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) at all like that, but when we'd really got into it and were producing them at high speed, his friends used to come to me and say, 'You've got him, that's him.'" Upon first meeting Davison, Christopher Timothy joked to Bill Sellars, "Too tall, re-cast!" Davison was concerned: "I thought, 'What if they suddenly noticed I was quite a bit taller than Robert Hardy?'" Timothy continued: "He thought I meant it. He was horrified that I was trying to get him re-cast. I was in no position to do that and I wouldn't have done that joke for the world