All Creatures Great and Small (franchise) "James Herriot", and are set in the fictional town of "Darrowby", based on a combination of Thirsk, Richmond, Leyburn and Middleham.. In the books James Herriot work with fellow veterinary surgeons, Siegfried and Tristan Farnon, based on real-life counterparts, "Donald Sinclair" and his brother "Brian Sinclair" respectively. Wight also used the name "Helen Alderson" for his wife, Joan Danbury. In America the books were collected as pairs into omnibus volumes, as the publisher felt they were too short to publish independently. The title chosen for the first book in the series "All Creatures Great and Small" (and subsequently one of
All Creatures Great and Small (TV series) one of the directors said, "Why don't we give [the Herriot part] to Christopher Timothy and "make" him a name?" In 2003, Timothy said that Alf Wight wrote him a letter after the series started, saying "You are the Herriot I wrote about". Siegfried Farnon, based on Wight's real life partner Donald Sinclair, is played by Robert Hardy. Writer Michael Russell sums up the character's composition thus: "He is capricious, cantankerous, whimsical, arbitrary, unreasonable, unpredictable, ill-tempered, extravagant, effusive, contradictory, etc., yet in the midst of all that, the most loyal and caring of friends." The cast met for the first