ‘his son’ and carry the bold spirit of Robin of Sherwood, ‘the hooded man’ – a role rather than a man – Robert of Huntingdon leads his band of outlaws as surely as his commoner predecessor did, but in his own unique way.
This back-story involving Herne lends the third season a dreamy paganism that is more reminiscent of the Arthurian legends than of the Robin Hood ones, and it’s all the richer for it.
Set in the thirteenth century during the reign of King John, a time associated more with the sword-edge of fanatical Christianity than with honouring the spirits of woods and rivers, Robin of Sherwood doesn’t shirk to show the squalid and religion-bound lives of all but a few, but it balances this potentially-depressing theme by celebrating the beauty and magic of a land that would have taken dangerous weeks or months to travel through and seems all the larger and more mysterious for it. The show’s cinematography is top-notch, approaching the standard of John Boorman’s Excalibur.
The supernatural theme also gives Robin of Sherwood and his motley crew (including Ray Winstone as Will Scarlet) more than one enemy to resist. So alongside the Sheriff of Nottingham, a blithely venomous Nickolas Grace, who stands for ‘bad’ King John and all the social injustice of the age, there are the pagan enemies, the enemies of the forest god Herne himself, among them the demon Cromm Cruac and the wolf god Fenris.
In the final two episodes of the season, the supernaturalism gets positively Jungian when an evil doppelganger of hero Robert of Huntingdon arrives on the scene, invoked by the evil druid priest Gunnar (Richard O’Brien from The Crystal Maze).
Released on Blu-ray on Monday 31st October 2011 by Network.
Watch the trailer…