Feared by the bad, loved by the good, Robin Hood

In 2001, satirical US website The Onion ran an article bemoaning the difficulty American TV execs were having in managing to cater for an increasingly low Lowest Common Denominator amongst their viewership. The intention was humorous, but as with all satire, the joke works best because it's true.

In a TV world where reality shows seem incapable of plumbing a depth beyond their viewers ability to wallow, and where the schedules are packed with presenters in open necked shirts and nice suits whipping up enthusiasm for watching other people move house, put up a conservatory or buy a bloody yoghurt, there's a temptation simply to settle for making whatever crap the public will swallow and allow quality to fall by the wayside.

But this isn't one of those screeds where the author moans his arse off about Celebrity Wanking for Coins. No, this is (yet another) one of those screeds where the author whines like a middle-aged and balding baby about the way TV bastards are stealing all the most fondly-remembered shows from his youth and re-making them in patented and trademarked Chavovision.

Take Robin Hood, for example. Ignoring the black and white version from the 1950s on the grounds that it's both dull and utterly indistinguishable from Ivanhoe, William Tell and that one with Ian Chesterton from Doctor Who, you're left with a choice of three main TV versions.

1. From 1975, starring Avon as the Sheriff of Nottingham, Ford Prefect as Prince John and Diane Keen as Maid Marian. This is the legend of Robin Hood as political thriller and as a result is more often than not set in rooms in castles, rather than Sherwood. Unbelievably to modern eyes, the outlaw gang don't even rob any rich passers-by until more than two thirds of the way through and they're pretty much all dead soon afterwards in any case.

You couldn't mistake this for anything but a big bloody slab of intelligent seventies miserablism, following in the 'faces like well skelped arses' tradition of When the Boat Comes In, Survivors and even supposedly kiddie fare like The Changes. In the Seventies, if the hero wasn't dead in a ditch by the end of the series then they just kept making more series until he was. No pandering to the audience here, just thoughtful drama filled with pointless death against a backdrop of Kings and Princes manoeuvring for position and in the end neither knowing nor caring that the little people get killed.

And they're not even heroic deaths - no-one even gets poignant last words, for Rutger's sake. Will Scarlet dies early on in a fight, Much gets hanged for something he didn't do, Tuck dies of a mysterious plague and Robin gets poisoned and, like Jack Ford, dies alone at the side of the road. Them's proper deaths, them is and that's yer actual realism, that is.

The 1970s - it truly was a Golden Age.

2. Flit forward ten years and enter Robin of Loxley, played with long haired angst by uber-hunk Michael Praed. Flit forward another couple of years and exit Praed, off in a huff and a puff of self-delusion which led him to believe that stardom inevitably lay ahead. How he must lie awake at night now, sobbing into his pillow as he contemplates a future in which the high spots are starring in the dreadful radio revival of Blakes 7 and reading the updates on - I kid you not - Michael Praed's Chest Hair Moments

Praed - and his replacement for a single season, Jason Connery, as the fortuitously named Robin of Huntingdon - is Robin Hood as Beckenham Arts Labs Hippy Mystic. If they'd had turntables in the thirteenth century, the Merry Men would have been sitting round the camp fire smoking joints the size of baby's arms, listening to the latest Nick Drake lp and playing Dungeons and Dragons. Which should make this my natural environment*, but unfortunately it's all so mind-numbingly, spirit crushingly earnest and slow that I've never managed to get past the end of the first season. Adding insult to injury, it has Clannad warbling (I assume) about how really, really fantastic trees are and how bushes are God's little cotton wool buds. Plus it wastes John Abineri (fabulous as Marian's guardian in the 1975 production) as Herne the Hunter, a Care in the Community borderline nutter with a penchant for wearing animal horns on his head like some deranged member of the Flintstones' Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes.

Even so, it at least makes an effort to do something new with an old story and if it's occasionally too slow and feels like a throwback to seventies serials, well that's not necessarily a bad thing.

And in complete fairness, I'm told by fans that the series really takes off in the second season when Carpenter gets to grips with the plotting requirements of 50 minute episodes. But for Christ's sake, I've watched Gridlock twice - how much more of my life do you want me to waste?

3. Which leaves the ASBO-wielding danger monkey antics of Jonas Armstrong as Joe Cole as Robin Hoodie himself. Don't get me wrong, I have loads of time for the latest incarnation of Robin Hood. It's silly and stupid in roughly equal parts, doesn't take itself even slightly seriously and can be damn funny, something never achieved by either of the earlier versions, for all their other virtues.

But there's no denying it's dumb as a Nicole Richie reality tv show. Hmm, there's a thought. Now that I think about it, Nicole and her skank drunk driver pal Paris would fit into Hoodie with barely a ripple. Short on personality and totally, completely, utterly bizarrely dressed, they're popular only because their total cluelessness and maddeningly illogical behaviour appeals to some broken part of people's minds.

Hoodie's the same. It actually aspires to a quality level which for most shows would be viewed as dramatic failure, and then positively revels in its own inanity.

For most TV series, the really eye-gougingly bad writing is reserved for the 100 page kid friendly novelisations** with bright photo covers and relatively complex plots boiled down to three or four straight-forward set pieces. Hoodie starts at that low, low point, so I shudder to think what the wafer thin novelisations actually consist of:

"Parent Hood by Mandy Archer

Chapter 1

Robin tried to kill a bad man but he escaped.

The bad man poisoned Marian with some poison he had that was poisonous. She was dead.

But Robin kissed Marian even though that would be minging because he loved her and she came back to life. They will probably have a baby now.

The End.

PS I kissed my gerbil but it was still dead and a bit smelly and mum said to put it back in the bucket, you stupid girl."

It's as entertaining as anything on television nowadays but Jesus suffering Christ on a big shiny bike, it's a show for the ADD Generation. Compared to the 1975 story it's a whole new world of stupid, and coating that stupidity in a thin layer of wink-wink, nudge-nudge knowingness doesn't make it any less daft. Being me and given that I like it, I've managed to read all sorts of meaning into it (actually, I'm no different in that respect to those who add layers of meaning to New Who, so perhaps I should be more charitable to those sorry souls) and invest it with a depth which almost certainly doesn't exist, but for the casual viewer it's pitched at exactly the right level of pig-brained imbecility.

There's a scene in the first series that perfectly sums the show up. Robin and his anti-social gang are standing about outside a village which has been walled up by the evil Sheriff, who is determined to starve the villagers into giving him the information he wants. Undaunted, the Merry crew push bread and fruit through the points of their arrows and fire them sight unseen over the walls to the unsuspecting but grateful villagers. But what if one of the arrows had thudded not into a handy cart, but into a less handy child's head?

There's an easy fix for the writer and director - have the outlaws stand on a nearby hill and fire downwards so that they can see where the arrows are going, but obviously no-one actually gives a monkey's and we're left with a rain of arrows battering down amongst what should be a terrified populace.

But they're not terrified, as it turns out, because they don't give a monkey's either. You can see it in their eyes, a desperate desire to be somewhere else, far away.

On the set of the 1975 production perhaps, with Robert Banks Stewart's words echoing in their ears and Trevor Griffiths as Little John firing an arrow into the air - "wherever this arrows falls, there shall Robin lie".

Now that's quality.

* Except for the D&D bit. Ridiculous game.
** Doctor Who is generally the exception to this rule.