"I hope I didn't say too much." - "You said what needed to be said."
no one cares for Audrey Hall more than Siegfried Farnon, and no one understands Siegfried Farnon better than Audrey Hall
"I hope I didn't say too much." - "You said what needed to be said."
no one cares for Audrey Hall more than Siegfried Farnon, and no one understands Siegfried Farnon better than Audrey Hall
This really lovely interview just popped up from Sam West. If I didn't think I could love him anymore this article opens explaining he came into the interview zoom meeting with his D&D name on....like imagine playing D&D with Sam West. I think I'd burst with excitement. Also interesting that his new birding show was filmed around the time his Ma died and that the BBC offered a pilot for the 2020 ACGAS whereas C5 offered the series.
Edit: See the article below the cut
After the success of All Creatures Great and Small, Samuel West is starring in a new Channel 5 factual series, Sam & Ade Go Birding
Published 11 April 2026 7:00am BST - Benji Wilson
When Samuel West logs on to our Zoom call, the name that pops up on screen is “Dr Tycho Toft”. Initially, there’s no picture, just that strange handle, so I am forced to ask who exactly has arrived sounding like a character from Gormenghast.
“Sorry! I came on with my Dungeons & Dragons name,” he says, switching it quickly to Samuel West.
What is a 59-year-old eminent Shakespearean, a star of stage and screen as well as the fourth generation of one of Britain’s most august acting families, doing playing Dungeons & Dragons, I ask? But West is much more interested in the picture on the wall behind me.
“Is that a peregrine?” he says, peeking over his glasses and leaning close to the camera. “It is! It is!” And then he is off.
“I went out for goshawks last week and I saw three, maybe four,” he says, “but I was by myself. And I realised that I just want to be with somebody else, now, when I’m birding. I texted my partner [the playwright Laura Wade] and said, ‘I’m watching goshawks and I wish you were here.’” West has decided that twitching, a long-time obsession, loves company. “It’s like sex and juggling: it’s more than twice as much fun with two people.”
It was a discovery he made thanks to filming a new Channel 5 series, Sam & Ade Go Birding. The “Ade” in the title is Adrian Edmondson, the former Young Ones star, but it is West who leads the expeditions and who got the show under steam.
West and co-star Adrian Edmondson pictured in west Cornwall to promote their new birdwatching series Credit: Channel 5/Frank Films
When we speak, he is in digs near Harrogate, filming a seventh series of All Creatures Great and Small. The remake of the Eighties classic has been, by any measure, a stunning success – he notes with great pride that the original BBC All Creatures ran for seven series, whereas his version has just had an eighth commissioned. It is this success that has given him the clout at Channel 5 to ask if he might be indulged: “I thought after I’d been playing the same part for five years on Channel 5, ‘I wonder whether they might let me talk about birds in some way.’”
West has a curious mind and broad tastes – he is wearing an AFC Wimbledon T-shirt, talks about stamp collecting, identifying birdsong by ear, the demise of interesting locomotives and a childhood fascination with what countries call themselves in their own language. He likes people who “lean forward into the world, as I do”.
It makes him the perfect man to front films about birding, his “main hobby”. “They asked who would be at the top of [my] list to come with me. And I said, ‘Well, Adrian, because he’s quite into birds and he’s lovely and he’s a friend. He said yes. So we did it.”
The series is obviously influenced by the success of BBC Two’s Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, a hymn to companionship and the joys of standing and staring that has attracted more than two million viewers. But Birding is notably darker. Episode two was filmed in November last year, a week after West’s mother, the actress Prunella Scales, died. I ask him why he chose to go ahead nonetheless.
“It wasn’t entirely unexpected, so I just thought, ‘No, let’s do it’. It wasn’t exactly The Show Must Go On, though she absolutely believed that. I mean, men are quite bad at talking about their feelings, but I don’t think we should be frightened of them. It [his mother’s death] is not something I’m against discussing. It just sort of led that way when we were filming, and it’s very easy to talk to Ade about these sorts of things.”
