Men in Tights

 

So I watched the new Robin Hood on BBC America. Or I should say, I tried to.

Let’s back up a bit. I do like my historical fiction as accurate as I can get it, within limits, I suppose. Lately I’ve been jousting with a writer from whom I was trying to get a blurb. She’s an über historian/novelist and I’ve taken a few liberties in my medieval noir. Nothing earth-shattering as in Braveheart or odd in certain other Elizabethan novels I have heard of where they serve tea in tea cups. I’m talking things like having only one sheriff in London when there were really two and having him serve for several years rather than the actual one. Which I explain in my afterword. See? Everyone still alive out there? You okay? Good. I mean, to begin with, it’s fiction. I’m already lying to you because I’ve created all these fictional people and stuck them in a real place—London—at a time when they didn’t really exist. And then I have this fictional person solving crimes of fictional dead people and their fictional survivors. I’m not writing it in Middle English which would make it incomprehensible to all but the most obscure of professors out there, nor with a quill, for that matter, but a good old-fashioned computer, the kind mother used to make. And for the record, monks and nuns never solved crimes either.

But other than that, it’s all pretty accurate.

So getting back to Robin Hood. Despite my own foray into fictional historical fiction, it does kind of annoy me when I see blatant inaccuracies blown at you on the screen. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You can get away with this stuff in the movies and on TV but you can’t in a book.

First of all, even though the actor Jonas Armstrong is quite easy on the eyes, I’m a little concerned about what he, and everyone else, seems to be wearing. T-shirts? From ye olde t-shirt shack? And what pimped out shop did the sheriff of Nottingham get his threads?

And again, they aren’t speaking Norman French or Anglo-Saxon English, but a little less with the modern idioms would be great. “Making a difference.” “You just don’t get it.”

And then, the strange and wonderful magazine review quotes. I like very much “young and edgy” and “romantic”. I plan on stealing those myself for Crispin. But People Magazine’s takes the cake. I quote: “Star Wars dropped into Sherwood Forest...” Sorry? What the hell does that mean? Um...the Merry Men are like the resistance and the Sheriff of Nottingham is like Darth Vader? Huh??? In a Forest. Oh. So that makes the Merry Men Ewoks and the Sheriff those walker-thingies? Well, why not? After all, Robin Hood is “making a difference” and if you can’t see that “You just don’t get it.”

Comments

[Patrick Shawn Bagley]

Did you ever watch the BBC "Robin Hood" series from the 1980s with Michael Praed (and, later, Jason Connery) playing Robin? If so, what did you think of it? I'm just curious.

[Jeri Westerson]

Sorry, Patrick. Never saw it. Or at least don't remember it. For me, of course, the definitive Robin Hood is Errol Flynn, even though the costumes and hair styles were not much better. But they at least used the romantic period for their inspiration, a sort of Weyeth-Parrish-Pre-Raphael sense of style, not some grundge rock fest of psudo-realism with contemporary brush strokes. It's an attempt to get that "young and edgy" label. I think it can still be achieved with the right costumes and a better sense of idiom.

[Jeri Westerson]

Wow. This was a long time ago. And you know what? I *did* fix my historical inaccuracies in the end. It just didn't hold water for me. And though we never see that other sheriff, he is mentioned, and they only get the one year. Accuracy wins again. Those were my thoughts back then before I got a contract. But I still felt the same way about that Robin Hood show.