It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet

A vet goes in to practise in pre-war North Yorkshire and experiences all kinds of scrapes, misadventures and funny situations before being accepted by the locals.

Based on the best selling books of James Heriot and with the fantastic Yorkshire countryside as a backdrop there isn't a great deal to go wrong and, indeed, very little does.

This is "play safe" film making from another planet! Nevertheless it does give a sense of time and place (pre war England) and delivers small laughs and a plot development of sorts.

Safe Sunday afternoon fare and no better or worse than the entertaining (but equally safe) TV series that followed.

The diary of a vet by James Herriot made into a film before the television series. It still has the Hillman Minx but different actors and the vet is already married. It's supposed to be set in the 1930s but the vet has rather long (Beatles style) hair, and in an early scene his wife has flares. Despite being made by the conservative Readers Digest, it features the famous vet scene with the vet's arm right up a heifer's nasty, and Tristan crashes the car when he's on the sauce, but he doesn't quite have the English hopelessness of Peter Davison (in the books Tristan is a bit of a ladykiller by the way).

This picks up the story of James Herriot a country vet and his new wife just before the commencement of the Second World War.

They live with his eccentric vet partner Siegfried in his practice and we see many little stories of goats chewing elastic britches ,mysteriously sick cows , lumps on cows backsides , choking vomiting dogs , dead budgies amid the onset of a world war , a running theme throughout this film.

Simplistic storylines without a doubt and maybe a tad drab for some but they work wonderfully well here and blended in with some great performances from the cast and some lovely photography of the Yorkshire countrywide together with a great musical score this is a film that stays with you.

So many great scenes , some funny , some extremely moving and at the end you are left with a nostalgic feeling and a sadness because they don't make films like this anymore.

a lovely film to watch,made me laugh,cry,you just have to watch it,so many moments of joy,like when james picks up a typical university waller at the railway station and he explains about medicane in the car,and later when the car runs out of controll into the stream when the handbrake is not applied,also at the summer fair everything goes wrong for james,also when he has a glass of wine too much and tries in vain to work on a cow,and does the job so funny,why this film is not on dvd i just do not know as it is such a good film to watch any time,also it is near the end of peace as we know it,so when the public house has extended hours to the disapproval of the new local copper,they say in the pub it's hitler,but at the end of the film,peace is at an end as the famous war speach is read on the radio