By the Light of the Silvery Moon
Space Time Visualiser: 28th June 1980
The Space Time Visualiser travels back 31 years to the repeat screening of The Moon Stallion.
There are times when you begin to wonder if your memory is playing tricks on you, especially when no-one else you know remembers a particular show from your childhood. It’s even odder when you finally track the show down and find that it all ties back to two of your greatest televisual loves. Not that my memory isn’t playing tricks on me these days; in fact, most of the time I think its dribbled out of my ears, so I was highly relieved when I finally did manage to get hold of a copy of The Moon Stallion on DVD. Of course, thinking Helen Cresswell wrote it instead of Brian Hayles probably didn’t help my search back in the dark days before the tinterweb gave us the ability to reunite ourselves with television’s back catalogue, no matter how obscure. But it does exist, and it’s actually aged far better than I thought it possibly could.
The series first aired on the BBC in Britain on November 15th, 1978 and then commenced a three-part repeat version on 28th June 1980. Having done my homework, I now know that Brian Hayles created the Celestial Toymaker, the Ice Warriors and all that Peladon malarky for Doctor Who, but at the time I was blissfully unaware of all that, being very much in the horses and fantasy stage of my childhood development. It featured a young Sarah Sutton (yes, Nyssa) as blind heroine Diana Purwell, as well as John Abineri as the archetypal bad guy (I knew I recognised him from somewhere when he showed up as Herne the Hunter in Robin of Sherwood). I was also utterly convinced that Mr Claypole from Rentaghost was in it, but it turns out that it was actually David Haig (Pangol in The Leisure Hive). I never did like Mr Claypole, so that was a considerable relief. I never much liked Rentaghost either, come to that.
Set in the early years of the 20th century, the story is a mish-mash of Celtic, Greek and English legend, all tied to the area around the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire, and in particular to the chalk horse at Uffington. The bitter and twisted local squire is determined to capture the mystical Moon Stallion, messenger of Diana the moon goddess, who he blames for his wife’s death. He is aided by a horse shaman (Haig), who is pretty obviously only helping out in order to nab the beast for himself. Supported by a score from Howard Blake, best known for Flash Gordon and The Snowman (now there’s a combination and a half), there follows much cantering about the English countryside in search of ancient power. Some of it is actually fairly unpleasant (there’s quite a high body count for a children’s TV show) but in the end, good triumphs over evil. Even if good, in the form of the Green King, is wearing a truly ridiculous horned helmet and looks like the illegitimate offspring of Alan Moore and Rick Wakeman. Oh, and King Arthur pops in for a couple of cameos, I suspect purely because you really can’t have this sort of thing going on without mentioning him in some form or other (it must be in his mythological contract).
I hate to say it, but this is a very girly story and for all the bad boy magician stuff in it, there’s really not that much for little boys (the Prof slept through quite a bit of it, although he insists that was because he wasn’t feeling very well). Okay, you’ve got Sarah Sutton wandering around in her nightie most of the time, but it is a very discreet fabric tent that leaves no room for titillation (but plenty for a circus side-show). The Beeb have always been good at doing period dramas and the costumes are lovely, so that’s a tick in the fashion box. There’re horses and a magical girl character who is at once strong yet vulnerable (another couple of ticks on the small female person’s ideal story check-list). Throw in a wicked magician and an evil lord and you’ve got a fairly standard Disney princess plot, but it works because it’s all played perfectly straight and with great gusto by its cast. If this wasn’t a period piece, though, I have no doubt at all that it would look absolutely awful to a modern audience; the one piece where they do use modern imagery to underline a rather trite “save the world” message (worthy of “He Man and the Masters of the Universe”, the undisputed champion of this sort of guff) is the only truly cringe-worthy moment in the whole thing.
I was so taken with the story at the time that I managed to convince my poor, long suffering Dad to take us to the area on holiday not long after (see, pester power is nothing new). As with the much later Robin of Sherwood, I was terribly disappointed to see that TV had lied to me in terms of the local geography and the general lack of magical wild horses (bear in mind that I was only eight at the time). You could get in to Wayland’s Smithy, but nobody had brought a torch, it was a bit muddy and I was scared of the dark, so unlike my heroine Diana, I never made it inside.
I’ve often wondered about going back, torch in hand, to see if the Green King’s still in there, patiently waiting for the end of the world. If he is, I hope he’s got a better hat.
