All Creatures Great and Small (TV series) that be wanted to cast the role. Sellars, instead, asked Timothy if he would accept the role of Tristan Farnon. "I had a wife, I had children, I had a mortgage to pay, and I wasn't working. So I said, 'No. It's Herriot or nothing.'" Timothy put everything on the line. "I got home one night, at about 9 o'clock. My wife was washing up in the kitchen. I walked into the kitchen and she said, without turning round, 'You've got the Herriot part.'" Timothy also stated that, after all of the roles had been cast except that of Herriot,
All Creatures Great and Small (TV series) and all the scenes that [Peter Davison] was involved in, I extracted and took them down to the hospital, threw them on the hospital bed, and said, 'Learn those.'" This accounts for the three-week break in transmission dates between episodes 11 ("Bulldog Breed") and 12 ("Practice Makes Perfect") of the first series. "I was plated and screwed instead of plastered," recalled Timothy, "and I was back at work in nine weeks — which was insane, in retrospect: I could barely walk, I was terrified, I'd lost a lot of weight and everybody worked round me." "They would prop him up