March 5, 2007 -- UK -- A revival of the TV series All Creatures Great And Small, based on a Yorkshire vet's memoirs, is on the cards.

Johnny Byrne, one of the scriptwriters who helped turn James Herriot's books into a run of TV series in the 1970s and 1980s, is looking for backing for an hour-long TV special.

James Wight, son of Alf Wight, the Thirsk-based vet who used James Herriot as his pen name, told the Yorkshire Post yesterday that he and his sister, Rosie Page, liked the script and had no objections to the project.

It takes Siegfried Farnon and his younger brother Tristan to the Middle East, on a mission to buy a prize bull. It is based on a story which was in one of the Herriot books but has not been retold on screen.

The film and TV stories so far were all set in the 1940s and 1950s and the new episode is from some time later, which would fit in with the fact that the original cast are 20 years older than they were when the last series finished.

The scriptwriter is hoping that the one-off will stimulate interest in a series he has written, called Young James, based on Alf Wight's early years.

Wight was born in Sunderland in 1916 but moved to Glasgow where he got his veterinary degree.

He then went back to Sunderland, before moving to Thirsk, which he called Darrowby in his books.

The books became best-sellers and the dramatizations for cinema and TV still bring tourists to Yorkshire. His old surgery is now a visitor centre called The World of James Herriot.