The greatest small creature of all? It’s the caviar-loving Tricki Woo!
Hello Tristan! Good day to you, Mrs Pumphrey — and, especially, welcome to Tricki Woo. Two episodes in, the essential cast of All Creatures Great And Small (C5) are all in place.
Though his fringe is less extravagantly floppy than his predecessor Peter Davison’s, Callum Woodhouse is the perfect actor to play Siegfried Farnon’s boozy reprobate of a little brother, Tristan.
Woodhouse is best known as leslie in The Durrells. Clearly it’s his destiny to play the wayward sibling of an older, hugely eccentric character.
Siegfried might not have written the greatest novels ever to be overlooked by the Nobel prize committee (that’ll be lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet) but his personality is undeniably brilliant. Samuel West is having a whale of a time discovering his tender-hearted sentimentality as well as his explosions of outrage.
There is nothing here to outrage fans of the James Herriot books. The stories haven’t been updated or imbued with 21st-century morals, and the nearest they came to being ‘sexed up’ was a moment at the start when farmer’s daughter Helen (Rachel Shenton) caught a glimpse of our hero swimming naked beneath a waterfall.
Next time she saw him, she called
SHOPPING TRIP OF THE WEEK:
For Texas ranger Tom, in Big Bend National Park, the nearest convenience store is 100 miles away, he told Sue Perkins on Along The US – Mexico Border (BBC1). Let’s hope he never leaves his wallet at home.
out cheekily: ‘Didn’t recognise you with your clothes on!’ How the poor lad blushed.
Dame Diana Rigg is wonderful as the grand Mrs Pumphrey. In the original TV series, 40 years ago, she was played by Margaretta Scott as a rather woolly-headed woman, slightly deaf and forgetful.
If there is anything woolly about Dame Diana, it’s wire wool — the sort that can easily remove a layer of skin. Her Mrs P had no time for Tristan’s flatteries, and although she invited young vet James (Nicholas Ralph) to her soiree, she didn’t dream he was good enough to mingle with her guests — he was simply there to mind the dog.
But what a dog. Tricki Woo is a long-haired Pekingese who lives on caviar, roast beef, trifle and brandy. evidently he is a creature of refined taste, though gluttony plays havoc with his digestion — a condition his owner referred to in the books as ‘going flop-bott’.
With his usual dry humour, Herriot explained in his memoirs why Tricki was such a valued client of the veterinary practice in Skeldale: ‘When he went to the seaside, he sent me boxes of oak-smoked kippers; when the tomatoes ripened in the greenhouse, he sent me a pound or two each week. But it was when the Christmas hamper arrived from Fortnum & Mason’s that I realised I was on to a really good thing.’
The good graces of a dog are worth cultivating — something our ancestors understood. Dog Tales: The Making Of Man’s Best Friend (BBC4) traced the story of how we befriended and tamed our mutts over tens of thousands of years.
The alliance appears to be largely their choice. Clever as the domestic dog is, wild wolves are smarter, one scientist in
Austria explained. They looked at early humans and decided to make allies of us.
Perhaps the most interesting segment of the documentary was also the most difficult to watch. An experiment with thousands of foxes in Russia has shown that, within ten generations of selective breeding, animals can be reared that are as affectionate as dogs.
These foxes roll over to have their tummies tickled and even wag their tails. A scientist scooped one up to cuddle it and said in broken english, ‘impossible not love them’.
Quite true. But to see fields of the poor creatures in tiny wire cages was horrible.