The winter evenings are long and dark, the news is often dire and politics ever more divisive. Where does one escape to for a cosy hug? For over six million viewers in Britain and tens of millions more across the globe, the answer is 1930s and 40s Yorkshire as portrayed in 5’s hit period drama All Creatures Great and Small.
Over six series, these gentle and beautifully crafted takes on James Herriot’s veterinary tales have captivated viewers in more than 100 countries. Warm-hearted and cosy without being fluffy, with real emotions and a keen sense of changing times, the show centres on Skeldale House in the fictional Yorkshire Dales town of Darrowby (real-life Grassington).
The principal two-legged characters are James Herriot himself, played by Nicholas Ralph, his wife Helen (Rachel Shenton), his irascible boss Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West), Siegfried’s younger brother Tristan (Callum Woodhouse) and their uber-capable housekeeper Audrey Hall (Anna Madeley).
Uncredited, however, are the scores of creatures great and small of the programme title. This support cast of horses, cows, goats, chickens, geese, rats, rabbits, cats and, of course, dogs has to come from somewhere. And that place is a holding farm 15 miles from Grassington that’s owned by animal trainer Jill Clark.
Jill lives with 11 dogs and 22 cats, all of them “actors” except for two farm moggies. Among this domestic menagerie are some of the four-legged stars of the series, including Tricki Woo, the absurdly high-maintenance Pekingese owned by Patricia Hodge’s character, Mrs Pumphrey, and Skeldale House’s resident golden retriever, Jess. Tricki-Woo’s real name, by the way, is Dora, while Jess is actually called Ernie.
“Until last year, Tricki was played by Derek, but I retired Derek because he had trouble with his eyes,” says Jill. “We searched for a lookalike, and we were very lucky to get Dora. She doesn’t need so much make-up because she’s got a slightly greyer face, which suits the show because Tricki Woo is getting on a bit now.”
The dogs go into make-up? “Yes, we still need to do a bit of make-up underneath the eyes because they’ve such black masks – so just to bring the eyes out a bit more, to make them shine, they do a bit of powder.”
If the idea of animals seated in the make-up chair seems faintly absurd, it’s all in a day’s work for Jill, who was introduced to the film world back in the 1980s, when she ran a dog training school with her then-husband.
“Somebody just turned up and asked, ‘Can you train a dog to bite a postman?’ because the Post Office was doing an advertising campaign at the time,” she says. “It just went from there. My first film was The Bounty with Mel Gibson in 1984. We had little cabin dogs that actually belonged to the prop master and street dogs, rats… all odds and pieces.”
The following year, she supplied the animals for the Tom Cruise movie Legend, and – joined by her son Dean in 2014 – her business has boomed ever since. Other memorable gigs include providing the 70 sheep, 12 horses, three cows, two goats, 10 chickens and three sheepdogs used in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. And while Jill and Dean have plenty of work elsewhere, it’s All Creatures Great and Small that has steadily kept them busy since 2020.
One of the more obvious problems facing Jill is the particular pet hates (as it were) of the cast. Fortunately, Samuel West kept rats as a child and has no problem handling Siegfried’s pet rodent, Vonolel, but Callum Wodehouse, just like his character Tristan, has a fear of snakes. “Callum said, ‘I’ll never hold it… I’ll never hold it…’ and he did,” says Jill of the scene in series five where Tristan has to deal with an escaped python. “Just give him time, don’t push it – let him do it calmly in his own time.”
It’s a philosophy she extends to all of the animals, including Clive, an enormous, fearsome-looking bull that Rachel Shenton had to handle in the first series.
“Clive was just the gentlest giant but really scary for someone who’s never met a bull before,” says Jill. “We told Rachel, ‘Don’t be scared of him, just go up, grab his head collar and walk off with him. But if you see us running, keep up.’”
Cows are problematic in other ways, including the logistical nightmare of moving them around amidst stringent bovine TB regulations. They are also herd animals with a tendency to stampede when spooked.
“If you stand in a field and a horse charges at you, if you wave your arms, they will go around you. A cow just goes straight over the top. We make sure they’re all used to halters and can all be led around, and make sure those cows are safe enough for a film unit to be in there. Cows can and do kill people.”
And then, of course, there are those scenes when the cows give birth – another logistical problem, with pregnant animals brought to the holding farm just before their third trimester.
“They dress the set and put the cameras up and we stay on watch 24 hours a day,” says Dean. “We have a little WhatsApp group, and everyone turns up when we message. It’s like a closed set – only the cameraman and us and Andy Barrett, the vet. They film it like a documentary, and then, completely separately, Nick [Nicholas Ralph] or whoever will film their scene. They then just cut in pieces from the documentary birth and splice it in together so that we never encroach on the animals.”
And, it might go without saying, the actors never actually carry out any of the treatments on the live animals. They’ll go as far as they can with the live ones, and then, when the surgical procedures begin, the camera angles are changed so that viewers don’t see the whole animal, and prosthetic models are employed.
Otherwise, Jill and Dean can train a cow to limp (“with lots of food and lots of praise”) and even get those most unbiddable of animals, cats, to lie down and appear to be asleep on the operating table. “We don’t anaesthetise them; they’re just trained to lie flat. Depending on the cat’s temperament, you can do quite a bit with them.
“Any animal can learn anything if it’s a natural ability to do it,” she adds, when I express scepticism about feline obedience. “It’s just a question of the trainer working out how they’re going to get a particular action.”
Inevitably, a bond is formed between the regular human and animal cast members – especially the dogs. “Everyone’s all over them all the time,” says Jill. “The dogs even go in the green room with them. And Callum and Ernie are always together. Ernie runs straight up to him every time.”
Tricki Woo and Jess have starring roles in this year’s Christmas special, and I fondly imagine that their off-screen alter egos, Dora and Ernie (and not forgetting Derek), will be curled up on a sofa watching the programme with Jill.
“I will definitely be watching the Christmas special,” she says. “Although I have read the scripts, it is totally different seeing it on the screen.”
The ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ Christmas Special is on 5 at 9pm on Christmas Eve
