Favorites? Dislikes?

I love that episode too - as well as any episode with Mrs. Pumphrey and Hodgekin (two of my favorites). For some reason though, I took a dislike to Calum and especially his girlfriend, Deidre.

It was on PBS - the other series or the other film. I tried to find a link to it on line but couldn't. I was pretty young when it was aired. It introduced me to the books which I read later.

I thought that James Herriot's character in the film who shot the horse was a little brusque which James Herriot in the book never seemed to be. Don't know how a vet could decide to shoot a horse to put it out of its misery though. Or hos he would act if met with resistence.

I may be wrong about a lot of this.

But whatever it is I watched when I was a kid (miniseries or film) about James Herriot it was very good indeed. It starts when James Herriot was in school.

I liked pretty much any episode where James got drunk, especially the one where he samples almost every different variety of that man's homemade wine. The ep with the exploding bullock was fantastic, especially to see Tristan standing up so amazingly to the old fart who was trying to sue them for demolishing his barn. Plenty To Grouse About was another good one, another shining example of Tristan standing up to someone and winning some much-deserved praise from Siegfried. The episode that directly followed that one as well, with the cat that James was going to put down, but Tristan convinced him to try to save him...then Helen fell in love with him and was heartbroken when his owner came to claim him.

After the third series, I found it increasingly difficult to find much to like. Recasting Helen with Lynda Bellingham was a disaster, no chemistry whatsoever with Christopher, and none of the natural warmth that Carol brought to the role. Tristan was still being written as a lazy sod, still chasing after the girls, something Peter Davison said he actually found embarrassing, considering that near the end of the show he was nearing 40, with a toddler at home, and was still shown salivating over young women who were half his age! The show became stagnant, the characters really showed almost no personal growth, even though the decades continuously changed. And I'm not even going to get into the train wreck of bringing Calum in, what purpose did that character even serve, other than to be a somewhat more eccentric subsitute for Tristan whenever Peter wasn't appearing in the show.

We are Mods! We are Mods! We are, we are, we are Mods!