Most of the THRILLER episodes have a certain something that overcomes the technical limitations of the era in which they were made : the mixing of 16mm exterior locations and VT studio interiors, the lack of blood and gore , the rather unnatural lack of 'language' in the dialogue, all of which are rather charming and evoke the TV you remembered from the early 70s.
However this particular episode has a fundamental flaw which makes the usual suspension of disbelief impossible. It's the ridiculous cliché of "village life". This seems to have been written by someone who hadn't ventured as far as the suburbs let alone a remote English village. The result is a Neverland of 'rural characters' which would have seemed out of date in the earliest Agatha Christie novel from the 1920s, let alone a TV drama written in the early 1970s. It's just nonsense. Here's "the gamekeeper"...with a shotgun under his arm, "the blacksmith" with his leather apron.... "The school mistress" a starchy spinster in a tweed hat... and even inevitable "village idiot"... and here they all are queued up one behind the other in the village shop (which by some quirk of set design looks like a trading post from a spaghetti western rather than a village shop). None of them seems to have any work to do, no one drives a car, in fact the whole village seems to have only one visible car, the newly arrived doctor's Morgan.
Irrespective of the story-line this backdrop is so fake it's laughable. So it's a dud episode I'm afraid. But never mind, if you are watching the box set keep going as the following episodes are so much better!
However this particular episode has a fundamental flaw which makes the usual suspension of disbelief impossible. It's the ridiculous cliché of "village life". This seems to have been written by someone who hadn't ventured as far as the suburbs let alone a remote English village. The result is a Neverland of 'rural characters' which would have seemed out of date in the earliest Agatha Christie novel from the 1920s, let alone a TV drama written in the early 1970s. It's just nonsense. Here's "the gamekeeper"...with a shotgun under his arm, "the blacksmith" with his leather apron.... "The school mistress" a starchy spinster in a tweed hat... and even inevitable "village idiot"... and here they all are queued up one behind the other in the village shop (which by some quirk of set design looks like a trading post from a spaghetti western rather than a village shop). None of them seems to have any work to do, no one drives a car, in fact the whole village seems to have only one visible car, the newly arrived doctor's Morgan.
Irrespective of the story-line this backdrop is so fake it's laughable. So it's a dud episode I'm afraid. But never mind, if you are watching the box set keep going as the following episodes are so much better!