It's Christ Time!
Link - 5 stars.
I first encountered Christopher Timothy (or 'Christ Time' as I came to know him) while on a caving holiday in Yorkshire in the early 80s. We were assigned to the same team, and he was as knowledgeable and confident as I was green and terrified. He took me by the hand, and guided me expertly into the deep, dark, unseen crevices - it was quite an adventure, and we've remained firm friends ever since.
He obviously took me into his confidence, and he confessed to me he was planning some special horror editions of 'All Creatures...' - immediately, I was almost intrigued. He told me he'd developed some scripts that were quite a way off of James Herriot's source material - the first one was about a bull with a skill for finance that attempts to buy up the entire village to build a 100 metre wide road to nowhere. The second concerned a deformed piglet who is forced to walk on his hind legs, due to not being born with any fore legs - the villagers then embrace it as a new deity and form a new religion ("Pigianity"), until they're reminded by Peter Davidson, in a genuinely harrowing scene and career making speech, that it's merely an "unimpressive pig".
The reception at the time of airing was not good - it almost threatened to remove the show from the air entirely, such was the force of feeling from the nation. However, Christ Time's performance is phenomenal, as you can see he sincerely believes in the words he's uttering for the first time in his career (Peter Davidson gives it a good go, while Robert Hardy, as usual, looks peculiar, embarrassed, and more red than a human should be). However, he never truly recovered from the poor reception that his foray into script writing received - he stated his ambition to me numerous times on how he wished to be promoted to a televisual people vet, which was achieved when he won the lead role on TV's never-popular "Doctors".
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