The Hungarian stuntman curls my novice fingers round the tip of the arrow, presses a calloused palm into my shoulder blades and points at my feet. "He's telling you that it's all in the balance," says the translator. The arch of the old-fashioned wooden bow is tense with possibility, the large target feels embarrassingly easy to strike. But, like the television drama being shot through the trees, this could go one of two ways. It's hit or miss this afternoon in the forests of Budapest.

Robin Hood is the BBC's new Saturday night extravaganza, filling the prime-time slot left by Doctor Who. The series made headlines last month when it was claimed that tapes of several key episodes had been stolen. Rumours circulated about eastern European gangs. A million-pound ransom had been demanded, reported the tabloids. A £40,000 reward was offered. And then a thrilling eleventh hour recovery. If the "merry men" had been real, this would have been the sort of stunt that would have had them chortling until their tights wrinkled.

Only, on this set, the phrase "merry men" has been banned. In this 21st-century take on the legend of 12th-century Sherwood Forest, Robin of Loxley's associates are called the "gang", and there's not a stocking in sight.

The show's writer, Dominic Minghella, says he struggled to shake the staleness from the ancient and often-filmed tales. "A whole generation hasn't seen Robin Hood. And I felt we had to have a take," says Anthony Minghella's younger brother as we drink coffee by the Danube. "You know, it's Robin Hood – but he's not that good with a bow. Or it's Robin Hood but he can do all kinds of other things too. For a long time it was 'Robin Hood but…'

"Finally, without having to mess with the DNA of it, I found ways to make it contemporary. There are some really obvious parallels with our world, and subtler things that bleed through. It's about a guy coming back from a foreign war he doesn't believe in to find that all is not well – he's come home to a country that doesn't know how to distribute its wealth fairly. Those are current themes. The thing that is different about our Robin Hood is that he's essentially a pacifist."

Minghella's inspiration on this front was Colonel Tim Collins, the soldier whose motivational speech to the troops in Basra was said to have been tacked up in the Oval Office for a time. The same soldier who later resigned from the Army over issues of under-funding, bureaucracy and mistreatment, and was himself accused of war crimes.

"He came out to see us," says the writer, "and we asked him how he got going in his Army career. He said: 'Well, I was always just a bit good at violence.' It was chilling. He had killed people. And I think our Robin has that – he is a bit good at violence, but he has realised that's not what he wants to do. I was keen to explore what it would be like to have a talent for killing, but to check it. A guy who goes around killing everyone who gets in his way isn't a hero to me."

Although Robin of Loxley is traditionally a landed gent whose estate is usurped in the king's absence by the sheriff's creature, Guy of Gisborne, there's little of the old-school officer class in the way young Mancunian-accented actor, Jonas Armstrong, approaches the role. "He's a bit street isn't he," laughs Minghella. "One of our touchstones was Jamie Oliver – a bit of a geezer. I mean, maybe it's a bit faux, but he says 'Hands up who thinks we should have better meals in schools?' Well, everybody. But nobody else did anything about it. Robin Hood's a bit like that – affecting change."

Armstrong is a winning, rather shy character when I meet him in the imposing Great Hall of the Sheriff's castle. He confides that he saw a tubby ghost – "just like Mel Smith" – in the forest on a night shoot, and laughs about Robin being the original "hoodie". "I like his idealism," says Armstrong. "But he's also arrogant, vain – he thinks he's the nuts. Marion's always picking him up on that."

So far in the shooting schedule, he admits, he hasn't got very far with the fair maiden, played by 19-year-old English rose Lucy Griffiths who has a sharp modern take on Marion's dilemma. "There's no 'maid' in this Marion," she grins, "so that aspect of her is open to interpretation. And she's a bit conniving. Her choice is difficult. She could either go live in the forest with a bunch of outlaws and a man who left her for five years or, love aside, she could consider living in comfort and safety – as everybody wants her too – with Guy of Gisborne."

Gisborne is an unusually tempting option in this version, played by Richard Armitage – the actor who shot to period drama heart-throb status playing Thornton in the BBC adaptation of North and South. If Armstrong is in the show to win over the teenage girls, then cool-eyed Armitage is there to woo the mums. "It was always our ambition to play out the love triangle between Robin, Guy and Marian," says Minghella. "Armitage captures so brilliantly the way that Guy is so consumed by his own ambition and desire for status and credibility which focuses itself on this poor girl."

Armitage has his own take on the characters. "There are no complete families in this story," he says. "Marion has no mother, Robin has no father, Guy has no father. Nobody's position is stable. And they're locked into an almost familial relationship with each other. It's almost in the bad guys' interests to keep Robin alive – like the modern situation with terrorists. Guy and the Sheriff need him as a scapegoat, to keep fear in the hearts of the people."

"Oh the Sheriff!" laughs Minghella, of the villain played by Keith Allen. "We've made him shockingly amoral. We wanted to create a character who, if drugs had been invented then, would have been a Class A boy."

Allen himself is fairly frightening in person. He hurls a banana skin across the set's banqueting table and says he based his character on Gordon Brown: "The sheriff is a sociopath, utterly asexual, devilishly charming and very politically ambitious."

In a week when al-Qa'eda-sympathising Pakistanis have been reported as describing Osama Bin Laden as "our Robin Hood", the political references are zinging through this prime-time Saturday night entertainment. Whether the BBC's £8 million show will hit home with its target audience remains to be seen.

'Robin Hood' begins on BBC 1 on Oct 7.
Tights, sword-fights - and terrible songs

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Sixteen years after Douglas Fairbanks's silent Robin Hood became the most expensive film ever made, Errol Flynn slipped into Technicolor tights to become the definitive defender of Nottingham's oppressed: dashing, cocky and a whiz with a sword. His shadowy final duel with Basil Rathbone's sinister Guy of Gisborne is one of the most thrilling in cinema history.