Remakes are the name of the game in the cinema and on TV as once successful ideas are recycled for a second airing. But the play it again game doesn't impress everyone, as Steve Pratt reports.

A luxury liner turns turtle after being hit by a giant wave. The American Ambassador to London comes to realise, after a series of horrifying events, that he's raising the devil's child. A man in Lincoln green and his merry men fight the oppressive authorities in medieval England. And a man is captured, imprisoned in a strange guarded community and given a number in place of his name.

These are scenarios for current film and television projects that sound strangely familiar. They're products of the play it again syndrome that dictates if something is successful once, then the same thing with a little non-invasive surgery can be a hit all over again.

We don't know yet whether The Prisoner - the leading character in the last of the four stories outlined above - will be chased along the beach by a big bouncy balloon as Patrick McGoohan's Number Six was nearly 40 years ago.

What is clear is that The Prisoner - "I am a name not a number" - is returning to TV screens as the fad continues for remaking, re-imagining, retelling or whatever you want to call it, old films and series.

Big or small screen, if it's not a sequel it's a remake. Producers will say such replays are perfectly valid, pointing to theatre people staging Shakespeare and other classics year in and year out. They might also point out that today's young generation of cinemagoers won't have seen or even heard of the originals.

Detractors will claim that recycling old ideas is lazy and shows a lack of imagination.

A slight name change can't distance new cinema disaster movie Poseidon from its role model, the 1972 upside-down liner drama The Poseidon Adventure. After flirting with a name change of Omen 666, the makers reverted to the original title of The Omen. You can't help wondering if the real reason they remade the horror classic was as a cunning marketing ploy that sees the film open on 6/6/06, playing on the 666 satanic trademark.

Both Poseidon and The Omen are good films. Well-made, well-acted and, to those old enough to remember them first time around, pointless. You can't improve on the originals and neither film has an interest in deviating drastically from the template that served those so well.

The Omen director John Moore liked the script and saw a chance to make it contemporary. "It's a very timely story. It was worth doing if we could make it feel like it was happening now," he says.

He wanted to make the point "that partisan politics might be obscuring or obfuscating the reality that the world has gone to hell." And there was I thinking it was a horror movie about Satan's offspring.

He compares his interest in doing The Omen to "when somebody tells a really good joke in a pub and you can't wait to meet someone and tell them the joke. The story was that good and it scared me so much I was intrigued.

"On an analytic overview level, it certainly talks to how potentially insane we are to do what we're doing to the planet we live on and the people we live with. This year, this moment now, it's about the state of the world that we're in and thereafter the fable plays out the story of the child."

Going into such a film, a director knows he'll be called upon repeatedly to justify the remake. Das Boot and Troy director Wolfgang Petersen dodges that by not seeing Poseidon as a remake.

"A new style of disaster movie would be interesting in these times of so much disaster and trouble in the world and people are so anxious about way our world is going," he says.

"It's not like in the Seventies when disaster movies were camp Hollywood inventions. Now is a very different style - very visceral, very realistic. This is how it would be if it happened."

Like Moore, he was interested in commenting on the state of the world through the metaphor of the upturned Poseidon representing a world turned upside down.

US audiences haven't embraced this view, with Poseidon failing to become the big summer blockbuster that its makers hoped. He's hoping that, like Troy, the film will do better with European audiences. The movie is already doing good box-office in Asia.

Americans may be tired of the onslaught of big movies like X-Men, The Da Vinci Code and X-Men: The Last Stand, he feels. Or maybe they've had enough of images of death and destruction through natural disasters like the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

Turning old TV shows into new movies is a different sort of remake, but just as common. The latest, Miami Vice with Colin Farrell and Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx as Crockett and Tubbs, opens later this summer. Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha will bring the Ewings to the big screen in Dallas with John Travolta as JR. She's also earmarked to direct another old Larry Hagman vehicle, the comedy I Dream Of Jeannie, for the cinema.

Television, too, is increasingly keen to recycle old series, spurred on by the BBC's award-winning resurrection of Doctor Who. Thanks to writer and producer Russell T Davies' guidance, the Time Lord has been brought back to life and has re-invigorated Saturday evening TV schedules.

He remained essentially the same but bigger budgets and an eye on the tastes of modern audiences have made the series compulsive viewing. So much so that the BBC has been prompted to dig up another old favourite, Robin Hood.

The adventures of the Sherwood Forest outlaw, starring Richard Greene as the folk hero robbing the rich to give to the poor, was one of British TV's earliest series back in the 1950s. Thirty years later Michael Praed, and then Jason Connery, played a more rocking Robin in the 1980s version.

Now the BBC, seeking a series to match Doctor Who in the ratings, is giving Robin Hood a makeover with appeal for all the family. "Fun, modern and intelligent" is how they describe the 21st century vision of him.

Newcomer Jonas Armstrong reckons his Robin is "both modern and with a bit of street - I've even got a hoodie". But filming is taking place a long way from Nottingham and Sherwood Forest - in Prague.

Trickier still is remaking The Prisoner, the 1960s Patrick McGoohan series that's earned cult classic status. Although Granada is making the show, it's been ordered by Sky One in its biggest drama commission yet.

There have been hints that the new Prisoner will be radically different to the old one with, it's rumoured, "a more exotic location" replacing the village of Portmeirion in Wales where the original was filmed.

Sky might even be tempted to put The Prisoner up against Doctor Who in the Saturday evening schedules. That's an interesting prospect if only because Christopher Ecclestone, who played the resurrected Time Lord for the first season, is being lined up as Number Six in The Prisoner remake.

* Poseidon (12A) is now showing in cinemas. The Omen (15) opens on Tuesday. Robin Hood will be shown on BBC1 this autumn, The Prisoner on Sky One next year.