Season one of All Creatures Great and Small, a remake of a 1978 series of the same name, aired last year on the United Kingdom’s Channel 5 and is now available on PBS here in the United States. The British series, based on the memoir If Only They Could Talk by James Herriot, dramatizes the adventures of Herriot, played here by Nicholas Ralph, an aspiring veterinarian in 1930s Scotland. Herriot’s working-class parents want him to find a job on the docks like his father, but he dreams of becoming a veterinarian. “It’s good to dream,” his mother tells him one morning at the kitchen table. “It’s also good to wake up and see the world as it really is.” Deluded or not, Harriot persists and gets a call to interview for an assistant veterinary position in Darrowby, Yorkshire, a not insignificant distance from their home in Glasgow. “Just don’t be disappointed if there’s not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” his mother cautions him as he departs for his interview. “You’ve got a dream,” says his more encouraging father. “You’ve got to chase it.”
On the bus to Yorkshire, the hopeful Herriot tries to read a thick textbook on farm animals. “Waste of bloody time,” someone from the back of the bus shouts at him. “You won’t learn an ounce in there you can’t learn out there.” With only his book, briefcase, and adventuresome spirit in tow, he disembarks at a place that literally looks like the middle of nowhere: a flat expanse of grass disturbed only by a few stretches of narrow roads. Fortunately, a horse-drawn wagon just happens to be making its way up the road. “This is Darrowby, isn’t it?” he asks the portly coachman, seeking directions to the Yorkshire town in which his interview is to be held. “Darrowby?!” the coachman responds. “No, you want bus for Darrowby!” Apparently, it was not the best idea to have gotten off that bus after all. As he moves off to the side of the road and prepares to wait for the next bus — which, the coachman tells him, will not come until after nightfall — it starts raining. This is not a promising start for a veterinary career, or for any career, for that matter.
When he eventually gets to the location of his interview, the wife of the eccentric, occasionally overbearing veterinarian Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West) has to persuade her reluctant husband to interview him. The couple’s hospitable son, Tristan, offers Herriot tea, but the tactless Siegfried says there is no time to waste on social niceties. “I’m not interested in how he takes his Darjeeling; I’m interested in how he is with animals.”
After some initial setbacks with a horse, Herriot successfully treats the horse’s injured hoof, prompting Siegfried to hire him, but only for a trial period. Siegfried shows Herriot around the sparsely peopled farmlands of Darrowby, musing that “it’s the animals that are the easy part; it’s the people that cause all the bubble.” The misanthropic Siegfried seems intent on making his Sartrean sentiment into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even after Herriot’s promising start, he wants to dismiss the young Scotsman and feuds with his wife over the merits of keeping the young man on the job. “Give the boy a chance,” she keeps on enjoining her husband, as if reading the audience’s minds. After heroically saving a pregnant heifer during an overnight house call, Herriot finally wins a permanent position. Now, his veterinary (as well as social and automotive) adventures can really begin.
The lush, verdant scenery of rural northern England, where sheep outnumber people, and the 1930s setting, replete with Model A Fords, tube radios, bowler hats, old-fashioned pubs, and unspoiled farmlands, give All Creatures Great and Small a becalming sensibility, making for escapist viewing at a time when our globalized world and lightning-quick news cycles can be overwhelming. The animals themselves, from shorthorn cows and gelded horses to roosters, hens, donkeys, geese, dogs, cats, bulls, calves, and yet more horses, are photographed beautifully. Cliches that would otherwise be cringeworthy, such as “time to earn your wings” and “his bark is worse than his bite,” take on a slightly more arch tone in the context of a show in which the animals can at times upstage the humans.
Aside from the period setting and the endearing animals, what makes All Creatures Great and Small more than just a quaint, charming diversion is the delightful chemistry and contrast between the smooth, secure, self-assured Siegfried and the occasionally awkward, anxious, wide-eyed novice Herriot. The stout, brown-bearded Siegfried, who bears a passing resemblance to Vincent van Gogh, speaks and conducts himself like a moneyed aristocrat, while the skinny, clean-shaven Herriot stumbles, stutters, and initially bumbles his way around animals (and also intermittently around people). His eager, wholesome earnestness makes us root for him from the very first scene, and our sympathies for him only grow as we get a sense of how good and kind he is with horses, dogs, cats, and calves. The animals give the series its spirit, but the show’s heart lies with its humans.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
