page_title: All Creatures Great and Small (TV series)
section_title: Locations
hierarchical_section_title: All Creatures Great and Small (TV series) / Production / Locations
caption_attribution_description: English: The back of the church with part of the cemetary.
context_page_description: All Creatures Great and Small is a British television series made by the BBC and based on the books of the British veterinary surgeon Alf Wight, who wrote under the pseudonym James Herriot. Set in the Yorkshire Dales and beginning in the mid-1930s, it stars Christopher Timothy as Herriot, Robert Hardy as Siegfried Farnon, the proprietor of the Skeldale House surgery, and Peter Davison as Siegfried's "little brother", Tristan. Herriot's wife, Helen, is played by a different actress in each of the series' runs: Carol Drinkwater originally, then Lynda Bellingham for the revival.
  The series was produced throughout its run by Bill Sellars. In early 1977, the BBC tasked him with the creation of a television series from Herriot's first two novels, If Only They Could Talk and It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet, using the title of the 1975 film adaptation. It is part of a series of movies and television series based on Herriot's novels. The Herriot novels were written in an episodic style, with each chapter generally containing a short story within the ongoing narrative of Herriot's life. This format greatly facilitated their adaptation for a television series.
context_section_description: All exterior scenes were filmed in North Yorkshire, mostly in the village of Askrigg, which doubled for the fictional Darrowby, and Bainbridge. Addlebrough, a 481-metre-high (1,578 ft) fell to the south of both villages, is seen prominently in several shots.
  "We would take over Askrigg and drive the very few motorists crazy by stopping the traffic," remembered Peter Davison. Indeed, three quarters of the way through the second run the crew was banned from filming in the village due to the disruption it was causing to the lives of the residents.
  Filming also took place at some of the Dales' countless farmsteads—the same ones that Alf Wight visited in the 1960s and 1970s, although the names of villages, farms and people were changed. Exterior shots were originally to be filmed in Derbyshire's Peak District, but Robert Hardy took offence to the plan and threatened to walk out of the producer's office. Some indoor scenes (including all those of the interior of Skeldale House) were shot at the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham, a few months after the on-location portions. This is demonstrated in the first series, when Christopher Timothy is seen walking normally during the scenes filmed in Yorkshire during the latter part of 1977, but by the time the studio shots take place, after his accident, his immobility is quite obvious.
  "Most of the locations were around Leyburn, where the unit had been based at the Golden Lion Hotel and Eastfield Lodge Hotel, respectively," recalled assistant floor manager David Tilley. "All the timings have to be scheduled in advance. It would be a blank sheet of paper when you started. The only thing that was pre-scheduled was the studio recording dates, which were organised by the BBC's Planning department, in conjunction with all the other series using the studios. We would then have to work out everything for each individual episode. We would always do the location filming first, so we assembled in Yorkshire to record the film inserts for 'Pig in the Middle' in the same block as 'Every Dog His Day...' I would have to make sure everyone arrived on time, either by car or bus, and that we had everything we needed to complete the scenes in time."
  For the first three series, up until the two Christmas specials of 1983 and 1985, most interior scenes were recorded on video at Pebble Mill and edited together with exterior shots. This provided hardships in December 1977, when filming briefly returned to the Dales, after a block of studio recording, to capture the look of winter. The temperatures dropped well below freezing. "The snow was high and the ice was solid," explained Robert Hardy in 2003. "I remember two occasions when we were so cold, from the wind on the [moorland] tops, that we couldn't speak. We had to stop." Peter Davison recalled: "People would hand me a cup of tea and I would stick my hand in it, rather than drink it, because my fingers were so cold." For the final four series, much of the filming other than at Skeldale House was done wholly on location at the farms. "Studios aren't really like cow byres or horse stables or country farm houses," explained Hardy, "so one had to make believe a great deal in those early episodes. I mean, they made good sets, but it was better later when we stopped using the studio and did all the filming in real locations in Yorkshire. That was when it really started coming alive, because the cameras were in real situations."
  "In the first series, we had large animals in the studio, with sets for farm barns and cow sheds, which were later filmed on location," explains designer David Crozier. "There were all sorts of things you had to take into consideration, not least of which was how you are going to dispose of the animal's waste, so we were effectively building these stables and cow sheds in the studio for real."
  "If you light one scene in the pub, your next scene in that pub might be set the next day, so you can't just whack up the same lights. It might be the same room, but it might be a different time of day, so you had to keep looking at the scrip
caption: The exterior of Wensley Holy Trinity Church was used in the wedding of James and Helen in the series 1 episode "The Last Furlong".
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