One of a handful of episodes not written by
Carla Lane, but given to veteran screenwriters Jack Seddon and David Pursall.
You can tell very quickly... The emphasis is all on setting up the situation,
with a lack of accompanying character interest in reflecting the lives of young
women. The plotting is confident, while at the same time feeling a bit wrong.
So that when the episode begins with Beryl and Sandra discovering that someone
has painted footprints all over their bedroom the previous night, this acts as
a catalyst for the pair trying to get a decorator in cheaply, when I would have
thought that the question of who painted them and why would have been of
greater dramatic interest.
'Which actors play their love interest this week?' is always a diverting question when I watch these, and this episode casts to type with Paul Angelis as the rough and ready decorator and Timothy Carlton as the supercilious Giles. Sandra's fanciful plan of impressing Giles by riding with him at a hunt meeting pushes the limits of credibility, but it does set up some filmed sequences of the girls at a riding school in the final third of the episode.
As soon as we get out into the countryside on film the quality shoots up. However fiddly the narrative that got the story up to this point, watching two women riding in rural settings, getting lost and walking their horses into lakes has an elemental environmental interest in itself. It would be these scenes that you'd remember one the programme had finished, making you remember it with more pleasure than most of it perhaps deserved.
'Which actors play their love interest this week?' is always a diverting question when I watch these, and this episode casts to type with Paul Angelis as the rough and ready decorator and Timothy Carlton as the supercilious Giles. Sandra's fanciful plan of impressing Giles by riding with him at a hunt meeting pushes the limits of credibility, but it does set up some filmed sequences of the girls at a riding school in the final third of the episode.
As soon as we get out into the countryside on film the quality shoots up. However fiddly the narrative that got the story up to this point, watching two women riding in rural settings, getting lost and walking their horses into lakes has an elemental environmental interest in itself. It would be these scenes that you'd remember one the programme had finished, making you remember it with more pleasure than most of it perhaps deserved.
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