Directing the Animals of All Creatures Great and Small
Across all four seasons of All Creatures Great and Small, Andy Hay has directed a whopping eleven episodes, and while he cites family as the heart of the show, animals, he says, are a close second, “because the animal stories always follow the human stories. There’s always a connection.” How to tell those stories can present certain challenges, and in an interview with MASTERPIECE, Hay shares directing anecdotes and insights about the animals that have made us well up and crack up over the years.
Some of these stories were excerpted in the All Creatures Great and Small Insider newsletter. To get insider news and content about the show, sign up to receive the free email newsletter.
- 1.
Distempered Dog: Duke
Wesley Binks (Billy Hickey) and Duke (Piper) in All Creatures Great and Small In making the show, we always make sure we’re dealing with very healthy animals, and we don’t in any way frighten them or distress them. There’s an independent animal welfare consultant attached to us, and we have several vets, but mainly our on-set veterinary advisor, Andy Barrett, who’s wonderful. It’s always our primary concern when we’re dealing with animals.
For Duke, in Episode 1 of Season 4, we had a description of a dog with distemper, which is a horrible disease for a dog to have. They shake, they shiver, they cough, they have puss in the eyes, and mostly, it’s terminal. When it was time to cast the dog playing Duke, I spoke to Jill and Dean, our animal handlers, who lined up a lot of dogs and I had a look at them on video. I specifically wanted a whippet because it’s a very Yorkshire dog. They’re quite thin, and they ordinarily are quite timid. So I interviewed quite a lot of dogs, but they just looked too healthy.
One day I went to a farm to do a recce, and Jill came with a lady who had two whippets. She brought out this first whippet and left the other one in the car—I could just see its little nose peeping over the window. The first whippet was quite friendly, but he looked so well. And I looked at the car and I just saw those eyes and asked about her. The lady said, “Oh, Piper? Piper’s very nervous. She’d be fine on set, she does shows and wins—I’m just not sure you’ll get what you want.”
So I asked to see her and this little thing popped out of the car and stood there shaking. I asked if she was frightened and she said, “No, she likes me around and is a bit nervous, that’s all.” I said, “I think she’s perfect—she’s a very healthy dog, but we can help her to look poorly by just putting safe makeup around here to look like what would be pus coming out of the eyes and redden it a bit.” Her tail kept going between her back legs because she was slightly nervous. I said, “I want you on set all the time, to be in eye shot of her, so she never feels that you are not there for her.”
And she was perfect, fabulous. The actor playing Wesley Binks, Billy Hickey, met her and adored her. She was a bit unsure of Billy first of all, but they went off on their own on a little walk, and every day he came in, they would go for a walk down the river, getting to know each other. Because it was important to me that the boy and the dog looked like they loved each other and always belonged together.
- 2.
Goats on the Go: Betty and Hilde
Training the goats for Episode 1 of All Creatures Great and Small Season 4 In Episode 2 of Season 4, we had Hilda, which is a very northern name, and Betty. It was always supposed to be just one goat, but Dean found two goats that he thought were trainable. He said, “I’m going to have two because on the day, one might go, ‘No, I’m not doing it, I’m don’t feel like it,’ so there’s always another one as a standby. Plus, it’s quite a big sequence to jump off the table in the examination room, run through the building and jump on the kitchen table.” I’d also added the embellishment of making it go into the larder and knock things over and cause chaos, so I agreed.
Then I saw him rehearsing the goats. First, they’d started on a low bale of hay, jump off that, and then they jump up on another. He was teaching them routines, using beeps and encouragement and rattling food, and slowly building up being able to jump off the height that would be as high as the examination table, and then jumping up onto what would be as high as the scullery table.
So when I saw him rehearsing with the two goats, I asked, “Do they encourage each other?” He agreed, and I asked, “Do they encourage you in terms of giving them confidence?” He said, “Without a doubt.” So I decided we’d write two goats into the story, one to jump off the table, and probably one just to jump up on the kitchen table, but keep both around because it brings more mayhem. The writer, Helen Raynor, wrote in that one of them was poorly, but the other one was just coming along for the ride to keep them company, which animals do anyway.
We walked around the set and worked out that with five setups with two cameras, we would get the whole sequence. We only had one day proper in the studio to rehearse it, and we worked on it so that they knew exactly where to go. We ended up putting people out of sight down the corridors to guide them to go into the front room. We set the loaf of bread left over from breakfast as a good target for her—she loved the bread, so Dean knew that when she came around the corner, she’d go straight for it.
In the end, only one of them jumped up and I said, “That’s fine, we don’t need to do that again.” We shot it as quickly as we could because we didn’t want them to get bored, or go off the idea of the beep, or get full and not be encouraged by the food. And they do get bored and distracted quite easily, so we had to move all the flowers—anything that looked edible had to be taken off, because goats eat anything. They also like to [urinate and defecate] regularly, so there was someone with a shovel and a cloth, making sure that no one was slipping about. We were still finding goat marbles around the place for a while. But they were beautiful creatures.
