Lesley Coote

Finding Robin Hood

AWW:   When did you first discover the Robin Hood legend?

LC:        My first encounters with Robin Hood were the Richard Greene TV series and the written stories of Roger Lancelyn Green, when I was at my first school - along with Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and the corresponding telly series. For a child, it’s important to ‘connect’ with characters in stories, in whatever medium they’re told, and I didn’t like both equally. In ‘his’ TV series, Robin Hood wasn’t someone I could connect with at all. I loved the stories – the settings, the clothes, the props, the ‘exotic’ nature of the whole thing, and the idea that this was ‘my’ history – but Robin Hood himself was like some of my friends’ dads, managerial and posh-sounding. He was nice, but seemed so full of moral righteousness; he always did the right thing and kept telling other people about it. In the stories there was a Robin who I could understand and like. He didn’t care about authority, he was independent-thinking, he had good friends but didn’t patronise them – you could believe that he loved playing tricks and games, that he could fight and get into trouble. He was someone I would have liked to be with – if I’d seen the TV Robin coming down the street, I’d have dodged down an alley out of the way! I liked the telly’s minor characters, Little John and Friar Tuck. I liked Marion – she was daring and intelligent – but couldn’t see why she insisted on being with boring old Robin. Children also react to illogicality, so I couldn’t get my head around why on earth Robin didn’t notice she’d suddenly become a different actor! I still hate it when series do that… it assumes that the audience are stupid.  

            The opposite was true with Ivanhoe. In Scott’s book he’s so damn good, so much better at everything than anyone else. I wouldn’t want to know anyone like that… I couldn’t understand why Scott insisted on always introducing my favourite character (Rebecca) with references to her race, color and religion, and why Rowena’s race, color and religion made her somehow more suitable as a match for the hero. Television and film made characters like Rebecca much more ‘real’ and important, and the way her race and ethnicity were treated (pretty badly by old people) was more like my own experience of late Fifties’ and early Sixties’ Liverpool. Robin Hood, or Locksley, was a rough thug-with-a-heart in Scott’s book (which was disappointing), but was treated with more reverence on the small screen, where he was portrayed more like the hero of the written stories. Ivanhoe himself always seemed so much more desperate and ‘endangered’ in the modern retellings. They focussed more on being young, misunderstood and ‘picked on’, and less about ‘good’ people versus ‘bad’ ones (where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ were based on some pretty spurious values).