IT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A VET.. OR It’s 26 years since All Creatures Great and Small was on ... but people still come up and ask me what’s wrong with their pets

THE elderly man on the phone was desperate for advice... His beloved dog had not been himself and was off his food.

Peter Davison listened sympathetically but the actor hadn’t a clue what to do.

It is 26 years since he played roguish young vet Tristan Farnon in the hugely popular series All Creatures Great and Small but people still think he can help.

This was not the first medical call he received and it won’t be the last. Peter, 65, said: “People still think we’re vets. Sometimes I do even offer advice.”

Christopher Timothy, 75, who starred as vet James Herriot in the series which attracted 18 million viewers, has had similar experiences.

He recalled: “A woman in the street asked me to come around and look at her cat. I said I wasn’t qualified and she thought I was being really difficult.”

The same goes for Robert Hardy, 90, who played Siegfried Farnon.

Robert said: “I had one woman tell me about her poodle and I said, ‘You should shoot it.’ That shocked her.

Womanising

“She was quite relieved when I told her I wasn’t really a vet.”

Last night the cast were reunited for the first time in decades to celebrate the centenary of vet and author Herriot’s birth. His real name was Alf Wight.

The BBC adaptation of his humorous memoirs of life in Yorkshire, including All Creatures Great and Small and It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet, made household names of Peter, Christopher, Robert and Carol Drinkwater.

It has been years since they were tackling the Dales’ muddy fields, angry animals and eccentric farmers but the memories are still fresh and, for Christopher, painful.

He said: “A cat called Boris was infamous in the books. The cat who played him in the show used to get very stressed. One day it bit my finger.

“I’ve never known pain like it. I said the f-word. They were able to lose it.”

Playing James, Christopher also got to grips with piglets in 1988 and, bizarrely, a blow-up doll the following year.

Perhaps his best-known client was posh Mrs Pumphrey and her over-pampered pekinese pooch Tricki-Woo.

Peter, who was also the fifth Doctor Who, had an even more agonising experience. He said: “You were up to your ankles in cow poo, stomping across muddy fields. You had to put your arm up a cow without the aid of a rubber glove as it was the 30s and they didn’t appear until after the war.

“In Yorkshire it could get pretty cold.

“One time I stuck my fingers in hot coffee to get the circulation back.

“Before I got the job the closest I’d come to farm animals was being chased by a pig in a farmyard. I was entirely unsuitable for Tristan. He was meant to be very outgoing – smoking, drinking, and womanising. I didn’t drink or smoke.

“I had to smoke Woodbines and spent most of the time spitting out tobacco.”

But the discomforts were a small price to pay as millions of fans fell in love with the scenery and the bond between the cast over the 90 episodes from 1978-90.

Christopher said: “They got the