Eccentric vet who inspired TV classic broke up parties with a shotgun!
Star of the new All Creatures Great And Small on how the character he’s playing could be a bit of a beast
WHEN it comes to breaking up a party, a barely stifled yawn and repeated glances at the clock are usually enough to get the hint across. Not so for the man who inspired All Creatures Great And Small’s Siegfried Farnon. He preferred a rather less subtle method – one involving a double-barreled shotgun.
The man charged with recreating that tricky character, originally played by the late Robert Hardy, in the new remake of the popular TV series, is Sam West – and he knows he has his work cut out.
“He once dismissed people at a dinner party that he was getting slightly bored of by picking up a double-barrelled shotgun and firing it into the wall of his house,” says Sam, whose performance is set to hit screens next month.
Siegfried is based on practice owner Donald Sinclair, the boss of vet Alf Wight, author of the famous books and better known by his pen name, James Herriot.
The original show was one of TV’s biggest hits, the Sunday evening, cup-of-cocoa drama about the adventures of a young Yorkshire vet with a cast of characters that became loved around the world.
Sam admits he has fond memories of the original series himself.
But his excitement at landing the role turned to trepidation as he researched the real Donald – and discovered a much more complex character than the quirky senior vet portrayed on screen.
A moody, short-tempered and lonely man who struggled to show emotion even to those closest to him, he tragically took his own life.
SAM sought inspiration by finding out about the reallife Donald from Alf’s son Jim, who also became a vet and worked with him.
In the series Siegfried comes across as bossy and irritable, but also goodhearted and kindly. But Sam says one of the first stories Jim told him was about the shotgun.
West, 53, adds: “I thought, ‘Yeah I would do that, if I had a house and a shotgun and I knew I wasn’t going to destroy the house’.
“Our on-set vet Andy also painted the same picture. He actually worked for Donald at the end of his life. I asked him to tell me about Donald’s eccentricities, and he said, ‘He wasn’t eccentric, he was mad!’”
Sam also discovered that Donald had committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturate in 1995, two weeks after the death of his wife of 53 years Audrey. Alf, who he looked on as a son, had died four months earlier and he had lost his brother Brian, the Tristam character in the stories, several years before.
Describing Donald’s complicated relationship with Alf, Sam said: “There was obviously great closeness there, and great antagonism.
“He never had children, he and his wife could never have children. There is a big gap between him and his younger brother, and then James comes along and to some extent they became the sons he never had.”
Sam is a fourth-generation actor in a family of thespians. His actor parents Timothy West and Prunella Scales, of Fawlty Towers fame, have been stalwarts of British TV for decades and have won even more fans with their Great Canal Journeys show. The couple travel the world’s waterways as Timothy and Prunella cope with her Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
Sam hopes his parents will tune in to All Creatures to see him. “They watch most things I do,” he says. “I mean, my mum won’t remember it, of course. Physically she is quite well, she is in very good spirits.
“You can tell that from the series, although they might smooth over some of the corners when they make it. But her mood, which is generally quite sunny, would be hard to fake. And they don’t have to.
“My father is a bit lonely some of the time.We try to see him as often as we can and he is very busy which is great. He has just finished the new series of Last Tango in Halifax.
“Infuriatingly I couldn’t see him as he was only down the road when we were in Skipton but we never managed to meet up.”
Sam got into acting after going to Oxford to study English literature, then got a place at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
At the last minute, he landed the role of a 17-year-old German aristocrat in the 1989 feature film Reunion, which was entered for that year’s Cannes Film Festival. That was quickly followed by the role of King Caspian in the BBC’s 1990 adapta-
‘Fans will all recall Christopher Timothy putting his hand up a cow’s bottom in the first series’
tion of The Chronicles of Narnia. In 1993 he was nominated for best supporting actor BAFTA for his part in the film adaptation of Howards End alongside Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.
He is now a familiar face on TV appearing in many long-running series including Midsomer Murders, Waking the Dead and Poirot.
The original series of All Creatures Great and Small shot the actors to stardom and made Christopher Timothy, who played James Herriot, the most famous vet on the planet.
The collected works of All Creatures Great and Small have sold 60 million copies internationally and have never been out of print. Now, 30 years since the series ended, there are still fan clubs of the show around the world.
And what Sam learned about the real-life Siegfried stayed with him as he filmed the six-part Channel 5 series. Sam says: “It was really useful to meet the family. I got a cold almost immediately after starting filming, and I remember Jim saying to me that whenever Donald got a cold he would always wear a red spotted bandana to try and look like a farmer.
“So I asked for a red spotted bandana and costume gave me one
– it was authentic. Then there was one scene where James has to scrape the infected hoof of a horse to get pus out. The on-set vet Andy pulled out a hoof knife and written on it in biro on the side was ‘D. Sinclair’ – it was the real Siegfried’s hoof knife he had inherited. So we used that on the very first scene.”
Sam also knows that the remake will thrust the picturesque Dales village of Grassington – which was made over to be the fictional village of Darrowby in the show – into the spotlight. “I know that when the series comes out people will come to visit that beautiful Darrowby marketplace,” he says.
“When I am there I always make sure I buy a book from the book shop, and a pasty from the pasty shop. And one or two bottles of wine from the wine shop.
“I took my children there over Christmas when it wasn’t dressed like Darrowby, and everyone was very nice. They seem to be embracing it.”
Fans will all recall Christopher Timothy famously putting his hand up a cow’s bottom when the hit series first aired – something Sam is relieved no one was asked to do for the remake.
HE SAYS: “Since the first series a very interesting thing has happened, which is that the rules about animal welfare have got stronger.You’re no longer allowed to do anything to an animal that it doesn’t need doing or that you are not qualified to do.”
He has a soft spot for animals, and one in particular.
“I am a big fan of rats,” Sam says. “I’ve had five as pets, female ones. They are a bit cleaner than the boys. They are very clever, they learn their own names if you call them, they don’t bite.
“To tell you the honest truth, the first time I ever held one I was wearing a sweater and it crawled up the sleeve of my sweater, turned round, crossed its paws and fell asleep. I was completely hooked. I was trying to convince my daughter to get a rat. She’s five. Our beloved cat sadly died last year and we haven’t quite got over it yet.
“She was very into it and then I told her they only live about threeand-a-half years if you are lucky, so she changed her mind.”
But Sam, who has two daughters with wife, playwright Laura, believes the new vet drama, which will be shown on Sunday nights like the original series, could well stand the test of time.
He says: “There is an important thing about Sunday evening television that it should be an anchor in a turning world. One thing I love about this show is that it is not about titled people, it is about people doing jobs in a real situation which are extremely hard work.”
●●All Creatures Great And Small is coming to Channel 5 next month