Now lurking in the leafy glades is a band of BBC technicians. On the spot where the bandits of Dobogoko used to hole out, the BBC is quietly reinventing the legend of the most famous woodland resident outlaw of them all, Robin Hood.

“We wanted to make a drama that is earthy and rural, and this place has been the business in terms of the way it looks,” says the writer-producer Dominic Minghella of the Hungarian hideaway his crew have chosen to double for Sherwood Forest. “But it’s also been a good place to get away from things. We sense there are a lot of eyes on us, a lot of people waiting to see what we’re going to come up with. Being out here takes the heat off — a bit.”

The anticipation is high for several reasons. Minghella, brother of the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, is considered one of British television’s rising stars. His

last series for ITV, Doc Martin, starring Martin Clunes, delivered the beleaguered network one of its few ratings successes in recent years. It was largely on the back of this that Minghella and his co-producer at the production company Tiger Aspect, Foz Allan, were last year given a multimillion-pound budget to film 13 episodes of Robin Hood for the BBC, with further series almost certain provided ratings are respectable.

All this makes it a high-profile production, especially since it is the first show to be specifically targeted at what is now the holy grail of BBC programming. Robin Hood will go out in the same Saturday evening spot as Doctor Who, the show that is credited with reinventing the concept of Saturday family viewing. With this in mind, Minghella and Allan have been given the same “show runner” status as Doctor Who’s creator Russell T. Davies, overseeing every aspect from writing scripts and storylines to casting, filming and creating spin-offs.

This morning the forest set reveals the first glimpses of how Minghella and his team have reimagined Robin Hood. As you pick your way past the makeshift tents and canopies, the first thing you notice is that Will Scarlett and company are dressed not in shades of Lincoln green, but browns and khakis. There is not a pair of tights or a feathered hat in sight. Some are wearing crumpled scarves, others paisley leggings. Almost all the gang have hoods. They look as if they have been dragged through a hedge backwards.

The other thing that strikes you is their age. With the exception of the comic actor Gordon Kennedy, who plays Little John, the rest of the gang — Joe Armstrong as Alan-a-Dale, Harry Lloyd as Will Scarlett and Sam Troughton as Much the Miller’s son — are all in their early twenties. Crouched at the root of a tree, Robin Hood himself is perhaps the most strikingly youthful. The Irish-born Jonas Armstrong is just 25 but, if it wasn’t for the recently acquired stubble, he could struggle to persuade a nightclub doorman he is over 18.

Minghella reveals that all these choices have been carefully planned. Even the headwear. “Yes, I know, someone has already coined the phrase Robin Hoodie. We will, of course, be inviting David Cameron along to the launch so that he can hug one,” he says with a smile. “But we did want to get across the idea that, at one level, at least, it’s about a gang of smelly boys in the woods. “We wanted Robin Hood to be on the cusp between man and boy. We need to believe he has been off to war and is a leader of men, who has got past his youthful instinct to go off and fight and arrived at a more cerebral, intelligent position. But by the same token we need him to be someone who can hang out with the lads, backflip off the top of a building and snog a girl for the fun of it, too” Robin Hood’s mix of adventure and escapism, romance and political intrigue has been casting its spell over artists for centuries. Conventional wisdom has it that he first appeared in a medieval ballad, A Gest of Robyn Hode, early in the 15th century, when he was little more than a South Yorkshire cattle rustler (Doncaster is still vying with Nottingham for bragging rights as the hero’s real home). Since then Robin has reflected the shifting values and attitudes of the ages, evolving from a canny thief into a kind of Che Guevara of Sherwood Forest, fighting a guerrilla war against the oppressive King John while his master, King Richard, is off fighting the Crusades. At various stages along the line he has also morphed into a nobleman, Robin of Loxley and Lord of Huntingdon, become a veteran of the Crusades himself and adopted the proto-socialist idea of stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

The truth is that, as a figure rooted in folklore, Robin Hood will always be whatever anyone wants him to be. This was the first challenge facing Minghella and his collaborative partner Allan, when the BBC commissioned them in August 2005. Who is Robin Hood? What does he do? And what does he stand for? As it turns out, the first thing they decided was that the legend had been reinvented quite enough. “One of the reasons Robin Hood is enduring,” Allan says, “is that he is someone who gets things done. He has the superhero skills around the edges but the truth is he’s a bloke who says: ‘No, we need to do the right thing.’ So we ended up having no buts. It’s Robin Hood, it’s what it says on the tin, a guy who’s good with arrows and is a decent bloke.”

In this, Minghella admits he took inspiration from a distinctly modern hero.

“Jamie Oliver was one of our touchstones. Politicians through the ages have said we should improve school dinners then done nothing about it. Jamie Oliver came along and just did it.” This is, of course, far from the first Robin British television has attempted. Actors from Patrick Troughton — the first to play the role on the BBC in the 1950s — to Richard Greene and Jason Connery have taken on the mantle. With its misty-lensed look, ponderous action and ethereal soundtrack, the last major drama, Robin of Sherwood, starring first Michael Praed and then Connery as the hero, was a paean to a more spiritual world and an almost pagan connection to nature. “That went out at the height of Thatcherism and they made a decision to show that there was a spiritual side to life as well as a material one,” says Allan. “It tapped into something and went down rather well. But we have moved on from there.”

Today’s Robin isn’t worried by materialism. This time, Robin is a medieval Bob Geldof, a man driven more by his social conscience than his desire to redistribute wealth. “Our Robin doesn’t rob random rich people. His fight is with the Sheriff of Nottingham and his henchman Guy of Gisborne. That’s immediately a contemporary thing,” explains Minghella. “Not so long ago rich people in drama were automatically antipathetic. We don’t any more dislike people automatically because they happen to be rich. That doesn’t make them immoral.”

