Most of the time when a DVD/Blu-ray reissue of something from years back comes our way, it’ll be some old, most likely half-remembered or oftentimes previously unseen horror/cult movie of the 70s or 80s. It’s comparatively rare that we get to revisit a similarly half-remembered TV series – and even less common for said series to be a children’s drama. But as soon as I was offered a review copy of 1988 Children’s BBC series Moondial, there was no way I could decline. I was still in primary school when the show originally aired, back in those primitive times when the only child-specific content on British television was on BBC1 or ITV between about 3.30 and 5.35 (assuming you didn’t opt for Home & Away on ITV at 5.10) – so, even though I didn’t naturally gravitate toward spooky stuff at the time, Moondial inevitably wound up on my radar.
I’ve rabbited on at length before about my prepubescent self’s aversion to all things horror, and how The Monster Squad proved a revelation – yet in a way, I think it’s fair to say Moondial helped lay the groundwork for that personal breakthrough. The key difference, though, is that while I’ve watched The Monster Squad God only knows how many times in the intervening 25 + years, I’d never seen Moondial again after it first aired until now. I recalled owning Helen Cresswell’s novel which was the basis of the series, with a picture of the cast on the cover; I recalled visiting Belton House, where the series was shot, and laying hands on the iconic moondial itself; I recalled random images, like the dial spinning in the moonlight, and a crowd of masked children chanting “devil’s child” whilst circling a terrified young girl with a facial birth mark. Curious how such images from childhood viewing stay with you, like snippets of long-forgotten dreams that you look back on with no idea what the hell they were all about, but with no doubt that they left a lasting impression. So it was with Moondial – and so it was I couldn’t pass up the chance to see it again.
All that being said, I didn’t sit down to watch the six 25 minute episodes expecting to relive some televisual masterwork – and a good thing too, for Moondial certainly isn’t any such thing. It’s a Children’s BBC production of the 1980s, and that means low production values, dated video photography, lo-fi FX, soundtrack from a Casio keyboard on orchestral setting, with somewhat stagey child actors and pantomime-esque adults. Yet even so, this was an era when kid’s TV didn’t seem averse to taking on genuinely unusual, even potentially risky material and gearing it toward a young audience. I’m not nearly familiar enough with contemporary children’s drama to know whether or not that’s still the case now (Power Rangers aside, my own children don’t want to watch anything but cartoons -and the way modern digital TV works, they don’t have to), but watching Moondial today I’m struck by how it doesn’t shy away from showing harsh realities: a central protagonist potentially facing orphanhood, supporting characters living through child labour, sickness, persecution, and the cruelty of both other children and adults. None of this gets sugar coated, and – crucially, considering this is a kids’ show – never does it feel dumbed down. Indeed, considering that watching it as an adult I still find myself struggling to keep up with some of the metaphysical aspects, it’s fair to say Moondial most definitely doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of its target audience.
The story in a nutshell centres on Minty (Siri Neal), an unusually intuitive young girl whose father died recently, and who seems to have become something of a social outcast since. Her mother takes her to spend the summer with her Aunt Mary (Valerie Lush) who lives by the country manor Belton House, and as soon as Minty sets foot in the gardens there she gets the feeling that something strange is going to happen… and then, before she’s even done unpacking, she gets word that her mother is hospitalised and comatose from a car crash on the way home. Naturally this leaves our young heroine in an even less stable frame of mind (another moment that stayed with me from first viewing is Aunt Mary slapping a hysterical Minty in the face to bring her back down to earth) – and given that it’s later that same day she has her first supernatural experience, it does raise some Pan’s Labyrinth-like questions as to whether any of it is necessarily real, or simply the escapist fantasies of a traumatised child unable to process the real horrors around her.
However, the elderly groundskeeper World (Arthur Hewlett), is also aware that there are spirits that cannot rest at Belton House, and sensing that Minty has a bit of the old sixth sense about her, he believes she is the one to help those spirits find peace at last. So it is that Minty comes to somehow move through time via the mysterious Moondial, and cross paths with two children from different time periods: Tom (Tony Sands), a cockney kitchen boy with consumption, and Sarah (Helena Avellano), the aforementioned ‘devil’s child’ tormented mercilessly by both the other children and her sadistic handmaiden – who turns out to have been reborn in Sarah’s time as an alleged psychic ghosthunter (Jacqueline Pearce, perhaps best known as Servalan from Blake’s Seven).
Yes, in many respects Moondial is pretty dated now, but it’s certainly still effective, and while there’s never anything particularly scandalous on screen it is quite an eye-opener to see a mob of masked hooligans looking like the junior Klu Klux Klan breaking into their ‘devil’s child’ chant, not to mention the extraordinarily sinister Halloween masks that same mob don in the final episode (has someone made a few purchases from Silver Shamrock…?) Minty, in common with a lot of children’s drama leads, is sometimes a bit too much of a know-it-all goody-two-shoes to really root for, plus Tom’s Artful Dodger routine does get a bit tedious, and oftentimes the whole thing feels like it makes no sense whatsoever – but then, a good supernatural yarn shouldn’t need to adhere to conventional real world logic. Moondial has lingered in my memory from childhood, and I can see it doing likewise for viewers today, young and old alike.
Moondial is out on Region 2 DVD on 4th May, from Second Sight.