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) Regarding the clock: "That clock should have been taken out and burnt," joked director Roderick Graham. "When you are doing retakes, how do you sync the "tick-tock" from the previous take? It was a nightmare and would drown out the dialogue." "The staircase went nowhere," revealed Peter Davison. "If you had to run downstairs to answer the phone, it meant perching yourself on a small platform just out of shot and launching yourself into the scene." "For the studio, we changed the colours of the surgery in the second series in order to give it a bit of time progression,"