Peter Kulman has everything to live for, but he jumps off a tall building. His family hire Frank to find out why he did it. Frank does some psychological and criminal detective work. Peter's mother is a psychologist with a careful manner, perhaps the detached stance she adopts with patients. How would this affect her son? She dresses frumpily and looks older than her age, with Mary Whitehouse glasses and a frightful bouffant. She becomes warmer and more vulnerable as the investigation goes on. Peter's brother and uncle run the family building business - his brother is played by a young, handsome David Suchet. They don't want the death looked into, but they have their reasons.
Frank finds a landlady who is packing up Peter's things - she tells him that Peter's passion was nature and bird-watching, and directs him to Peter's girlfriend. The girl is sensitively played, and is clearly meant by the writers to be a hippy (a bit out of date, but they didn't go away), an alternative Bohemian, an arty type of the kind that has always existed. She and Peter had high ideals, and despised the past, the present and the future.
The writers clearly don't know much about this type of person, and have created her from various sources. She has painted her living room black and has black net curtains. Not in the early 70s! She has got rid of chairs (we did in the late 60s but quickly brought them back as sitting on the ground is so uncomfortable). She has long hair, but it's /backcombed/. No post-hippy in the 70s would have backcombed her hair! And she's wearing an off-the-peg "hippy" dress - turquoise and flowery, with ruffled sleeves. A girl like this would make her own clothes, or wear army surplus or fancy dress to Stick It to the Man.
Despite all this, it's a good episode, and the girlfriend and family have a couple more revelations for Frank. (And at least I could work out what was going on!)
Frank finds a landlady who is packing up Peter's things - she tells him that Peter's passion was nature and bird-watching, and directs him to Peter's girlfriend. The girl is sensitively played, and is clearly meant by the writers to be a hippy (a bit out of date, but they didn't go away), an alternative Bohemian, an arty type of the kind that has always existed. She and Peter had high ideals, and despised the past, the present and the future.
The writers clearly don't know much about this type of person, and have created her from various sources. She has painted her living room black and has black net curtains. Not in the early 70s! She has got rid of chairs (we did in the late 60s but quickly brought them back as sitting on the ground is so uncomfortable). She has long hair, but it's /backcombed/. No post-hippy in the 70s would have backcombed her hair! And she's wearing an off-the-peg "hippy" dress - turquoise and flowery, with ruffled sleeves. A girl like this would make her own clothes, or wear army surplus or fancy dress to Stick It to the Man.
Despite all this, it's a good episode, and the girlfriend and family have a couple more revelations for Frank. (And at least I could work out what was going on!)
