The Moon Stallion
WRITER BRIAN HAYLES WILL be forever celebrated by Doctor Who fans for creating those scaly Martians the Ice Warriors. But just as worthy of consideration by fantasy fans is his final completed project The Moon Stallion. It was a spooky six-part children’s serial mixing witchcraft with bucolic backdrops, in which an Edwardian archaeologist’s blind daughter discovers uncanny links with her moon goddess namesake Diana, King Arthur and the 3,000-year-old Uffington White Horse hill carving in Oxfordshire.
Diana Purwell, brother Paul and widower father Professor Adrian Purwell had originally appeared in Hayles’s stage plays for children, The Hour Of The Werewolf and The Curse Of The Labyrinth, which ran at the Unicorn Theatre in 1975 and 1976 and starred Gillian Bailey as Diana. For the Purwells’s TV debut, the timeframe shifted from 1890 to the early 20th century.
Sarah Sutton would soon become well known to fantasy fans as Nyssa, companion to both Fourth and Fifth Doctors, but in 1978 veteran director Dorothea Brooking cast her as the lead in The Moon Stallion. Sutton fondly recalls making the serial. “It was a real joy,” she tells SFX. “I love a good period drama, we had lovely costumes and horses and the outdoors… it was everything I love, really.”
Since heroine Diana was blind – albeit blessed with supernatural second sight –
AN ENCHANTING BLEND OF EQUINE ADVENTURE, COSTUME DRAMA, ANCIENT MAGIC, PAGANISM, ARTHURIAN LEGEND AND THE OCCULT – STARRING A FUTURE DOCTOR WHO COMPANION – MADE FOR A NOTABLE ENTRY IN THE JUNIOR SECTION OF BRITISH TELEVISION’S FOLK HORROR CANON
Sutton prepared diligently. “My mum got in touch with our local Basingstoke blind society and they introduced me to a lady, May Harrigan, who had been blind since birth,” she recalls. “I spent a bit of time with her, just talking to her and watching her face and the way her eyes moved or didn’t move, according to what was being said or what she heard surrounding her.”
Sutton remembers difficulties putting her research into practice: “I found that early in the filming, I got a lot of eye-ache because we move our eyes all the time without realising it. It’s quite difficult to stop yourself reacting to a noise with your eyes. Eventually, I think my muscles retrained.”
In The Moon Stallion the Purwells visit Oxfordshire’s Vale of the White Horse, where Diana senses the presence of a fine white stallion. Old wives’ tales say the beast magically appears every nine years and that on its last manifestation, the wife of local nobleman Sir George Mortenhurze died – forging his obsession with capturing the horse for his stable. Diana discovers she is the chosen “moon child”, messenger to her namesake Diana – goddess of the moon, horses, hunting and nature – and must protect the stallion from Mortenhurze (trusty character actor John Abineri) and his occultist stablehand Todman (talented newcomer David Haig), as she slowly learns of the area’s ancient connections to the legendary King Arthur.
Having just finished school, Sarah Sutton began an 11-week location shoot around the Vale in summer 1978. “Yes, I’d just done my O Levels,” recalls Sutton. “It was an interesting time for me because having quite recently turned 16, I didn’t need a chaperone.
“It was the first time I was let loose on my own, really, so it was a real transition time for me – it was very exciting. I absolutely loved it. We stayed away from home, with all the location work done in and around the same area, so we had a base of hotels in the towns surrounding the White Horse.”
HORSING AROUND
Sutton’s fellow cast included James Greene as Professor Purwell and Caroline Goodall as Mortenhurze’s teenage daughter.
“We had a really lovely cast… I just remember it as being a very happy summer for me,” says Sutton. “We all got on really well. Caroline I haven’t seen since, actually – I’d love to see her again. We had a lot of fun, because we had hotels and, after a while, a group of us rented a cottage together. The make-up artists, the whole crew, were all great. In the evenings after we’d finished filming, we’d sit chatting on the grass outside – I remember it being a glorious summer.”
Sutton singles out her villainous rival for praise. “It was David Haig’s first television – that’s someone I’d love to work with again. He was great.” SFX mentions that she just missed him as the villain in 1980 Doctor Who adventure “The Leisure Hive”, five stories before she joined as Nyssa.
“Did I? That’s really unfortunate! I’m still waiting for him to be asked to do a Big Finish Doctor Who, so maybe I’ll ask about that.”
Actors always claim to be able to ride horses in order to get plum roles. Was this the case for Sarah? “Yes, every actor’s CV has got horseriding on it and I just don’t believe that!” she laughs. “I had ridden a bit as a child but it conflicted with my ballet so I stopped quite early on.”
