“All Creatures Great and Small” soothes our souls
A young veterinary surgeon begins to practice in the remote Yorkshire Dales in 1937, treating abscesses in horses’ hooves and milk fever in cows and prescribing diets for overfed lap dogs.
It hardly sounds like the stuff of bestsellerdom. But James Herriot’s first book, “All Creatures Great and Small” (first published in Britain in 1970 under the title “If Only They Could Talk”), and the seven books that followed became enormous hits worldwide, selling over 60 million copies by the time the author — whose real name was James Alfred Wight — died in 1995.
They also generated two movies and a hit television series that ran from 1978 to 1980, and returned for another four seasons between 1988 and 1990.
Still, when Channel 5, in partnership with Masterpiece on PBS, announced a remake of the series in 2019, it didn’t inspire much excitement. But once again, the story demonstrated, as Anatole Broyard put it in his 1972 New York Times review of the novel, “what a satisfying thing ordinary life can be.”
Despite featuring mostly little-known actors (including Nicholas Ralph as James Herriot) and large animals, the new series was an immediate hit when it debuted in Britain in September. It drew over 5 million viewers for each of its six episodes and became Channel 5’s highestrated show since 2016, charming a nation that after months of COVID confinement and restrictions was clearly ready for a dose of rolling hills, taciturn farmers and livestock in need of friendly ministrations.
“It’s an old axiom that at a time of great uncertainty people seek certainties,” James Jackson wrote in The London Times. “Channel 5 has recently, by luck or by design, offered solace by being a kind of safe space for older, decent values — a halcyon vision of Yorkshire.” Helen Lewis, in The Sunday Times, put it more succinctly: “Apparently, the best cure for COVID blues is watching a man contend with an abscessed hoof.”
Now “All Creatures,” which premiered Jan. 10 on PBS’ “Masterpiece,” arrives in an America in need of its own relief, amid a still-surging pandemic and wrenching political upheaval.
“It has the warmth people are looking for during a really challenging time,” Susanne Simpson, the executive producer of “Masterpiece,” said. “It gets at emotional truths that are comforting for us.”
The idea to revisit Herriot’s gentle agrarian tales was actually born of a healing impulse, albeit in response to an earlier national crisis. Colin Callender, whose Playground Entertainment produced the series, first thought about a remake of “All Creatures” after the Brexit vote in 2016, he said.
“The divide in views between the rural and metropolitan areas was really striking, and I was reminded of ‘All Creatures,’ because the books really bridged that divide and appealed so broadly,” he said. “I felt that living in such difficult and complicated times, there would be an audience that wanted a show that was gentle and entertaining and would bring us together.”
And that, he added ruefully, “was before COVID.”
Callender met Wight’s children, Jim Wight and Rosemary Page, to discuss the idea. “I think they were skeptical at the beginning, or at least cautious about how it would be brought back,” he said.
They stipulated that the series should accurately portray veterinary practice and farming life in the period covered by the books, and be filmed in Yorkshire.
But they agreed to the idea of exploring the characters in more psychological depth, particularly the women — the housekeeper, Mrs. Hall (Anna Madeley), and James’ love interest, Helen Alderson (Rachel Shenton) — who had minor roles in the original series.
“None of us have been able to move about much this past year,” Shenton said. “But we’ve spent some time in beautiful Darrowby.”