The Yorkshire Vet is now back for series 11

If you’re a viewer of a certain age, cast your mind back to the summer of 1975. While Steven Spielberg’s Jaws terrified millions, a British comedy drama about a Yorkshire vet and his patients also caught the imaginations of many.

Okay, All Creatures Great and Small was no blockbuster, ut that film which dramatised the exploits of animal expert James Herriot helped launch assorted similar projects.

Aside from a fine turn from Simon Ward as James, it also featured superstar-in-waiting Anthony Hopkins as his irascible mentor, Siegfried Farnon.

It left thousands of fans hungry to check out the page-turning source material, and there was little surprise when another Herriot-inspired movie, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet, hit cinemas the following summer.

Sadly there haven’t been any films like it since, though the huge success of ACGAS on BBC One in the late 1970s did little to diminish interest in Herriot’s work. Or rather James Alfred Wight, as James Herriot was his alias.

Though Young James Herriot, a three-part prequel series, tickled the interest of some fans in 2011, things have been a bit quiet on the dramatised fiction front.

Not that interest in Yorkshire Vets has fallen by the wayside in the years since. Far from it, as this returning series proves. When The Yorkshire Vet started a few years ago, the show-runners hoped it would do well, but had no idea it would still be going strong in 2020.

We’re now onto series 11, and once more cameras follow all the drama, laughter and tears at two busy veterinary practices. Peter Wright, who was trained by Herriot, now runs his old mentor’s practice in Thirsk, while his former partner Julian Norton works in nearby Boroughbridge.

In the first of the new seven-part run, Julian rushes to an emergency at Jackie’s alpaca farm, where a new four-legged mum desperately needs his help. However, rural North Yorkshire isn’t always the best place for driving when time is of the essence, and Julian gets stuck behind not one, but two tractors.

We get to see what lockdown life was like for Jean and Steve, whose daughter Sarah kept a video diary. And with things returning to some degree of normal, Peter returns to the Greens’ farm, where there’s now lots of veterinary work to do. While young chicken-owner Holly brings her little pal poorly Penny in to see Julian, Peter is stunned when a couple of rabbits are rushed to Skeldale with nasty injuries because of a family feud.

Cameras also focus on Quercus, the greedy canine who has been having a food party. Alas, there’s definitely nothing to celebrate for his owner, Leah. She’s had to rush the poorly dog to the practice because she thinks he might have swallowed a party popper. And Julian is worried it’s a potentially explosive problem.

We never know what TV shows will be hits in the future, but there’s a good chance these creatures great and small will keep fans tuning in.

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