Every Version of All Creatures Great and Small (All Creatures Great and Small #1-2)

The 1978 BBC series starring Christopher Timothy as James and Robert Hardy as Siegfried Farnon is the adaptation that defined how the world pictures Herriot's world. Hardy's Siegfried is one of British television's great comic performances: all thundering authority and transparent hypocrisy, a man who issues absolute pronouncements he has no intention of keeping himself. The series ran long enough to follow the characters through marriage, children, and wartime, giving it an emotional sweep the books only partially have. It is Sunday-evening television in the best possible sense: unhurried, warm, and quietly brilliant. Every subsequent adaptation casts a long shadow.

The Channel 5 and PBS reboot launched in 2020 had every reason to feel redundant. It found its own register quickly. Nicholas Ralph's James is a more outwardly anxious and emotionally legible character than Christopher Timothy's, which suits contemporary storytelling. The production design is lusher, Helen Alderson gets a fuller arc, and Samuel West's Siegfried carries a melancholy note the earlier series never quite reached. Measured against the original it is clearly second, but measured on its own terms it is very good television, and it has introduced Herriot's world to an audience that had never seen the earlier version.

Readers who come to Herriot via the television adaptations sometimes assume the books are the sentimental original behind a sentimental show. They are not. The prose is drier than the adaptations suggest, the comedy sharper, and Herriot has a genuine gift for the grotesque detail of large-animal practice that no television series has quite had the nerve to reproduce faithfully. It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet in particular is as good as British comic writing of its era gets. The books deserve to be read as literature, not just as backstory.