The warm-hearted festive special of All Creatures Great and Small airs tonight – and its star Samuel West will settle down to watch it on Christmas Eve with his actor parents Timothy West and Prunella Scales.
In the show, Skeldale House will be celebrating Christmas while facing the impending losses of the Second World War with a young evacuee in their midst.
And in the West household, there is also an impending, but much more gradual, sense of loss as Prunella, 90, who has been diagnosed with dementia, slowly slips away.
Her condition, which is believed to have started around 15 years ago, has left her without a short-term memory and it forced her to stop filming Great Canal Journeys with husband Timothy in 2020.
But Sam – who plays the curmudgeonly Siegfried Farnon in the Channel 5 vet drama – says his mum is still “absolutely” able to enjoy his work and is still able to recognise him both on and off screen, as well as his children.
For now, the family are holding on to the woman they love, and she to them. However they are braced for the possibility of the cruel fading of recognition. Sam admits: “I expect there might be one day, soon, I don’t know.
“The thing I’m very fond of mentioning, only because I think it’s such a great piece of wisdom, is that thing she said when she was doing Great Canal Journeys.
“She said ‘I don’t always know where I’m going, but I always enjoy getting there’. That is still the case.
“She is generally quite nice about my performances, although she is sometimes quite surprised by how big I am. And she is surprised I’m not blond any more. She has got a picture of me which is about 10 years younger than I am now.
“It is fascinating, this thing.”
Meanwhile, Sam’s 88-year-old father Timothy may well be watching the episode, the finale of series three, with envy.
“He will probably be very cross he’s not in it!” chuckles Sam, who recently worked with his dad on a theatre production.
“If he is not in it, he wants to know why. I think most actors do.”
Sam, 56 – who has two children aged five and eight with his partner Laura – says his mum is “quite jolly, quite sunny” which is a “blessing”, although her condition can be particularly hard on Timothy.
Veteran stage and screen actor Timothy married Prunella in 1963, 12 years before she took on her best-known role as Sybil Fawlty, wife of Basil in Fawlty Towers.
“I think he misses her very much,” reflects Sam. “It’s hard. He has lost the wit and companionship of his best friend.”
He can, for example, no longer go to the theatre with her and discuss it afterwards. Much like tonight’s All Creatures special, she won’t remember it once it has gone.
But they try to create present moment memories with Prunella as often as they can.
Her 90th birthday party this year was a jewel. Beforehand, Sam invited people through Twitter to send their own best wishes.
“I got 6,000 replies,” he says. “I bound them into a book about 140 pages long and gave it to her, leading with ‘Best wishes from [Star Wars actor] Mark Hamill’.
“As I said in my speech, ‘I don’t know about you, but Luke Skywalker wishing Sybil Fawlty a happy 90th birthday is the content I’m here for!’ All sorts of people wrote and probably 80% were about Fawlty Towers.
“But then there were people who said ‘You did a comedy workshop in Loughborough in 1987 and I have never forgotten it’. Just tiny things. That was a very special moment.
“She just flicks through these messages and they are instantaneous hits of pleasure and they remind her of the joy she has brought to people through her work.”
Sam’s own catalogue of work now spans more than three decades. After studying English Literature at Oxford, he was cast as the very blond Prince Caspian in the BBC ’s 1989 adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader. Theatre roles followed, and movies.
Sam was nominated for a BAFTA for his role in Howards End with Helena Bonham Carter in 1992.
But he is now very happy working on All Creatures, a series reimagined from James Herriot’s classic books.
It gives him a warm glow that extends beyond the cameras. “It’s a very happy feeling on set, the happiest I have known,” he says.
Not wholly without jeopardy though, thanks to his animal co-stars. First, there are the horses.
“I had done a bit of riding, I had played a cavalry officer in Hornblower [the 1990s ITV adaptation] and done a bit of riding in Narnia,” he recalls.
“But when they called me in November last year and said ‘Do you ride, we have got you galloping bareback, can you do that?’ I said ‘No, I can’t!’”
Ever game, Sam agreed to take riding lessons, as does his daughter.
Secondly, there are the cows, which no lesson can help with.
“I don’t seem to be able to work with cows very well,” explains Sam, who has to wear steel-capped boots during filming. “They like to know where you are. If you are next to them it’s fine, if you move away they move sideways to follow you – generally on to your foot.
“The pressure is enormous, I have bruised the top of my foot quite badly.”
Beyond the safe nostalgia of All Creatures, Sam is proud of the message it sends.
“Some people watch it because it’s rosy, warm and not particularly demanding,” he admits.
“But bad things happen in it, and there is between the people and through the community a cable of support and respect which means when people are down we support them, when people are in difficulty we show up. It’s good to remind ourselves.”
Catch All Creatures Great and Small at 9pm tonight on Channel 5. Also available to stream on My5.
