Robin Hood
You find comfort in the strangest places sometimes, for some the Blimpy Burger, others the bottle, and still others the pleasure of the flesh.
I found it on ABC last night. No, not the American Broadcasting Corporation- the other one. Robin Hood was broadcast, the latest in dozens of broadcast versions of the Merry Men of Sherwood, and headed by the latest fresh young man who could have been Errol Flynn form Hollywood, but being on the small screen, owed more allegiance to Richard Greene of the black-and-white outlaws of my youth.
The story has been updated of course, and is more suitable to the England of today, where it is produced, than it is true to the original tale. Or let me take it back; it is true to its times, as all the Robin of Locksley tales have been or else they would not ring so aptly through the generations.
This version had some features that would have caused Errol Flynn to sit up and take note. There has been an addition to the Merry Men, and it is a South Asian woman who provides necessary diversity to the cast; she is the smart one, if you hadn’t guessed already. This episode several Ninja-style women assassins dispatched from the Palestine to slay the featured Saracen Prince. The latter is a dashing fellow who brings a message of peace and friendship from the Crusades, which have diverted the attention of Richard Lion-Heart.
At the conclusion, I was left with the definite feeling that everything would have been OK if there had just been a little more love, and England had left well enough alone and not gone crashing about looking for the True Cross, or whatever.
I was almost ready to take umbrage with the more obvious nonsense in the plot when I realized it was the just the querulous of age to youth, resenting it mucking about with the legends. The world is always created anew. I was happy enough to recognize some continuity from week to week, and realize that this Sunday’s programming meant that I had been here long enough to start thinking seriously about home again.
It had been a good day, as quiet Canberra days go. It was a working weekend, of course, and I hauled my papers and notebook down to the Starbucks on the square and set up camp. The morning was lovely, and the coffee was the drip version, and strong.
I was grateful for a little globalization as I watched the town wake up. I worked through lunchtime there, and harvested enough material to begin filling in the outline on the project that has an interim product due on Friday, with something more substantial before departure.
Despair began to dissipate with progress as I used the vocabulary I have been learning, and I typed madly at the Hotel before venturing out before the light failed to document the city in photographs. Don’t think of it as half-way, I cautioned myself. Don’t do that until tomorrow.
I got ready for bed as the television murmured a cop show called “Life on Mars,” which features a Midlands cop who has been accidentally transplanted in time. He has many adventures in a 1973-version of Manchester, which was right around the first time I visited there. Interesting to see it as cop-show science fiction, with whose great empty brick industrial buildings forming such a splendid backdrop of decay and loss of hope.
I was just preparing to turn off the television and welcome the night when that show ended with a cautionary tale against football hooliganism when a sophisticated woman appeared from the BBC to tell me all about the Reconquista and the expulsion of the Moors from Spain.
The Berber tribes of North Africa had stormed across the Straits of Gibraltar in the flower of Islam’s expansion in the 700s of the Common Age. It turns out that it was a bad thing. The caliphs of Andalusia were actually the good guys, the enlightened ones, and the Spanish, and the Catholic Church were the evil and brutal ones, and should be condemned for the ejection of Islam from Europe.
Looking at the wonderful images that the commentator produced of the surviving al Hambra palace, I couldn’t help but agree that it must have been a Golden Age when the Faithful carried the sword north across the Peninsula and right into France.
How different it would have been if they had succeeded, and gathered from the commentary that the woman with the television show thought that might have been a good thing.
I turned off the message before I could get too worked up about it. This is what they have to deal with in Britain, these days, and television needs content wherever you go, even far south of the equator. Two television shows, one serious and one not, reinforcing the message that we should embrace Islam more enthusiastically should not have surprised me.
I knew it already, but it was a little unsettling to see how pervasive the philosophy is. The multi-culturalists have already won this battle and moved on to the world that is arriving. America has not dealt with that yet, so it shouldn’t surprise me. Age versus youth, and all that.
It is just television, after all, and I don’t imagine anyone really listens to the message, do they?
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com