Where once a bit of occasional wealth redistribution and thumping sufficed to occupy the lives of Sherwood Forest’s resident street-talking bumpkins, now it seems nothing less than national salvation is the order of the day. It’s a big step up from the recovery of a side order of gammon. It’s a sharp change in direction from merely running after bullies in black cloaks. It is, in other words, a second series.

Ultimately what let down last year’s resurrection of Robin Hood was its limited scale. It ran out of places to go, both literally (the UK’s largest forest turning out to be frustratingly compact) and thematically.

Every week our heroes found themselves pitted against the machinations of the Sheriff, which was fair enough, but every week they never seemed to learn anything from their escapades, which wasn’t. Characters evolved, but artificially rather than organically. All momentum got frittered away. There was precious little trace of ambition, of storylines exploring grand themes of good and evil or hope and despair. Everything was just of the wrong magnitude.

It meant that what stuck most in the mind were the anachronisms, which made for the worst possible landscape upon which to fashion a follow-up. The 21st century slang, the contemporary mores, the numerous references to partially-topical talking points (“Regime change”, “mass destruction”) – they wouldn’t have mattered so much were they not so distinguished by their prominence, especially in contrast to the programme’s less ubiquitous grasp on medieval scene-setting.

So it’s good that certain changes have been made. Something needed to be done, if only to demonstrate the team behind the series were aware that, well, something needed to be done. Except what appears to have transpired is not a dilution of the problem, but rather an intensification.

On the evidence of this first episode, characters have become even less dimensional and even more prone to acting merely as ciphers. Aside from Robin and Marian, whose relationship is not immune from being reduced to clumsy metaphors, everybody else is a walking plot point. Their very purpose, their very existence in this fictional recreation of the real world of 13th century England, is to move events from A to B to C. Nothing more.

It means the roaring, vituperative, unpredictable monster that is, by legend, the Sheriff of Nottingham appears on screen as little more than the Hooded Claw, wholly occupied with engineering bland strategies of retribution that never work, and from whose failure he draws no heed.

Accordingly his “grand plan” for this series – to kill the King and take over the whole country – got soundly robbed of any dramatic scope and potential. The sequence of him assembling his “Black Knights” for a secret conference felt nowhere near as fearsome as it should. Keith Allen’s performance was more hollow than hair-raising.

The episode’s “very special guest” (a gimmick set to continue throughout the series), the Sheriff’s sister, was equally ineffectual. She did little other than scream dementedly or strut around looking haughty, in an attempt to try and outdo her brother by way of over-the-top scene-stealing. Saturday night drama doesn’t – shouldn’t – always have to major in subtly, but resorting to such devices as having a de facto wicked witch completely fool your hero by dressing up as a peasant, then stringing him up above a pit full of poisonous snakes, felt perilously close to just lazy storytelling.

It’s with Robin’s gang, though, that the main disappointment lay. It’s much the same problem as before. They remain a bunch of people for whom you have neither much time nor respect. By rights, depending on your age, you should either want to be one of them, look forward with knowing expectation to their inevitable arrival in the nick of time, or simply enjoy their swashbuckling antics. Any one of these three remains unlikely, however, so long as they continue to be drawn on screen in ultra-bland strokes, rarely speaking except to agree or disagree with their leader (“You were right all along, Master Robin!”). Worst of the lot is Much, who’s still depicted a bumbling, put-upon ditherer. Despite their respective characters’ history of fighting together in the Crusades, the question remains: why on Earth would Robin want such a person in his band?

Robin and Marian provided the limited strength of this episode, as indeed they did for most of the first series. Their verbal and physical sparring should be the foundation for any number of elaborately constructed plots – or so you feel. Both are competently played, both are plausibly written, and it’s here the real possibility lies for expanding the concerns of the show beyond simply yet another battle/ambush/escape.

There’s no reason why it couldn’t still happen. Something is required, though, to avoid proceedings repeating last year’s habit of settling into a kind of self-obsessed inertia. A subplot, tentatively begun in this episode, involving Robin’s cohort Allan A Dale being bribed to spy on his own side might inject some zest. Maybe the weekly guest stars will help broaden the emotional canvas.

If, however, the ambition of this self-styled “spirit of England” is never going to extend much beyond outlaws exchanging Two Ronnies catchphrases (“So it’s goodnight from me …”, “… And it’s goodnight from him”), then it’s doubtful this second series will get, let alone deserve, a third.

There’s an almost primal satisfaction in seeing a familiar face back on Saturday night television where they’ve always belonged. On this occasion, however, it wasn’t just the sight of Brucie cutting some capers which confirmed the world was turning on its correct axis.

A weekend appointment-to-view on and off for half a century, the return of Robin Hood – and to such a flagship place in the schedule – is, let’s be clear, worth celebrating in itself. And from the point of view of setting out stalls and proffering introductions, this first episode back on screen more than did its job, nimbly flitting between motive and impulse, and action and consequence.

Yet from the off it was thunderously clear this was no Errol Flynn gadabout. Here there was plenty enough back-story to shade Robin in more than just a Lincoln green wash of youthful piety.

Given the temptingly convenient option to sketch 12th century England as a simple struggle between good and evil or forest and town (step forward Kevin Costner), this was a striking move at so early a stage in proceedings. Social and geographical loyalties were blurred from the off. Lest anyone forget, boomed the implication, Robin is a nobleman, not a peasant; he has had a place reserved for him at the Sheriff of Nottingham’s table despite his long absence – an absence spent, incidentally, fighting for the establishment by way of supporting the King’s Crusades in the Middle East.

