So Robin Hood’s been percolating away on BBC One on Saturday nights for two months, and despite enjoying the opening episode I haven’t watched it since. To be honest, I’ve been too busy with Torchwood. Last week, Torchwood was all about some fairies who killed a paedophile by stuffing rose petals in his mouth — an episode clearly written by Stevie Nicks, after a joint, under a pseudonym. I love Torchwood — and I haven’t even seen Captain Jack’s beautiful naked back yet. Imagine what will happen when I see Captain Jack’s beautiful naked back! I’ll pay my next 15 TV licences early, and then faint, probably.
So, obviously, a lot has happened since I last watched Hood. Robin’s hooked up with Little John, and a Saracen alchemist called Jack, who’s a chick, and looks like Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights organisation Liberty. Of course, if it actually were Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights organisation Liberty, it would be a masterstroke of grassroots campaigning for cultural understanding. Into millions of households every Saturday, we are seeing a strong, confident Muslim woman, making her way in white Britain by formulating gunpowder, and blowing things . . . Oh well, it’s halfway there.
The other thing that seems to have happened since I last watched Robin Hood is that it’s become very, very stupid. This week’s episode centred almost wholly on Robin’s discovery that, three years ago, Gisborne had secretly travelled to the Holy Land, and tried to murder King Richard. Apparently at the time, no one knew that he had even left the country — but he was “ill for a while, and forbade anyone to disturb him”.
Now I don’t have exact facts and figures, but Nottingham to Jerusalem in AD1100 — it’s not going to leave you much change from a month, is it? However grumpy Gisborne is, surely after, say, two weeks of being locked in his room, the servants would have presumed he’d died of thirst and hunger, and kicked the door in? I can’t believe they’d just sit playing dominoes for four weeks, with their master “getting his head down” over a bit of plague, and not have any subsequent questions when he suddenly burst through the door, dressed in armour, smelling faintly of falafel.
Anyway, when Robin finally discovers Gisborne’s treason, he decides he’s going to have it out with him, man-to-man. There then followed one of the most unintentionally hilarious fight scenes in recent memory. Hood and Gisborne in the wood, punching each other for so long that they fall over, exhausted — only for Gisborne to say something deliberately vexing, like “Marian is STIRRED by me,” and the fight starting all over again.
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Simultaneously, Robin was trying to use the fight as the springboard for a lecture on cultural relativism. “There will always be war so long as people like you revel in their own ignorant bigotry!” he yelled, before swinging at the black-clad Gisborne, and falling over. It was like watching a geography teacher having a punch-up with a member of Depeche Mode.
While Robin and Guy were fighting, the rest of the Merry Men had time to leave them, go to the castle, rescue the captured Jack, escape via the sewers and return, with Marian — and Guy and Robin were still at it. It’s clear that the scriptwriters on Robin Hood have absolutely no concept of time, or how long it takes to travel somewhere. Maybe someone should buy them both an egg-timer and a sat-nav for Christmas.
Planet Earth (BBC One, Sunday), meanwhile, continued on its majestic journey to TV immortality in The Shallow Seas — this week, primarily whales, sharks and invertebrates. Obviously it had a way to go to top last week’s possessed jungle ants — with the freaky, penis-like spores shooting out of the back of their unfortunate dying heads — but this week’s shark attacks ran it pretty close. In real time, the attack lasts less than a second, but here, it was slowed down to last 40. Out of an empty ocean, teeth erupted, framing a luckless seal as the shark arced from one side of the shot to the other, like man-trap, never stopping. On the 40th second, its tail-fin sliced silently and neatly back into the water, leaving nothing but froth, and one less seal.
There were also some sea urchins that looked like Zandra Rhodes’s hair that were pretty hysterical.
Finally, the last word to the unstoppably gorgeous Simon Schama in this week’s Power of Art (BBC Two, Friday), talking about the Impressionists: “They were marinating the meat of human existence in the rinse of their luminescence.”
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People just aren’t saying things like that on American TV.