All Creatures Great And Small — a review of the new TV adaptation from a fan of the books
I read All Creatures Great And Small for the first time when I was eight, and even as a kid I was completely won over by James Herriot’s (real name Alfred Wight) laugh-out-loud humor and masterful immergence of the reader into his world and life.
Those two ingredients are the core of the appeal of his books. As The Telegraph reported, Alfred Wight’s humor was inspired by his college readings of Wodehouse. Wight has a very distinctive style, though the influence of Wodehouse is, I believe, noticeable in his writing.
His ability to transport us into his world is underscored by the fact that it is a very different world indeed (how many of his readers were Yorkshire vets in the early 1940s?). But while reading the books, one feels like, at the furthest, a neighbor of the Skeldale house clinic.
Both of these essential elements are lost and/or wilfully replaced in the recent Channel 5 series.
Wight’s humor is a challenge to translate to visual media, but one that must be accepted in order to make an adaptation of his stories and not a generic/independent project about a Yorkshire vet. Channel 5 All Creatures Great And Small version did not even bother.
Just compare this opening (the one in the book):
They didn’t say anything about this in the books, I thought, as the snow blew in through the gaping doorway and settled on my naked back.
I lay face down on the cobbled floor in a pool of nameless muck, my arm deep inside the straining cow, my feet scrabbling for a toe hold between the stones. I was stripped to the waist and the snow mingled with the dirt and the dried blood on my body. I could see nothing outside the circle of flickering light thrown by the smoky oil lamp which the farmer held over me.
No, there wasn’t a word in the books about searching for your ropes and instruments in the shadows; about trying to keep clean in a half bucket of tepid water; about the cobbles digging into your chest. Nor about the slow numbing of the arms, the creeping paralysis of the muscles as the fingers tried to work against the cow’s powerful expulsive efforts.
There was no mention anywhere of the gradual exhaustion, the feeling of futility and the little far-off voice of panic.
My mind went back to that picture in the obstetrics book. A cow standing in the middle of a gleaming floor while a sleek veterinary surgeon in a spotless parturition overall inserted his arm to a polite distance. He was relaxed and smiling, the farmer and his helpers were smiling, even the cow was smiling.
This is a masterful combination of getting us into the world of James Herriot, the vet in the Yorkshire of the 40s mixed with a good laugh.
Now the TV show opening has the young James Heriot, still leaving with his parents in Scotland, jogging in the morning through the streets. I am at a loss as to what effect this sequence is supposed to produce in the viewer. Is it an attempt to make the modern viewer, who is likely to be jogging in the morning, to relate to James Herriot’s character? They might have as well handed him a paper cup of coffee then.
Then we watch James with his parents, where the template of “here are the stakes” (him wanting to be a vet in a time where finding a job as one was extremely hard) is rammed into our faces together with the cheap motivational quote style idea of “follow your dreams” thrown in.
The invented drama of the missed bus that follows in the TV show serves the purpose of jeopardizing his chances of getting a job. Mrs. Hall, who greets him on arrival, is quickly introduced as a major influence on the plot — she was the one who invited him over for the interview — behind Siegfried’s back. Such promotion of her character (barely mentioned in the books) strikes me as a lack of trust in the original material and a clear desire to move away from the source.
As for Siegfried — his character was always my favorite in the books and hence deserves a separate post.
The car not having breaks is also pulled for the first episode (it was much later in the book). While in the books, Siegfried promised to fix the breaks, but forgot, as he often did, which led to dangerous, yet hilarious situations, in the TV show it’s replaced with an absurd piece of pseudo-philosophical motivation. “Have faith in yourself. Keep your foot on it”, Siegfried says when James discovers the absence of breaks while driving. I doubt faith in oneself helps much in the absence of working breaks, and neither does pushing the acceleration.
Later on, Siegfried of the TV adaptation offers James the job, but on a “trial period only”, whilst in the book he gives him the job outright. I suppose this is an attempt at raising the conflict, but that is much more efficiently done in the book when soon after getting the job, James makes a controversial decision in front of a troublesome client to put down a horse.
Helen, James’ future wife and the love interest in the books until she becomes one, is also vastly different — in this case — modernized. In the book, James meets her while she is cooking:
A voice answered “Come in,” and I opened the door into a huge, stone-flagged kitchen with hams and sides of bacon hanging from hooks in the ceiling. A dark girl in a check blouse and green linen slacks was kneading dough in a bowl. She looked up and smiled.
But a woman cooking is not cool enough for the TV show, so here Helen is doing the farm work and handling the bull. I wonder if Helen cooking instead of Helen offering her future love interest a hand to get off a fence is not a deserving love interest for a protagonist to fall for in the eyes of the modern audience…
Further in the series, they add a love triangle to that love story, which was not present in the books. Presumably, it serves to replace the wonderfully written, funny, and truthful worries of a young man pursuing his love interest with a touching clumsiness that the creators couldn’t translate to the screen.
For example, the quiet desperation of this passage from the book:
She looked at me over the top of her cup. “Good evening, Mr. Herriot, are you enjoying it?” Oh God, she
always said that. And Mr. Herriot! But what could I do? “Call me Jim,” would sound great. I replied, as always, “Good evening, Miss Alderson. Yes, it’s very nice, isn’t it.” Things were going with a bang again.
…was in no way conveyed by the scene in episode one where James introduces himself as “Herriot” and quickly fixed it by saying “James… James Herriot”.
The overall tone of the book is optimistic with some moments of sadness that touch you all the more because they are rare and sudden. The tone of the TV show is depressing, but then again, this is a general feature (or is it a bug?) of TV and films these days — for some reason most if not all make an impression of miserable people living miserable lives, with those melancholic single piano notes in the background and perpetual inner turmoil and past hurts on characters’ faces…
