All Creatures Great And Small review: Vet James Herriot’s back where he belongs, at the business end of a cow, writes ROLAND WHITE

All Creatures Great And Small (Ch5)

Rating:

If you’ve been watching All Creatures Great And Small since the heady days of 1978, you might care to take a stiff drink and sit down before reading on. What I am about to say amounts to television heresy.

The Channel 5 version of this much-loved show returned yesterday for a fifth series, and it’s now clear to me that Samuel West is a better Siegfried than the great Robert Hardy.

Hardy’s Siegfried was a force of nature. But with his hurricane-strength personality, it was hard to see why anyone would want to work with him. He was a tuba in an orchestra of piccolos.

West’s Siegfried is still the alpha male of Skeldale House, impulsive and sometimes impossible, but the character is more rounded. His kindly side is allowed to peep through more often.

Nicholas Ralph stars as James Herriot in series 5 of All Creatures Great and Small

Flight Sergeant Harriott (pictured) is about to climb into the cockpit of his bomber when he keeled over. He is diagnosed with the cattle disease brucellosis and banned from flying

It’s now 1941, and Siegfried is coping almost single-handedly in Darrowby because James Herriot is still trying to become bomber command’s answer to Biggles. And very out of place he looks, too.

We viewers don’t want to see James dodging flak over occupied France. We want to see him back where he belongs — at the business end of a cow. And dodging flak from his usual enemies: Mrs Pumphrey and Tricky-Woo.

As it happened, we didn’t have long to wait.

Flight Sergeant Herriot was about to climb into the cockpit of his bomber when he keeled over, which is never a good look for a pilot. Somehow it fails to inspire confidence.

Good news for us, though. James was diagnosed with the cattle disease brucellosis, and from then on it was only a matter of time. Banned from flying, he was put to work digging trenches on a farm. He heard a cow in distress, but the farmer grumpily dismissed his offer of help.

Of course he did. It wouldn’t be All Creatures Great And Small if farmers were cheery apple-cheeked chaps who said, ‘Oh, Sergeant ‘Erriot I’m right glad to see you.’

But James persisted, saved the calf, and realised where hecan do most good for the war effort. And not before time, too. Because it’s been all goin Darrowby.

Mrs Fawcett’s spring greens have been attacked by the frost, there’s a budgerigar with a leg ulcer, and young veterinary student Richard Carmody is shaping up nicely.

He might look like Gussie Fink-Nottle, newt fancier and friend of Bertie Wooster, but he’s introduced a scheme to make the surgery more efficient. So we will politely ignore the minor setback of the dead cat he diagnosed who half an hour later felt a lot better.

Meanwhile, Mr Bosworth — Yorkshire’s answer to Dad’s Army’s Warden Hodges — can’t find enough volunteers. So Mrs Hall has signed up for the ARP. Who better? When Mrs Hall tells you to put that light out, you don’t complain about the dark.