Maid Marian and her Merry Men (1989)

Original title

Maid Marian and Her Merry Men

Directed by

Kate Lonergan, Danny John-Jules

Genre

sitcom

Country

United Kingdom

Length

4 seasons, 25 episodes

Rated

PG

Rating

6.0 of 10 from 14 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A comedic kids' series that retells the Robin Hood story with Maid Marian as the smart leader of the Merry Men while Robin Hood is a bumbling former tailor. The show mixes songs and farce in a historical setting.

comicallightheartedplayfulcheekysatiricallivelycampywhimsical

What happens

Maid Marian and her Merry Men is a British children's television series created and written by Tony Robinson and directed by David Bell. It began on 16 November 1989 on BBC1 and ran for four series, with the last episode shown on 16 February 1994. The show was a partially musical comedy retelling of the legend of Robin Hood, placing Maid Marian in the role of leader of the Merry Men, and reducing Robin to an 'incompetent' ex-tailor. The programme has been likened to Blackadder, not only for its historical setting and the presence of Tony Robinson (as well as early, uncredited, script editing work being undertaken by Richard Curtis), but also for its comic style. Many of the show's cast, such as Howard Lew Lewis, Forbes Collins, John Rapley, Ramsay Gilderdale and Patsy Byrne, had previously appeared in various episodes of Blackadder alongside Robinson. The show's success led to an adaptation produced for the stage and a cartoon strip by Paul Cemmick which was serialised in the Daily Telegraph's children's paper The Young Telegraph (also available as a series of collections), and the programme was repeated on BBC One in 2001. Series 1 was released on video in 1990 and 1993, with three episodes each on four tapes, and all four series are available on DVD. It was repeated in April 2002 on the CBBC Channel and the first series was repeated in June 2007 at 12:30 on the CBBC Channel. During the summer of 2009, Gold repeated the entire 4 series. Tony Robinson was in discussion about a revival in 2018, 2021 and 2022. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• When Things Were Rotten (1975)
• The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955)
• Back to Sherwood (1998)
• Robin of Sherwood (1984)
• Jeeves and Wooster (1990)
• The Adventures of Maid Marian (2022)
• Extras (2005)
• Derry Girls (2018)