The stallion was called Tabu, trained by handler Richard Viner, who also had a cameo as the Dark Rider. “I absolutely love horses, but
I’m quite nervous of them and I wouldn’t claim to say I was a horse rider. The problem I had was riding the Moon Stallion without saddle or bridles. There is a shot of me galloping over the hills on Tabu and I have to admit that was not me!” exclaims Sutton. “That’s my double, because there were no fences, no fields as such and Tabu was quite a strong horse. If he decided to take off, that would be it, he would be gone.”
There was some slight trickery involved, as Sutton explains: “We used a piece of catgut or nylon wire around his nose, the poor thing. It can’t have been very comfortable for him. So I had that to hold onto, but other than that it was gripping with your knees, basically!”
Co-production money from German broadcaster Südfunk Stuttgart saw the serial lavishly shot entirely on film and almost completely on location.
“It’s a completely different quality on film,” Sutton believes. “The difference, in that era, between location and studio was more marked than it is today. I think the inside of the cave at Wayland’s Smithy was the only bit done in the studio, but on film – probably at Ealing rather than BBC TV Centre – which is why you don’t see that big gear shift.”
Brian Hayles had heavily researched the history of the Vale of the White Horse, Arthurian legend and Celtic religions including Paganism and Druidism, liberally sprinkling elements of each throughout. Part four goes beyond mere supernatural spookiness into the planet’s very destiny, as Hayles adds a dash of
It was the first time I was let loose on my own, really, so it was a real transition time for me
sci-fi to the mix. Diana rides the moon stallion on the night of Beltane (1 May) to ancient burial mound Wayland’s Smithy, and meets the twig-helmeted Green King (Michael Kilgarriff, once and future Cyber Controller in Doctor Who), whose many names include Wayland and Merlin.
He warns Diana of technological progress and possible nuclear destruction in man’s future. Chemist James Lovelock had developed his Gaia Theory in the late 1960s, suggesting that the Earth and its inhabitants are part of a balanced ecosystem. As in The Changes (see SFX 322), mystical forces somewhere in the planet feel that man is upsetting that balance.
Besides Lovelock, Hayles also referenced Buddhist teachings on the cyclical nature of the wheel of life, where great civilisations rise and fall. So did Sutton understand the storyline?
“Er, no!” laughs the star. “I’ve read the story for audio recently and should have been able to work it out from that. I probably did understand it for about five minutes, and now I’ve forgotten it again. It is quite complicated!”
She feels, however, that this is a positive: “I’m sure it made children think, setting them a challenge. It does drop in a lot of information that is really interesting, and might make people go and research a little bit more. Rather than giving it to them on a plate, instead [it gives] them options, making the audience ask more questions. I think that’s a very clever thing to do.”
BLAKE’S HEAVENLY SCORE
The serial’s beautiful, galloping musical score was by Howard Blake OBE, previously composer for Tara King episodes of The Avengers and, later, famously on Christmas animation The Snowman and its seasonal standard “Walking In The Air”.
“I was commissioned by the formidable Dorothea Brooking who lived near me in West Hoathly, mid-Sussex,” Blake tells SFX. “It seemed somehow appropriate to be composing for children at the time of my daughter’s birth.
“The subject seemed to be a fanciful tale of ancient myth and magic, and it was only some time later that I wondered if its creators were rather more serious about the magic than presumed! I gave the score a supposedly Celtic or Druidic ring by using the ancient instruments of dulcimer and tabor.”
When the serial aired at Wednesday teatimes on BBC One, from 15 November to 20 December 1978, trade newspaper The Stage and Television Today praised Sarah Sutton’s “delicate playing” and said “the designs and costumes are exquisite and Dorothea Brooking has caught most accurately the period flavour… the locations are breathtaking.”
Given its intended audience and timeslot, The Moon Stallion possesses spooky and supernatural undertones, if not outright horror
– but should still be recognised as a key entry in the folk horror subgenre, with its basis in English folk tradition and Arthurian legend.
Sadly Brian Hayles didn’t see the broadcast; he died on 30 October 1978, aged just 47. But this posthumous work was certainly among his very best. “I absolutely loved filming The Moon Stallion,” says Sutton. “And we had a female director – a brilliant one in Dorothea Brooking – and a female producer, which was quite something at the time.”
Though it was briefly available as a download from the defunct BBC Store, there is no UK DVD or Blu-ray release of The Moon Stallion. “You can get it in German!” exclaims Sutton. “I’ve got it as Der Mondschimmel, but you can’t get it over here, can you? Let’s get it out there. That’d be brilliant!”