That season’s fifth episode, titled “If Wishes Were Horses,” serves as a parallel to, if not the basis for, “Surviving Siegfried.” Again, we see Siegfried (here played by Robert Hardy) caring for a horse, though this time the infection is of the hoof as opposed to River’s spiritual malady.
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The season aired less than a year into Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister (the run of the original series would match up with her 11 years in office to within a year), amid a time of tremendous unrest in the United Kingdom, a nation still reeling from a year of unprecedented strikes, the peak of which would be retrospectively termed the Winter of Discontent. The world was no less complex and painful 43 years ago this month, when the BBC premiered the third season of the original televised All Creatures Great and Small. How many of us can truly feel all right given the state of our own damn world? Thus, the gently antic All Creatures Great and Small must balance its status as a comforting tonic to a messy and painful 21st century and its awareness of the fact that the world has always been more complex than any of us would prefer. “Of course I’m not! None of us is! Nor should we be! State of the damn world - there’d be something wrong with us if we were!” The line fits the character and story, but it might well strike a chord for present-day viewers as well. “That’s a stupid bloody question!” Siegfried snaps. Siegfried himself has been thrown from the horse so many times he can barely walk, let alone operate a vehicle. “Are you all right?” Tristan asks the obstinate vet while driving him back to see River. Now, Siegfried has been called upon to care for another traumatized horse - River, who will not be ridden - and though the oncoming brutality has not yet touched these particular creatures, its specter dominates the season. Hall (Anna Madeley) watching a spitfire strafe the sky. Jeeps pass the car as Siegfried shuttles between Darrowby and the outlying farms the previous season closed with his housekeeper, Mrs. In the show’s present, another war looms, casting a shadow over a series that has previously struck a comforting note of escapism. But there’s another, perhaps even greater wound: “the damage we can’t see.”
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“Physically speaking, he’ll make a full recovery,” this younger version of Siegfried remarks of the animal.
There, a younger version of the typically jovially eccentric Siegfried - played in these segments by Andy Sellers, and now seen as a solemn captain in the Royal Armed Forces around the time of Armistice Day - is tasked with caring for his major’s wounded horse.
“Surviving Siegfried” transports the viewer to Belgium in 1918, a schism in the series’ typical operations that underscores just how present the First World War remains in the consciousness of characters now facing down the Second. Two iterations of the same man are both beset by the same righteous world-weariness, one that would have resonated just as clearly four decades ago as it does today. But in Siegfried’s awareness of the traumas of war, the two series do feature remarkable echoes.
To call the new series a remake of the prior one would be inapt, as both take their own liberties in adapting Herriot’s books.
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But they first became staples of the TV landscape in 1978, when the BBC premiered the first serialized adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small. The series centers on veterinary surgeon James (Nicholas Ralph), who toils under the watchful eye of the persnickety Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West), whom he struggles to please - though not as much as Siegfried’s layabout brother, Tristan (Callum Woodhouse), does.Īll of these figures are familiar to readers of Herriot’s books. The show, adapted from the internationally bestselling series of memoirs by veterinary surgeon Alf Wight, who wrote under the pen name James Herriot, has thus far been situated squarely within the late 1930s in the sleepy English farming community of Darrowby, a fictionalized corner of the Yorkshire Dales where 21st-century viewers might burrow away for an hour a week and let their troubles be replaced by gentle tales of rural animal care. This week’s episode of All Creatures Great and Small - the third episode of the third season, entitled “Surviving Siegfried” - offered something rare for this series: flashbacks.
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