Various faces, some familiar and some soon to be over-familiar, then shuffled forth to assume their place in half-remember mythology. Look, there’s Marion pouting. See over there: it’s the Sheriff gurning. And there’s Guy of Gisborne, black of cloak and – of course – also of heart, snarling repetitively.

Yet none of this was done with heavy-handed exposition. Again, the episode’s pace and agility saw to it that the principal cast, along with their respective agenda, made their entrance minus hysterical melodramatics. Even Keith Allen, doing his best Keith Allen which can’t have been to anybody’s great surprise, was taken down a peg thanks to having to wear a stupid fluffy hat.

But from the point of view of imbuing the series with some momentum, of sufficiently winding up the show’s motor to send everyone and everything charging off into another 12 episodes, this first outing was not quite the powerhouse it should have been. Proceedings needed to burst forth with all-consuming, all-addictive energy, demanding you tune in again and again. Instead they half-shuffled off the starting grid, heading in the right direction but more through expediency than intention.

A reason for this was the presence, or rather the non-presence given his avowedly low-key performance, of Jonas Armstrong in the title role. Youth and maturity are not mutually exclusive qualities, but Armstrong, though undoubtedly blessed with the former, never seemed to muster enough of the latter to make him a credible leader of men. His eyes had just too much innocence in them to belie the substance of his deeds, at least in this first episode.

Casting against type doesn’t always spell trouble. Think of David Burke successfully playing a “young” Watson in Granada’s Sherlock Holmes, or the notion of Robbie Coltrane as a crime-busting super-sleuth. But here Armstrong needed to do just that bit more than run around and fire two arrows at the same time to indelibly stamp his take on this oldest of folk heroes. Hopefully he, as well as the show itself, will grow in stature over the forthcoming months.

An omen of sorts came within the last quarter of an hour, when all interested parties finally got down to some derring-do. Suddenly the story crackled into life and that which had only been frustratingly suggested so far – fear, tension, death and retribution – uncoiled with satisfying relish. Here was what you wanted: baddies blundering, crowds baying, nerves jangling. It was unashamed swashbuckling, marred only by the fact that Robin’s hugely irritating servant Much failed to be thrown off the top of a tower and plunge to his death. Still, when was the last time you saw people being hanged 10 minutes before Strictly Come Dancing?

Not the consistently superlative opening that it could and should have been, then, but a decent enough forward march, albeit one not entirely sure where precisely it’s going. Ratings-wise the episode certainly did the business (8.2m at the time of writing, though this will surely go up when videoed and delayed viewings are factored in), but you sense the show is going to have to work hard to sustain and renew its audience. There just wasn’t quite enough here to command you to tune in next week and the week after that and on all the way through to Christmas.

Perhaps it’s because, unlike its recent teatime antecedent, it doesn’t come with a gaggle of fandom already attached. Perhaps it comes down to whether you subscribe to the whole vaguely preposterous Robin Hood conceit or not. Throughout screen history the character has never been played by somebody particularly likeable, but in most cases that hasn’t mattered given the character is not particularly likeable anyway. It’s what Robin does and how he does it which catches the eye and stops the heart, not the man’s ability to state universal truths or crack a doleful pun.

If the notion of a man righting wrongs with a bit of capricious archery and a twinkling stare clicks with something deep inside you, then barring exceptional circumstances (Jason Connery) you’re always going to sign up to the man’s latest incarnation. If, however, you can’t get over the rudimentary dimensions of the Dark Ages and need to see your heroes engaging in philosophical battles over whether to leave someone behind in a parallel world or whether to flick a switch that could destroy entire life forms, you’ll never be able to see Loxley Wood for the trees.

Which is a shame, because this version of Robin Hood could well prove to be the most inclusive and unassuming piece of drama BBC1 has shown on a Saturday night for years.

“I think there’s something very special about Robin Hood, something unique,” he vouchsafed. “It’s like a folk memory that exists in all of us … One of the themes of Robin Hood is liberty. Although it’s timeless, there’s something oddly modern about it too. The starting point is Robin of Loxley comes back from a controversial war in the Middle East to a country where the government is in trouble. It’s raising taxes, it’s losing touch with the people. These are dark and troubled times.” 

These sentiments were later echoed by Keith Allen – the Sheriff of Nottingham – who described his character as, “A combination of Blackadder and Gordon Brown”. 

And it was all fun and lusty stuff … but why was I the only person walking out at the end of the screening who felt decidedly unimpressed and grumpy come the final quivering arrow? I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s just me, but I really didn’t get what this new version of Robin Hood was for. Swashbuckling political allegory for a Saturday night? I dunno.

Perhaps it was the casting. Jonas Armstrong as the titular thief was fine, but physically uncharismatic and flat. Keith Allen was okay – but terribly, terribly Keith Allen (not a single note of his performance surprises). Marian, meanwhile, seemed little more than a Cornish Pasty squeezed into girdle. Her rapport with Robin? Well, maybe that’s for episode two.

And then there was the oddly off-kilter script, which jumped between olde worlde-not-speaking-in-contractions (“I do not make the law, I do not decide”), to chatty modern-day vernacular (“Pop your hand on there”), to toe-curling ’80s buddy cop parlance (“I knew that!” murmured comedy sidekick Much, every time he was re-directed from taking the wrong route).

But … well … like I said, don’t listen to me. Really. Everyone else seemed to think it was pretty good. Lizo off ofNewsround was in attendance, so I daresay if you log onto Outpost Gallifrey in a moment, he’ll be able to fill you in on everything that was good about it. As for me, Saturday nights will once more become the domain of my Thriller DVD boxset.