All Creatures Great and Small (Channel 5) is back, comforting as a hot buttered crumpet. It’s a show that kills all cynicism. Two minutes in and I was cooing over Helen’s baby. Let’s be honest now: not all babies are beautiful. Quite a lot of them look like Toby Jones (no offence to Toby Jones, who is a wonderful-looking adult). But this one is the cutest, chubby-cheeked little thing. Excellent casting.
It is Spring 1941 and James (Nicholas Ralph) is still away from Darrowby, serving in the RAF. This has left Siegfried overstretched at the veterinary practice, and he reluctantly promotes student vet Richard to work alongside him. Meanwhile, Darrowby’s women are pitching in with the war effort. Mrs Hall volunteers to be a blackout warden, while Mrs Pumphrey has offered her home to the Army, to be used as a convalescent hospital.
It is testament to the show’s strength that although the war has changed the group dynamics of the earlier series – and we’re still awaiting the return of Tristan – it still feels agreeably familiar. Even while serving as an airman, James ended up with his arm halfway up a cow.
There was a lightly comedic bit involving Richard (James Anthony-Rose) mixing up two cats, one of which was alive and well, the other alive but mistaken for being dead on account of it having licked a morphine spoon. And there was a scene in which Siegfried (Samuel West) gazed at Mrs Hall in her warden’s uniform, and she asked: “I don’t look too daft?” and he replied: “Not in the least. You look… very smart,” and it was yet another occasion on which I wanted to yell at these two to just get together.
At least James and Helen were reunited, after he collapsed ahead of a training mission and was diagnosed with brucellosis, a disease caught from cattle (am I the only person who googles all these animal ailments while watching the programme?). The moment that he walked back into Skeldale House and saw his wife and baby again was lovely. And there will be another homecoming soon, as the producers have teased that Tristan will rejoin the family later in the series, just in time for baby James’s christening.
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