Rob wanted to immerse himself in a totally authentic Nottingham historical experience. But he went to Tales of Robin Hood instead...
I’ve had numerous arguments with Nottinghamians about how this city should grab on to Robin Hood’s big ol’ medieval teats, milk them until they’re red raw and then milk 'em some more. Trust me: speaking as a foreigner, there is a lot of money in those merry men - and after walking around St Anns for a couple of hours, I can tell ya, this city could use it.
I could never understand why the people in this city are so anti-Robin Hood. Simply saying 'Robin Hood' to a local will invoke his gag reflex. I’ve always thought this was a shame considering how crap or un-Nottinghamish the other touristy things in this town are. Don’t get me wrong; the Galleries of Justice are wonderful, the outdoor ice arena was okay and that big ferris wheel that breezed through town had its charm, but none of them really scream 'Nottingham' at the tourists, do they? In fact, that ferris wheel screamed 'fourth-rate London wannabe'. And the Goose Fair? What in the seventh level of Hades does a Goose have to do with Nottingham? In fact, the very few geese I have seen around here are Canadian! You’d be closer to the mark calling it Gimp-footed Pigeon Fair. Lord knows we’ve got enough of those.
Anyway, I walk past the Tales of Robin Hood on an almost daily basis and had always meant to go in. It looks sketchy with those naff (I love that word) decorations in the window, but it’s got ‘Robin Hood’ on the marquee and it’s on Maid Marian Way. It’s got to be good, right? I had no idea.
My wife and I arrive at TORH, hungover, on a grey Sunday morning. We pay our £9 each and are told to wait in the lobby for the tour guide. I haven’t read the 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 dead-looking dog. After waiting in Dante’s lobby with a French family for about ten minutes, someone who appears to be the doughy love-child of Dave Grohl and Peter Pan bounds in and leads us 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 Fat 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.
'Hm, I don’t think that was supposed to happen,' I whisper to my wife. I learn very quickly that if you turned Tales of Robin Hood into a drinking game, where you took a swig every time you said 'Hm, I don’t think that was supposed to happen', you’d be comatose fifteen 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 of 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 can't manage it.
Finally, Will takes another peek past the door and gets the signal that everything is OK. The door swings open…onto what looks like the crappiest tourist attraction I have ever seen. If there was a place called Crapland where the buildings were made of crap, where crap people drive crap boats over rivers of crap and are lorded over by King Turd, Tales of Robin Hood would be more crap than that. Thing is… it’s also brilliant.
I have never seen anything like it. You wander through underground caves while these mad 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’, who 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. Hm, I don’t think that was supposed to happen.
We get on one that they both deem to be safe and we’re 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. Everywhere else smells of pee. No, seriously. If you learn nothing else from TORH, it’s that medieval Nottingham funked like a Top Valley subway on Sunday morning.
At the halfway point it dawns on my wife and I that it’s very quiet. This is the Tales of Robin Hood, damn it - 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 stink of piss in complete silence. My wife and I lapse into a giggling fit that doesn’t end until we go 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 you can have a free go on the archery'. Suffice to say that when we went up to ‘the archery’, there was no-one there. I think I saw Robin Hood himself though, sitting on the bar chatting up some girls, but it could have been a tramp.
Speaking as someone who Tales of Robin Hood is firmly aimed at, I have to say that it's so bizarre that it belies belief. We left in a weird state of giddiness, that had in actual 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 day I would recommend to anyone.
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