Minghella and Allan were clear that their Robin had to echo the darker undercurrents of our times, too. “We want to be crowd-pleasing. This isn’t Play For Today. We want people to enjoy an action adventure, but if you do want to find contemporary parallels I want you to do so relatively easily. Being tabloid and broadsheet is what Doctor Who has done. It’s an adult and a family show,” he says.

The most obvious echoes here, of course, concern the war in the Holy Land. In this morning’s scene, for instance, Robin and his gang must confront a team of suicidal Islamic soldiers who have appeared in Nottingham seemingly intent on avenging injustices in the Holy Land. When Alan-a-Dale bemoans the fact they are worrying about a “war that is happening 2,000 miles away”, Robin angrily tells him the conflict is closer to home. “The war’s here, it’s in the forest.” As this suggests, Minghella’s Robin is a soldier who has returned from the Middle East with his eyes opened to the futility of war — and its consequences for the people of England.

“Robin’s asking himself: ‘What does war achieve?’ So when we put him in situations where, for instance, the Sheriff of Nottingham is cutting people’s tongues out, he tries to use his wits first before using the tools available to him. Robin tries everything not to use violence. I think that’s very contemporary; it’s about diplomacy, left-field thinking.”

For all their desire for contemporary resonances, however, Minghella and Allan, a veteran of long-running popular hits such as Casualty, are much too commercially aware to make the show overly serious. “There’s a danger of being pious and worthy, which we avoid by keeping it young and fresh and cheeky. We’ve got a bit of the buccaneering Errol Flynn in there as well,” says Minghella. With the swashbuckling Flynn in mind, Robin and his gang wield an exotic collection of weapons that includes a Saracen bow and scimitar for Robin and a massive, long-bladed sword for Little John.

Lightening the mood, too, are the support players. Robin is joined by a gang of multitalented partners, although not — in this series, at least — by Friar Tuck. “We didn’t have room for him in this series, but people shouldn’t read too much into that,” Minghella says, slightly defensively. “If there’s another series, there’s absolutely no reason why he couldn’t be there.”

As usual, the love interest is provided by Marian, the noblewoman with a foot in both the camp of Robin and the castle of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Originally depicted as a warrior, subsequently she was softened into a more passive figure by the Victorians. Minghella’s Marian — played by Lucy Griffiths — blends the best of both schools. Her feisty, bow-and-arrow wielding heroine is straight from the Keira Knightley mould, but the romantic sparks fly between her and Jonas Armstrong, too. She also gives the show a strong, appealing, young feminine figure to compare with Billie Piper, whose character, Rose, was central to Doctor Who’s success.

The show’s clowns and villains provide the light relief. A Falstaffian fall guy, Much the Miller’s son, is played by Sam Troughton, the grandson of the first television Robin (and later, of course, the second Doctor Who), Patrick Troughton. Minghella and Alan’s most astute piece of casting, however, may have been in the villains. Expect Keith Allen as a sneering and chillingly sadistic Sheriff of Nottingham (Allen later reveals that he has based the character on Gordon Brown), and Richard Armitage, as a debonair yet murderous Gisborne, to be vying for acting awards.

And welcome as critical success would be, Minghella and Allan hope to emulate Doctor Who in other ways. With its vast collection of bestselling books, DVDs, toys and memorabilia, Doctor Who is, so far, the best example of what the BBC calls “360-degree commissioning”. Minghella and his team hope that children everywhere will soon be demanding their versions of Robin’s scimitar and Saracen bow. “I did economics at university,” says Minghella. “The fusion of creative and commercial appeals to me.”

That fusion was behind the decision to come to low-budget Hungary. The move looked ill-advised at one point. As filming drew to a close, four high-definition tapes of the show were stolen from a production office, it is thought by a local extra. Rumours swirled of Hungarian robbers holding the BBC to a £1 million ransom. Eventually, however, concerns that scenes would need to be reshot proved unfounded and the production remained on track.

At the Fot Studios in Budapest, they have built three permanent sets, including the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle and a complete reconstruction of the medieval village of Loxley, but the heart of the production is in the forest, an hour away. As the morning draws to an end at Bandit Rocks, Jonas Armstrong is justifying the faith the production has placed in him — remarkably, he was cast after one 20-minute audition. This morning’s scene, in which the gang debate how to respond to the Saracen menace, has taken almost five hours to complete.

The scene, Armstrong explains, sums up the Robin Hood he is creating. “He’s always been played almost as a superhero. The way I wanted to play him was as an everyman. He is not the kind of guy who sees something wrong and lets it be. He has to go by his sense of justice and what he thinks is right. This scene was very relevant to what he saw in the Crusades, so it was very important,” he says.

He admits that after five months of 6am wake-ups and 12-hour days it would be easy to let the energy levels dip. “A scene like today, you can’t go in with low energy because we’ve only got six weeks to go. You can’t risk it,” he says. He admits, however, that the production is taking its toll.

“When we started five months ago I didn’t think I would be able to get to the end of it, but now I can see there is a finish line. It has been very tough but very rewarding,” he says.

And can it imitate the success of Doctor Who? The early signs are good, as far as the Minghella household is concerned at least. The father of three children showed his 11-year-old son the opening episode on a brief trip home. “I had to drag him away from the computer games. But within 15 minutes he was hooked. Much to my relief,” he chuckles.

He will know soon enough whether his production is really out of the woods. But the smart money suggests that the forests of Dobogoko have not seen the last of their outlaws just yet.

Robin Hood begins next month on BBC One