All Creatures Great And Small - Part 1

Sitting down and watching an episode from All Creatures Great And Small made and broadcast in the late 1970s is a fascinating experience in the modern 2020 world of barraging and arguing over every single aspect of life. We are in a lockdown situation because of bad agricultural practices on the other side of the 

world but few people are presenting it that way. We also live in a world where you can either be upset by something—for some reason—or by upsetting people. You can decide, for example, that you are offended by the idea of a song, or that a song is somehow a symbol of a historical stain on the national history. Or you can suddenly present that song as a symbol of something that you believe in very deeply. All arguments can and most probably have a validity, but nobody is sitting down together and compromising.

Also, people don’t sit down and watch television at the same time these days—back in that era there were three channels and if you didn’t watch something when itwas broadcast you either missed it or waited for a repeat. Remember when people moaned that the BBC did repeats? All Creatures Great And Small was a tremendous series: setin Yorkshire and based on the memoirs of James Herriot, it had dashing Christopher Timothy as the urbane young man dropped into a subtly class-ridden Yorkshire rural society. The actor was clearly a game chap as the series is famed for the realism of its medical procedures. In the very first episode, Christopher Timothy’s bare arm is indeed seen withdrawing from the far end of a cow… There’s also a weird plot involving a girl who says nothing as she presents a tortoise taken from a paper bag, a tortoise that appears to have nothing wrong with him (or her). Then there’s the bull that likes to get acquainted with new vets by ‘shaking hands’. Herriot gets a kicking to the amusement of the assembled agriculture workers. It is about class and agriculture, and the cost of treatments—and that line between giving the right treatment because it is the right treatment, and having a reason to charge the poor farmer for another visit.

The way the vet is reliant on the farmer and vice versa is played to an audience who probably understood that already. The dramatic beats of this episode are so gentle but the meaning is still there. Even when it was originally broadcast, ACG&S was nostalgic but—having gone through Downton Abbey, for example—watching it now is doubly tinged with that smiling joy about how simple things were. There’s a theatricality to the episode that doesn’t really happen in modern telly, but it’s properly done with presumably authentic art direction and no shaky scenery. I haven’t seen the film version of All Creatures… but films based on BBC series never fared too well, and although the modern Dad’s Army was a lot of fun, they added some drama to the Downton Abbey movie. Older film adaptations from TV series probably fell down through not adding gunplay.

The show, in my mind, was about subtlety and about the portrayal of Britain without showiness of any kind. An inoffensive drama which points at the basic inoffensiveness of how we were and how we are. And then, right at the end of the first episode, James Herriot is called to a horse which is supposedly suffering from colic. The horse is a race-horse owned by an absent character, the aristocrat who has rightly left his stableman in charge. Herriot identifies the horse’s predicament and, because he’s not going to pull through, has the poor animal immediately put down. You think of how Downton Abbey would have handled this, and you wonder if it would cause any social media fuss or formal complaints…

And maybe you don’t need to add anything if you have Siegfried Farnon as played by Robert Hardy. In Episode 1 there isn’t much for him to do. His presence is heavily trailed by the stentorian Yorkshire housekeeper, and when he comes in he is low-level fantastic: it’s all in the actor rather than the part at the moment. We know that Siegfried is like a balloon being let go and flying around the room at times. And, according to The Cult of All Creatures Great And Small there were backstage issues later on as the series developed. But what I love about my memory of this series is that it’s so pure and when you’re young you don’t know about actors and egos, and bringing in younger male characters to encourage viewers. All Creatures Great And Small fits with How We Used To Live in the TV history of the 80s schoolkid generation. Parts of it stick in the memory but the joy of watching it is almost like watching something new. And when I saw The Cult Of… a few weeks ago I didn’t know that there was a reboot coming to Channel 5.