I once came up with a brilliant idea for a children’s Sunday-evening TV series. It would follow the adventures of young Jesus in Britain, circa AD 16, and his rich, tin-trading great uncle Joseph of Arimathea. There’d be dragons and giants and lots demonic figures, all trying to kill the boy Messiah before He achieved his true purpose. And young Jesus would continually be constrained from using any of His real powers because it was all a secret and His time had not yet come. If you’re clever, you can probably guess the title.
But it’s never going to get made because a) I haven’t written it and b) the film and TV worlds are run by satanists. Not literal satanists, perhaps. Well, not all of them. But definitely by people who feel about as much enthusiasm towards even vaguely pro-Christian themes as vampires do towards garlic, crosses and holy water, but who love saying yes to shows where the heroes are serial killers, demons, or, in the case of Lucifer, the devil himself.
As Exhibit A, I present the latest incarnation of Robin Hood. For no obvious reason, the showrunners have decided to use the tale as a vehicle for demonstrating to impressionable young viewers that the problem with everything is Christianity. The goodies – Robin and his merry men – are all basically Anglo-Saxon pagans, infused by the benign faerie spirits of the greenwood; while the baddies are all Normans who have gone and ruined Merrie England by enforcing their joyless, legalistic, fascistic agenda in the name of the church.
Historically this makes no sense whatsoever. Wasn’t King Alfred quite into Christianity? Wasn’t Edward the Confessor? Yet here we have a series, explicitly set during the reign of Henry II, asserting that until William the Conqueror came along with his pesky clerics – chuckling self-righteously as another Saxon is dragged to the gallows – nobody in England believed in the Christian God. ‘Norman laws and Christianity have been forced upon the Saxon people who must pay taxes and give deference to their new masters,’ declares the opening caption. Eh?
Robin’s dad is a lovely chap called Hugh of Locksley (Tom Mison), a dispossessed Saxon nobleman, who is doing his best to accommodate himself with the new regime while salving his moral conscience. For his family’s sake, he grudgingly accepts an administrative role as royal forester; but he can’t quite bring himself to do what his boss the Sheriff of Nottingham (Sean Bean) wants, chopping the hands off poachers and suchlike, because he remembers those prelapsarian days when the craply CGI-animated pronking deer of the forest belonged to all.
I don’t think I need to issue a spoiler alert when I say that this model dad ain’t going to survive to the end of the first episode. Well, obviously he has to be executed, cruelly and unjustly, so as to give our hero – his son Robin (Jack Patten) – the excuse to go rogue with his well-honed bow-and-arrow skills and wreak dire vengeance on the ruthless, cross-wielding invaders with their hatred of dancing and justice and fun (and free venison).
The film and TV worlds are run by satanists
The love interest is provided by Maid Marian (Lauren McQueen) who lives with her evil dad, the Earl of Huntingdon (Steven Waddington), in Robin’s ancestral home. Marian is sweet and their romance is coy and affecting, even if it does somewhat stretch the bounds of credulity that an unmarried high-born Norman girl would have been allowed out of her parents’ sight long enough to commune with dodgy hippie types at woodland proto-Glastonbury festivals like the traditional folk wedding where Marian gets to dance for the first time.
This scene is possibly the most excruciating of the opening episode, so redolent as it is of the most twee hobbit festivity scenes in Lord of the Rings. There is much wassailing, thigh-slapping and good-natured banter, all to the accompaniment of Irish-like fiddle-dee-dee generic movie folk played on instruments that probably did not exist in that period. You half expect the picture to be completed by Lenny Henry, making a cameo appearance in the white wig and pointy ears he sported so memorably in Rings of Power.
But here you’d be disappointed because, strangely and almost daringly, this is a resolutely diversity-free medieval England – a throwback, almost, to the Errol Flynn and Richard Greene era, rather than a capitulation to the post-1991 one when the makers of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves decided that the 12th century was in sore want of black action stars, so shoehorned Morgan Freeman into the script by casting him as a ‘Moor’.
Also in its favour: a reasonable amount of budget has gone into the realistic-looking sets. Either that or it has successfully repurposed the old ones left over from previous medieval series. The Fawn thought she’d recognised a particular set of stone steps from Bebbanburg Castle in Last Kingdom; I did too, though I contended that they were from Castle Black in Game of Thrones. Perhaps we’re both right.
Now what I need to do is to work out how to cancel my free MGM+ subscription before it goes into pay mode. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to buy my Jesus in England series idea, it’s called And Did Those Feet?.
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