LeftLion print ed #7 - The (in)famous Tales of Robin Hood column
2008-08-05

UPDATE:-- It was printed in a later issue!

Well, it has finally been quashed, banned, striken, nutkicked, sacked and smashed.

For reasons I'm not going to get into, my Tales of Robin Hood column which was described by the Deputy editor as "my best column ever" will never grace the hallowed pages of LeftLion. Alas.

For you, the lucky CILL reader, though, here it is in all its unedited (and now very dated) glory. Sorry it has taken so long, I was still holding out hope that LeftLion would reconsider.

Enjoy!

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I’ve had numerous arguments with Nottinghamites about how this city should grab on to Robin Hood’s big ol’ medieval teets and milk them until they’re red raw and then milk some more. There is a lot of money in those merry men, and after walking around the rotting pit-stain that is St Anne’s for a couple of hours, I can tell ya, this city could use it.

Sure, the outdoor arena was ok and that big Ferris wheel has its charm, but neither of them really scream "Nottingham" at you, do they? In fact, the Ferris wheel screams "Fourth-rate London". I’m so sick of seeing all these regurgitated ideas coming through town. What’s next? A tiny "Angel of the Midlands" wearing a burberry hat, balancing a can of Special Brew on its wing? What a joke. Every time I look at those City Coucil "Ambitious" ads on the Ferris wheel cars, I feel like I’ve just been beaten about the face with a giant rubber irony dildo.

I walk past the Tales of Robin Hood on an almost daily basis and I had always meant to go in. It looks sketchy with those naf (I love that word) decorations in the window, but it’s got Robin Hood on the marquee and its on Maid Marian way. How bad could it be?

I had no idea.

I asked a few locals about The Tales of Robin Hood and the answer was exactly the same every time. An eye-roll, a laugh and an "It’s crap".

We arrive at the TORH, hungover, on a grey Sunday morning. We pay our £18 and are told to wait in the lobby for the tour guide. I haven’t read Webster’s dictionary definition of "lobby", but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t contain a water wheel, a giant fibreglass horse, a very live falcon and a very dead dog.

After waiting for about ten minutes in Dante’s lobby with a French family, a guy who looks like Dave Grohl and Peter Pan’s lovechild bounds in. He leads us past the falcon toward a huge wooden door that is absolutely blanketed in falcon shit. I look at my wife and say, "Jeez, they could’ve at least cleaned that stuff off," to which she replied, "I think they leave it on there on purpose to add to the reality". Of course, silly me.

Our guide who is not Dave Grohl at all, but Robin Hood’s pal Will Scarlet himself, knocks on the big wooden door and shouts "Open up in the name of Robin Hood!"

No answer.

He knocks again even louder and pushes the door open a crack to peek in. This engages the automatic door mechanism and the door starts opening. "Whoops!" he says and pulls the door shut again. "Hmmm, I don’t think that was supposed to happen," I whisper to my wife. If you turned the Tales of Robin Hood into a drinking game, where you took a drink every time you said "Hmmm, I don’t think that was supposed to happen," you’d be comatose 15 minutes in.

Something behind the door is obviously askew. Will now has to stall us until whatever is behind the door is fixed, so he attempts some shtick. To two hungover people and a family that doesn’t speak English. God help him. He pretends he’s going to kick the door in and tells a couple gags about how Robin hood used to wee in the water wheel and that the dead dog actually belonged to the man himself. You could hear a pin drop. Ordinarily, I am the king of the sympathy laugh, but even I couldn’t manage it.

Finally, Will takes another peek past the door and gets the signal that everything is ok. The door swings open onto the single crappiest tourist attraction I have ever seen. If there was a place called Crapland where the buildings were made of crap, where the crap people drive crap boats over rivers of crap and are lorded over by King Turd, the Tales of Robin Hood would be more crap than that. The thing is, it’s also brilliant.

I have never seen anything like it. You wander through underground caves while these mad, spastic dummies talk to you and each other. I couldn’t really understand what many of them were saying (did I mention it was crap), but I think the gist is that you are trapped by the Sheriff of Nottingham and sentenced to death. Before you are sent down, however, Robin Hood’s Merry Men (led by our hero, Will Scarlet) help you escape on what can only be described as an underground chairlift. Yes, you heard me right.

We get to the chairlift bit where Will Scarlet is sorting out the moving chairs out with "Maintenance Man". Maintenance Man must’ve been one of the background Merry Men not mentioned in the story. While glory hounds Little John and Friar Tuck are out swashbuckling, Maintenance Man sits back at camp in Sherwood Forest sharpening arrows and stitching rope ladders together. Yeah, that must be it.

Will and Maintenance Man swap perplexed looks and start letting empty carriages go through. Hmmmm, I don’t think that was supposed to happen.

We get on one that they both deem is safe and are off. The car moves past a number of medieval scenes where the mannequins quake about like giant Action Men in the midst of a death rattle. As if that isn’t strange enough, you can actually smell the action. When you go past the fake coal fire, it smells like coal, when you go past the fake food it smells of roast dinner and everywhere else it smells like pee. What horrible Head shop from Hell do you go to to get pee incense?

At the halfway point it dawns on my wife and I that it’s very quiet. This is the Tales of Robin Hood, where’s the bloody tale? I look up and see a speaker above our heads and point at it inquisitively. She shrugs, and I poke at the speaker cover only for it to pop out of the top of the car giving me a clear view of the ceiling. Hmmm, I don’t think that was supposed to happen.

It was at this point the sheer ridiculousness of my current situation hits me. I am sitting in a broken, underground Gondola rolling past twitching, leprous dummies that smell of pee in complete silence. My wife and I lapse into a giggling fit that doesn’t end until we went to bed that night.

At the end of the ride, my wife asks Will if there was supposed to be any sound. He looks up at the now misaligned speaker cover and replies, "Yes, there was. Hmmm, go upstairs and tell them ‘Will Scarlet says we can have a free go on the archery’". Suffice to say that when we went up to the archery, there was no one there.

The Tales of Robin Hood is so bizarre it belies belief. We left in a weird state of giddiness that had in fact cured our hangovers. I hadn’t laughed like that in a long time, and although it might’ve been for all the wrong reasons, there’s no denying we had a fun day. A day I would recommend to anyone.