Tales of Sherwood Forest (ITV, 11 June to 23 July 1989)

In a promotional interview for The Guardian in the run-up to the first episode of the seven-part Tales of Sherwood Forest, Plater sounded a note of worry about the ambitious series he had devised for ITV:

This could be a huge turkey. There’s a danger that your judgement goes out of the window and you think 'this is the greatest thing since forever'.

OK, let’s get this out of the way first: Tales of Sherwood Forest isn’t great. Nor has it left much in the way of footprint – I’ve struggled to find any remembrance of it online, not even a message-board comment of the ‘can anyone remember that weird, slightly musical thing where Pete Postlethwaite runs a Casablanca-themed bar in Nottingham?’ variety. At the time of writing, there’s only one clip of it online (from the final episode) which actually makes the show look way more fun than it is.

A shame, because the series has a fascinating origin story, rooted in Plater’s ambition to produce a series format that would simultaneously keep the flag flying for studio-produced drama, and give opportunities for emerging writers to cut their teeth on TV – whilst also allowing him to indulge his ongoing fascination with the tribe of folks he called the ‘night people’. Indeed, early working titles for the project included ‘Plays for Midnight’ and ‘Night People’ – the latter being a name Plater had already given to a one-off drama of 1978 (and which I discuss here).

In a press release for Sherwood, Plater was reported as saying:

I’m fascinated by the sort of people you see travelling on those late night buses, or going to clubs until the early hours of the evening. My idea was to create a television series which could celebrate those night people – the sometimes lost, and sometimes found outs, who are given to staring too long at the moon when it is full, too long at the grape when it is ripe – the people who have heard the blues at midnight.

The idea was that activity would converge on a single key location, the bar establishment bought on a whim by the Casablanca­-fixated Richard (Pete Postlethwaite) after he gets the sack as a Polytechnic lecturer. Upon arrival, the first thing he has to do is get rid of the Robin Hood-themed decorations of the venue’s previous incarnation, which thus explains the title of the series.

Plater came up with the overall concept, but only wrote the first episode, which sets up the establishment of ‘Rick’s Bar’ and introduces the key characters. This initial screenplay was sent to a group of nine writers with minimal experience of TV writing, which was then whittled down to a core of six. Plater then acted as script editor for the rest of the series, encouraging individual writers to focus on specific storylines, as opposed to particular episodes. The scripts were then developed through ‘democratic’ workshop-type rehearsals open to everyone involved in the production process: writers, producers and cast.

So, for episodes two to four, the writing credit goes to Mark James, Neil McKay (who also seems to have written a spin-off book) and Betty Burton, each of whom has a particular credit for the three soap-like storylines that develop simultaneously over the three episodes. Episode five, written purely by David Farnsworth, is something of a reset: a standalone ‘bottle’ episode concerning a stag do at the club that just involves the central characters. Episodes six and seven are written jointly by Guy Andrews and Nick Perry, and introduce two new story strands, whilst ramping up the quotient of what Plater described as ‘post-Potterisms’.

Right from the first episode, there are fantasy sequences where Postlethwaite’s character imagines that he's in a scene from Casablanca, and in many episodes we see Anita (Bee Jay), the bar’s waitress, performing a classic, 1940s-era song. The musical score for the show is by Frank Riccoti, who had worked so sympathetically and memorably with Plater on the recently-completed Beiderbecke trilogy. The final episode of Sherwood ramps up the Casablanca skits and musical/fantasy bits, and culminates in a very silly scene where David Troughton’s antagonistic policeman character, who has been a regular visitor to the bar from the start, reveals he is neither in the police force, nor a man.

The show’s complicated architecture means that storylines and characters come and go in a way that could either be considered as narratively audacious, or as a sure way to lose an audience’s interest. Put simply, the majority of the ‘tales’ are unengaging, and the acting varies in quality too – it’s not hard to guess that the whole thing has been produced by committee.

With regard to the show’s throwback to an old-fashioned style of studio recording, Plater and his producer Richard Argent wrote in an early treatment for the series that:

We are not dedicated to destroying the filmed play, or the flexible use of discontinuous recording: we are simply saying that this approach is appropriate to the particular subject, and if, in passing, we re-assert some of the values that informed the work of such as Paddy Chavyevsky and Rod Serling, well, that wouldn’t be bad, would it?

Initially pitched at Channel Four, Sherwood was picked up by Central Television, and looking at the correspondence relating to the show in the Plater archive (at the Hull History Centre), it is clear that the writing team were required to limit the planned number of studio and exterior locations for budgetary reasons.

Alas, one of the insurmountable problems of the series is that it begins with a Plater episode. Considered as a standalone play rather than as the trigger for the rest of the series, it is pretty decent, unhurriedly establishing the characters, doling out the fantasy elements in modest, digestible amounts, and managing to say a few things about middle-aged despair, self (re)-invention and the commodification of heritage. Obviously you’re in safe hands. It just goes rapidly downhill after that.

But let’s be positive and thankful for what we’re given. There’s a line that I’ve heard attributed to the esteemed Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn: that fans of the Fab Four should ignore those who say that, for example, the Magical Mystery Tour EP is substandard – who cares, it’s more Beatles. Similarly, Sherwood is more Plater. A misfire, sure, but he gave it a go.

And it’s also great to see Pete Postlethwaite playing against usual type as a dreamy, hen-pecked, academic type.

To give a flavour, here’s a clip where he gives his keynote speech celebrating the nocturnal tribe of those who ‘come to life after dark’: the ‘lonely, love-sick, poets and private eyes, gangsters and hoodlums’.

Because I feel a bit bad about telling you that Tales of Sherwood Forest isn’t really worth staying up beyond midnight for, I’m going to end with another quote from Plater taken from the show’s pre-broadcast press-release:

In an age devoted to television as a product, which you can put in cans and market, it’s been refreshing to take part in a genuine creative adventure, where the individual imagination is made welcome. Without it, we’re doomed. Any of the Night People will tell you that.