Since its revival in 2020, All Creatures Great and Small has drawn big audiences internationally and become Channel 5’s biggest hit, even if there have been occasional grumbles about how it takes liberties with James Herriot’s original books.
The show works because it gets the simple things right. It’s built on sound principles of solid plots and well-drawn characters, with the result that the ensemble at the core of All Creatures… ticks along like a piece of old-fashioned but lovingly maintained machinery.
The role of grumpy but kind-hearted paterfamilias Siegfried Farnon now suits Samuel West as comfortably as a much-lived-in tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, while his younger brother Tristan (Callum Woodhouse) used to be a hare-brained twit, but has acquired at least a tenuous connection with common sense. Nicholas Ralph’s James Herriot played a fairly low-key role in this seasonal special, him and wife Helen (Rachel Shenton) being preoccupied by the first birthday of their baby boy Jimmy, while the spotlight swung on to stalwart housekeeper Audrey Hall (Anna Madeley, pictured below).
In the wider world beyond Skeldale House, World War Two has been expanding across the globe. Mrs Hall was dumbstruck by the news that HMS Repulse had been sunk by Japanese aircraft in the Far East, one of the crew members being her son Edward. Stoical on the outside, she was a ball of chaos and terror on the inside, desperately scouring the newspaper casualty lists every day for any news of her son. Meanwhile, she had still managed to track down a goose for Christmas lunch.
As ever, the big-sky scenery of the Yorkshire Dales, and the reassuringly imperturbable mood of the fictional village of Darrowby, lend healing balm to the travails of a world potentially sliding towards armageddon. Although Tristan has been recruited to the Army as some kind of veterinary consultant, he has so far avoided being drafted overseas, instead being faced with such challenges as finding a source of carrier pigeons for military use.
This prompted a little lecture from know-all brother Siegfried about the history of carrier pigeons, including Cher Ami, a heroic bird who saved many American lives in World War One. It also set us off on a subplot involving curmudgeonly local pigeon breeder Enoch Sykes (Duncan Preston, once a regular in Victoria Wood’s programmes), who, it transpired, had been inadvertently killing his birds with lead poisoning thanks to some dodgy and crumbling paint-work.
It was the animal world, too, which helped Mrs Hall to cope with her crippling anxiety about her son. A local boy had brought a young stray fox to the vets (though it was rather cute and looked suspiciously like a groomed and pampered pet), and Mrs H virtually adopted it as a kind of emotional surrogate.
All Creatures… is vaguely reminiscent of Harry Enfield’s bullish Yorkshireman (“I say what I like and I like what I bloody well say”), kind of a square deal where you get exactly what was promised, no more and no less. And you can’t argue with that.
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