Butchery At Last!

Last night saw the final episode in the first series of the BBC’s new Robin Hood dramatization. A good job really as I’ve now nicked just about every picture of Lucy Griffiths from the BBC Robin Hood web site that was available in order to illustrate my scintillating reviews of the show.

You know what? It wasn’t too bad an episode at all. Over recent weeks I’ve quite begun to warm to the show. God knows it still drives me batty with its historical and costume-based inaccuracies, its teeth-grindingly annoying too-modern colloquialisms, its flagrant disregard for the period’s limited technology and its sodding refusal to ever show Lucy Griffiths emerging totally naked from a frothing waterfall, sucking a Cadbury’s Flake with the strength of an industrial Dyson and cracking a jewel encrusted cat-o-nine-tails over a seraglio of Saracen love slaves.

I mean c’mon guys! That’s a killer show ready to go! What’s the matter with you?

Anyway, last night saw Marian unsurprisingly retrieved from out of death’s grubby claws by a miracle reaction to hemlock and then a little while later retrieved from out of the grubby claws of somebody who was even worse than death itself – Guy of Gisbourne - by a far grittier agency. Guy, still wearing a black leather trench coat like an extra from an ABC video and still talkin’ like a Catherine Cookson mill owner by ‘eck, had his troth well and truly unplighted by Marian giving him a right-hook in front of the altar. Poor Guy. 13 episodes mooning after Marian and all he got into her was the blade of his knife. He should have guessed that Marian was secretly pining for the impressive length of Robin’s longbow…

As it was even Robin could hardly be called the Dr Love of Loxley. 13 episodes pretending not to be mooning after Marian and only at the end does he finally have the brains to snog her to within an inch of her heaving virtue. Geez. At this rate it’ll be the end of the next series before he finally gets to bury his weighted tip into the depths of her quivering bullseye. Or some such other archery based euphemism.

At least he was quicker getting his act together regarding the ridiculous pacifism malarkey of the merry men. Last night saw them hacking, stabbing, shooting, and knifing to death as many of the Sheriff’s men as could be squashed into a medium sized people carrier with plenty of gung-ho left over to wipe out a small garrison of CND activists. Should there have been any around. At frigging last. Swash buckling. It’s the whole point of the Robin Hood legend after all.

I have to say that despite my initial dissatisfaction with the show I will miss it. Saturday nights just won’t be the same for a little while. What can I take the P out of now?