Siegfried Yes do. Remember. Spare the rod, spoil the child.
Jace I want to talk about Siegfried. Siegfried Farnon is an interesting character, to say the least. He’s fastidious, eccentric. He’s quick tempered. He’s described in Ben Vanstone script as, quote, “Having a mind that works so fast he struggles to keep up with himself.” What do you think makes Siegfried tick?
Samuel I mean, his own will, I think, is probably the main answer, he’s quick tempered, as you say, but he’s not bad tempered. And that’s an interesting distinction. He’s very quick to fly off the handle, but he doesn’t bear grudges, which I think is very attractive. He’s also incredibly absent-minded. We actually worked with a vet, Andy Barrett, who worked with the real Siegfried Farnon, Donald Sinclair, at the end of his life. And Andy managed to keep the job because when Donald would say to him things like, ‘I told you that yesterday,’ all the previous vets would say, ‘No, you didn’t.’ And Andy, who knew that he hadn’t just said, ‘Oh, yes, of course. I’m so sorry. I forgot,’ and he managed to keep the job. Whereas Donald at this point was very forgetful. But Andy managed to stay on the right side of him by just pretending that he was right all the time. I think Siegfried is driven by a desire to be a good vet, and that’s important to remember. You mentioned Ben Vanstone’s notes…one of the things that really attracted me to the part, I mean, the first thing to say is that I don’t get to be very funny very often. I don’t get to play comedy very often. I have quite a serious voice and I tend to play quite serious people. So the chance to be in something where, you know, there were clearly laughs to be got with the words or with the character was a nice opportunity. And when I absolutely jumped out and there’s a certain amount of name recognition in the part, I mean, it may not be Dr. Who or Hamlet, but if you say I’m playing Siegfried Franon and people go, ‘Oh, brilliant,’ or ‘Oh, better get it right,’ or oh, ‘You won’t be as good as Robert Hardy,’ which of course I’m not. But I did know Robert Hardy and worked with him and I and I got a lovely tweet from the Robert Hardy fan club when I’d been cast saying, ‘Of course, nobody will be as good as him. But we were very pleased that it is you who’s going to try.’ And that was very sweet of them. And that gave me some confidence. I think the main thing that I like about him was basically Ben sent me a list of character notes very early on that were written — I mean, I don’t want to over overegg this pudding, but — it could have been a Chekhov play. It talked about his war record and how he’d seen a lot of horses shot in the First World War, as many thousands, tens of thousands were, because it was cheaper to shoot them than to take them back from France or mainland Europe. And he’d come back rather preferring animals to people, as a lot of people did, I think from the first war, his wife, Evelyn, has died only four years before and he’s still emotionally quite blocked about that. He was a bit of a ladies man and with no children could, you know, could be absolutely dating again after four years. But he’s still in love with his wife and he’s finding that toe very difficult to dip into the water, although he does manage later in the series, no spoilers, but with mixed results. And I think he just struck me as a complex and real character. The actual Donald was pretty eccentric. I remember the first thing I knew about him that Jim, Alf’s son, told me when we first met him, was that he’d once got up after a dinner party and instead of offering everybody coffee, he’d grabbed a shotgun and discharged it into the wall of the cottage he was in because he was bored and he wanted everybody to go home. I thought I have been to a few dinner parties where I really wanted to do that. Had I had a shotgun handy, but how wonderful to be playing somebody who doesn’t just think of doing that, but then actually does it. And he also he walked out of his own granddaughter’s christening. He said, ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ And the more I heard about it, the more I thought, yes, there sort of aren’t any rules with him. I like this. And I think we’ll probably see more and more of that as we go on through a second series. But deep down, he’s a very caring person who’s trying to be empathetic, I mean, as vets are generally because, you know, the first book is called,