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) to go out in the autumn slot, which meant we would barely finish the first series before starting the next. Chris's leg was improving all the time, but we had lost six or seven weeks, and so had a three-week break in transmission in March to allow post-production to catch up." Davison married his second wife, American Sandra Dickinson, in Rockville, Maryland, in December 1978. "By March, I was back in the Dales, freezing to death and chasing sheep across the snowy hilltops." The programme initially ran for three series, with each episode adapting one or two of the Herriot