THE MOON STALLION

THE STORY BEHIND THE SF AND FANTASY OF YESTERYEAR 1978

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 . Sutton fondly recalls making the serial. “It was a real joy,” she. “I love a good period drama, we had lovely costumes and horses and the outdoors… it was everything I love, really.”