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 I wanted to do them," he explained in 2016. "I'd miss the second half of series 5 because of "A Very Peculiar Practice" and series 6 I missed because I was doing "Campion". I was incredibly lucky to move onto the things I did. There was no plan to it; it's just good fortune, being in the right place at the right time. But in the end, when I'd finished "Campion" and "A Very Peculiar Practice", "All Creatures" was still going and I never had any problem coming back." Helen Herriot (née Alderson) is played by Carol Drinkwater in