The man who made All Creatures Great and Small a huge hit: ‘We should have confidence in British TV’

All Creatures Great and Small - Playground Television
All Creatures Great and Small - Playground Television
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When you remake a show like All Creatures Great and Small, you have to get the casting completely right. No one knows this better than Nicholas Ralph, the newly graduated young actor who plays Jim in the Channel 5 remake of the series - a part played famously by Christopher Timothy in the much-loved BBC version of James Herriot’s books. Yet never mind that – Ralph points to even more important co-stars. Derek, for instance, who plays Tricki Woo, Mrs Pumphrey’s Pekingese.

“He’s brilliant – he just gets better every season," raves the young actor, about whom the same could be said – his Jim is about to return for a second series. Still, he'd rather dwell on the sight of Derek emerging from his trailer, ready to perform. “He was all windswept with his hair everywhere. We could have done a shampoo ad. He looked glorious!”

If you know All Creatures, you’ll know Tricki Woo is just a tiny taster of the range of animal life on show. The cast ranges from budgies to two-tonne bulls, passing by an expensive prosthetic ewe, all lovingly tended to by vets roaming the Dales in the 1930s. Other cast members include Samuel West’s eccentric Siegfried Farnon (respectfully wrestling the role from the late Robert Hardy), Anna Madeley as his housekeeper Mrs Hall and Rachel Shenton as Jim’s plucky inamorata, Helen.

The reboot was a sweet and diffident smash last year not only in the UK but in the US, too, earning rave reviews in publications such as The New York Times and Rolling Stone, which you’d imagine aren’t read much in the show's fictional location, Darrowby in North Riding (“played”, this time, by Grassington).

Even the old cast love it: West, chatting on Zoom like his co-stars, reveals that Timothy, now 80, wrote him a note after the Christmas special aired last year, saying how much he’d enjoyed it. “When a series is so identified in people’s minds with him – to be told that your version of it is something that made him smile was just enormously lovely,” he said.

Nicholas Ralph plays the all-new James Herriot - Playground Television
Nicholas Ralph plays the all-new James Herriot - Playground Television

It also came as a welcome balm. The remake was conceived by executive producer Sir Colin Callender (the head honcho who has powered everything from Pan’s Labyrinth to Wolf Hall) well before Covid, as a bid to heal the intense divisions caused in both England and America by Brexit and Trump – divisions which, of course, tended to run between those in cities and those in the country. Instead, Herriot’s stories extol the joys of community.

“There are no villains in All Creatures Great and Small,” says Callender. “There are no bad guys. It’s about people trying to get through the day with dignity.” And it got an extra boost by appearing on our screens when most of us were locked down, isolated, and extra-appreciative of nature. “We just felt everything a bit more, maybe,” suggests Shenton.

“The show turned out to be not just popular, but of use,” adds West, before pointing out that it makes a welcome change from TV’s grisly standard fare. “Since I became a father,” says the actor, “I’ve noticed that quite a lot of television is about the murder of children.”

Patricia Hodge as Mrs Pumphrey with Tricky Woo - Playground Entertainment
Patricia Hodge as Mrs Pumphrey with Tricky Woo - Playground Entertainment

This new All Creatures is a different beast to the old. It has higher production values (everyone salutes the drones which can now sweep all over the epic countryside, filming it from above) and 21st-century principles: female characters such as Helen or Mrs Hall get proper airtime. Have the story and the characters been “modernised”, then? “I don’t know if Helen has been tweaked or modernised,” says Shenton. “It’s just the sense that we’ve been able to SEE her, and see what she’s like.”

For West, “that sense of making it ‘modern’ – it weirdly goes in both directions. We want the women to be strong, to be independent – but we don’t want the farming methods to be modern.” He points out that in the very first episode of series one, Siegfried tells Jim that it’s not all about high milk yields – “progress” is never accepted blindly.

Meanwhile, the casting is ethnically diverse. “It would be very strange if it wasn’t,” explains West, “I wouldn’t want to do it. And you know, you look at the Glasgow School of Veterinary Science graduation photo in 1933 and there are three Sikhs in it. They’ll have practised somewhere in Britain – so they may as well be in this!”

Rachel Shenton stars as Helen Alderson in the Yorkshire-set series - Playground Television
Rachel Shenton stars as Helen Alderson in the Yorkshire-set series - Playground Television

Glasgow is a valid reference because this is, of course, where Herriot – the pen name of Alf Wight – graduated from himself in 1939, heading promptly afterwards for the Dales to have experiences which he would loosely fictionalise. “It was a bit like life imitating art," says Ralph, "because I graduated from drama school in Glasgow, and then my first TV job was this – so I was like him, on the bus into the Dales….”

He admits that it’s a dream first job. If series two sees him and Helen get closer, it also has more prosaic pleasures. “I spend a lot of the time at the back end of big animals again,” he says. This season promises novelties: lambs are the big one, since we’re in spring now. After Jester the two-tonne bull was taken to the knacker’s yard, in one of the heartbreaks of season one, we also get a new bull, Monty, positively svelte at a tonne and a half. Ralph, however, says horses are the most intimidating to deal with. But not for West.

“I got trodden on by a cow – AGAIN,” he sighs. “Cows are funny creatures.” He made a movement which confused the heifer, and paid the price. “I was wearing wellies instead of steel toe cap boots... My foot went completely black. And that’s twice in two series!”

A keen birdwatcher who enjoyed observing the lapwings and curlies signal in spring, West’s only real disappointment is that there were no rats. “They promised me a rat, because I’m very keen on rats. But there was some hold-up on that story… they may bring it in in series three, apparently.

One bittersweet note is the fact that series one’s Mrs Pumphrey, Diana Rigg, died last year, meaning that she has had to be replaced - by the ever-excellent Patricia Hodge. “It’s an extraordinary piece of casting, let alone re-casting,” says West. “The baton has gone very well.” That said, he admits, they have got certain things wrong. “Somebody wrote to me about the first series, saying: ‘Why aren’t you using a tea strainer?’” He is repentant. “There are definitely tea strainers in series two.”

It's spring in Darrowby as series 2 of the rural drama begins - Playground Television
It's spring in Darrowby as series 2 of the rural drama begins - Playground Television

The BBC infamously turned down this version, apparently because it felt that it wouldn’t speak to a younger audience. They got that wrong to some extent, says Callender. “I have found that the people who present themselves as ultra-cool and sophisticated and above-it-all, they’ve got completely caught up in this.” However, he does graciously come to Auntie’s defence, pointing out that to remake such a BBC jewel was a risk for it. And he immediately bats away my suggestion that the American audience is more of a priority for the show than us Brits. “If you’re trying to second-guess what an American audience wants, that’s when you stumble,” he insists.

But if our telly is still a “cultural treasure that still acts as a benchmark for everyone else,” he sees it as under threat. Something like Netflix, he says, “has caused confusion as to what we should be making in England”.

“I think the advent of streamers with large chequebooks, and all the noise around them, has made people think twice about what we should be doing,” he explains. “And I think there’s a danger that we lose sight of who we are, and what we do best. It’s a very interesting but important moment in British television, right now. It’s important that we have confidence about who we are, and we don’t second-guess ourselves.” One to ponder – or maybe the reverse, to blissfully forget – as spring starts up on All Creatures, and we welcome in the lambs.

All Creatures Great and Small returns to Channel 5 at 9pm on Thursday 16 September