Why has Robin Hood been a popular story for so long?
It’s a question that no-one has really answered before because there are so many other heroes in Britain – but there’s nobody, apart from Robin, who seems to have spread across all the generations in so many forms – the early ballads, plays, sitcoms, films, books etc. And of course, it’s a presence that’s changed over the centuries; each generation has its own particular Robin that we project our anxieties and aspirations onto. My favourite is the Errol Flynn film from the 1930s. From there, you see the shadow of the jackboot in Europe, with Robin a kind of prefiguring of a resistance leader in an occupied country. Later in the eighties TV series you get a much more folkloric Robin, tied in to Celtic mythology and post-1960s spiritual thinking. Nowadays, he becomes a spirit of the forest, like the Green Man. He’s a marvellously malleable figure. Tell us about the Robin of your generation… This was The Adventures of Robin Hood, the half-hour ITV series with Richard Greene, who played Ro
