On Demand: All Creatures Great and Small (BritBox, from Thu) Channel 5 recently revived the much-loved tales based on Alf Wight's books If Only They Could Talk and It Shouldn't Happen To a Vet, written under the more famous pseudonym of James Herriot and based on his experiences as a vet in the Yorkshire Dales during the 1930s and 1940s. The series was both gentle and charming, but not a patch on the original TV adaptation, which began on the BBC in 1978 and ran, one and off, until Christmas 1990. Now all 90 episodes are being made available to stream so, if you watched the revamp, you can contrast and compare the two. Here, Christopher Timothy plays Herriot, memorably supported by Robert Hardy and Peter Davison as eccentric veterinarian Siegfried Farnon and his mischievous brother Tristan.