When the Movie Isn’t as Good as the Book!
PBS provided a great deal of hype for it’s new adaptation of James Herriot’s books about his time as a veternarian in the Yorkshire countryside. Some viewers, however, do not appreciate the new version of All Creatures Great and Small. Have you watched the series? Did you read the books? What do you think?
James Herriott, whose actual name was James Alfred Wight, was a writer at heart and a vet at trade. When he turned 50, he began writing about the subject of football, but his books were not widely read. He then decided to do what many writers do, and that is to write about what they know best. Herriott’s main characters were animals, and his autobiographical novels enchanted adults and children alike. His editor combined the first two books and titled the resulting work All Creatures Great and Small. St. Martin’s Press in NYC published the book in the early 70’s. The book was an immediate success with readers buying millions of copies. The first television series followed in 1978 on BBC.
Mary Mcnamara, a culture columnist and critic for the LA Times, devoured Herriott’s books as a child. She wrote a recent column bemoaning the fact that the new PBS series did not live up to her expectations. She particularly doesn’t like the way Siegfried, the senior vet who is Herriott’s boss, is portrayed in the series. Mcnamara does, however, appreciate the increased importance of the housekeeper in the new adaptation, and she loves Diana Rigg’s portrayal of a rich old lady with an overly pampered Pekingese.
Herriott obviously loved animals; and, if you are an animal lover, you will probably enjoy the new series. You certainly might read the book so that you could compare it to the PBS version. I love animals, I enjoy the slow and gently moving episodes and I like British characters, especially as depicted in the forties and fifties. The scenery is beautiful, the sentiment is touching and the entire production seems authentic to me. But then, of course, I didn’t read the book!!