- 3.
Ferret Fun: Wilf's Great Escape
Joe Coney (Paul Bazely) and Wilf the ferret Originally, the Episode 2 story in the books was about a dog that has, I think, an eye infection—I can’t remember now, but when I first read it, I talked to [producer] Melissa Gallant about it, saying that we’d seen a lot of dogs on the show, and one thing we’d never had was a ferret. Ferrets are big in Yorkshire—people have two or three and keep them for competition, for rat catching, mouse catching, rabbit catching. They’re a kind of predatory animal, and they’re gorgeous as well. So I said, “What about a ferret?” They agreed, and we decided the ferret could have a tumor. The writer [Helen Raynor] was brilliant and came up with ferret roulette. I like the idea that the character, Joe Coney, had been born and bred in Yorkshire, but that his father had come from Sri Lanka, through the docks of Hull. And Joe, having come out of the Navy, was traveling with the ferret—he probably had two or three—and was going around to farms and getting rid of rats for them.
We worked with the actor and the writer and found the right script, what the story might be and how the ferret would fit into it. Because Joe obviously loves the ferret and it gets slightly serious because of the tumor, I thought it was a really nice idea for the ferret to escape when they were taking it across the street for the operation, just to add a little bit of fun towards the end. We always like to have humor alongside anything that’s emotional or darker. It’s the great thing about the program—it’s not mawkish or too sentimental. So before, I’d asked Dean if there was any chance that we could let the ferret out of the cage and run around. He said, “Yeah, the problem is we might lose it. But we could put it on a lead.” So he trained the ferret to walk on a lead, and then on the day we just changed that for fishing line. You couldn’t see it. He had a little harness around his body with the wire on it, and then we just took it out with VFX where you could see it.
A lot of ferrets are slightly brown, darker colored, but we chose a white one, which stands out well. It was beautiful and behaved really well. And Paul Bazely, who played Joe Coney, was really good—he just picked it up and got on it like he loved him.
- 4.
Shortbread Bandit: Jess
Anna Madeley (Mrs. Hall), Will Thorpe (Gerald) and Ernie (Jess) The dogs that are most on set now are Ernie and Erin, who play Jess and Dash. Ernie joined us as a pup a couple of years ago because unfortunately, George, the first Jess, passed away. Ernie was a big bumpy pup, not impossible, but almost impossible, to train, so what I like to do is just let him loose on the set, which is what I tend to do with the dogs—let them do whatever they’ll do. Sometimes we’ll position the animal trainers on one side of a room or another, but because they’ve gotten to know the actors more, they’ll often just be in the scullery or the living room.
There’s that one great scene at the end of Episode 5 in Season 3, when Mrs. Hall and Siegfried are sitting there after she’s come home from meeting her son. Tristan brings them in a cup of tea and a bit of the leftover shortbread that she was going to give her son. I wanted the dogs there at their feet, because it just had that homely feel. And when Ernie saw that biscuit, he just went GULP and had the whole piece! Siegfried improvised and went, “Jess!” and Mrs. Hall laughs a little bit. If you watch it, it’s there, just in the moment. It’s real.
And then at the end of Episode 7, they were playing Monopoly and I said, “Let’s let the dog loose, just come encourage it to mess the game up.” So they did, and it worked. It was in the shot and it was great. I do like letting them do what dogs will do. Ernie’s still just a pup and he climbs all over Anna [Madeley, who plays Mrs. Hall]. Erin, who plays Dash, is just sort of the sidekick. They’re both very energetic. In this last series, there’s one scene in the scullery where Ernie spontaneously jumps up on the table and grabs a whole slab of butter! So I kept it in.
- 5.
He's Just Tricki
I’ve done quite a bit with Derek, who plays Tricki. Like for the cricket episode, I said, “Let’s get him to run away across the pitch to go to his amour down the road,” that shot where the two dogs walk towards each other and then goes into slo-mo. On that day, Derek had a stand-in for the camera analysis because Derek gets hot, and it was the height of summer. So we used a little dachshund to do the run first before him, so he didn’t get too tired and hot.
He’s just such a wonderful animal on set. And he makes these lovely noises, going [snorting sounds]. We recorded them, and I’ve got a bank of all these noises, so if he moves his head, an editor will just drop in this [inquisitive sounding snort]. He’s not Scooby-Doo, we’re not trying to humanize him or take the mick out of him, but he does sometimes look like, “Hey, what are you doing? ” Or he’s just there in the background, looking, going like [disgruntled sounding grunt]. So you give him an attitude, and you can put him anywhere, do anything with him. I’ve even gotten him to make it look like he’s nicked ham out of a hamper! He’s lovely. I love him.