Scales had dementia for 20 years by the time of her death. In Birding, West also meditates on the loss of his father, the actor Timothy West, who had died just the year before.
“When two such big trees fall on your horizon, you can see much further,” he says, “but everything looks different, and you’re not quite sure how it looks different. You have to get out there and find out.”
In an interview given when he was playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the RSC in 2024, West said that he didn’t really know who he was without his parents. He ended the conversation with, “I suppose I’m about to find out”.
“That might have been a slightly w---y thing to say,” he says now, “but I think it’s probably true. Because I went into the profession; because I’m the fourth generation of actors in my family, and because I, entirely, without thinking about it, have referred so many of the decisions of my life back to them. I think you do find out who you are when they’ve gone.”
While filming the third programme, set in Somerset, “I thought I understood what not seeing them ever again meant. And then I discovered that I didn’t. It was really hard. And I thought, ‘I’d give anything for an hour with them now.’”
In her last years, Scales would forget who her son was. “She said to me once, ‘Where do you live?’ I said, ‘Islington’. And she said, ‘Oh, that’s where my son lives’. I said, ‘That’s who I am’. And she looked up at me and asked, ‘How did you get so big?’” At first it was upsetting. “But it was clear that I was available to her in many different ages. I was seven some of the time and blond, and she kept sort of touching my hair, which is now dark and receding, but used to be fair and straight and wondered where this seven-year-old had gone. And sometimes she was in her mid-50s, late 50s, like I am now, and I was about 23. And I thought this was really odd.”
West says he used this experience after his father died as a way of coping with his grief. “I thought, ‘He is now available to me in all the ages I remember him. He is simultaneously available to me as the man who took me fishing when I was eight, and the man who took me to university when I was 20, and the man who came to see my first show, and the man who used to give me notes when I was at the RSC the first time.’ That’s all my mum was doing, really. Except I was still alive. It made sense of my mum’s dementia in a way that was less confusing.”
Scales died peacefully at home in London on October 27, 2025, aged 93. It was a day after what would have been her and Timothy West’s 62nd wedding anniversary. “It was only the first one they’d spent apart,” West says. “And 61 years of marriage is not to be sniffed at. I mean, I’m not married, but even if I had been, I’d never get anywhere near that.”
He says he is planning a memorial in July. “We’re trying to hold it in Chelsea, which is, if you can imagine, where she lived as a young actor when you still could – when it wasn’t the most expensive borough in Britain. I hope it will be as joyous a celebration as my father’s one, which we held 10 months after he died. But that will, I suppose, draw a line under it.”
West has been with Wade, best known for her 2018 play Home, I’m Darling, for years. They live in north London with their two daughters, eight and 11, and go birding together as a family. It is all very wholesome, but still tinged with West’s keen-eyed drive. “When I met Laura, she didn’t have any flat shoes!” he says. “Now, Laura and I will wait for three hours to see a bird if we haven’t got it on our list.”
Surely the children get bored, like all children do? “They wouldn’t sit for hours, but they have got a fair bit of knowledge. I set the bar reasonably high. They know that if they confuse a moorhen with a coot, I’ll sell them…” He would prefer not to talk directly about his children – he doesn’t on the programme – although you sense that if they wanted to join the family business, neither he nor his partner would stand in their way.
‘When I met Laura, she didn’t have any flat shoes!’ West and his partner, playwright Laura Wade, now go birding with their children Credit: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images
Born in 1966, West is the grandson of the actor Lockwood West. He has a younger brother, Joe, who works as a teacher and translator, and a half-sister Juliet (from his father’s first marriage to the Eurovision Song Contest winner Jacqueline Boyer) who is a make-up artist. The Wests lived in Wandsworth Common in south-west London and he went to Alleyn’s school. “It did one thing really well, which was it taught everybody that enthusiasm was cool. My parents taught me that as well – that’s probably my greatest inheritance.”
After Oxford, where he studied English, West was about to start at drama school when he was cast in the BBC’s 1989 adaptation of CS Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. He has worked in theatre and television ever since. Is he happy with the job of actor? “I think in some ways it would have been better to try and do things a bit more differently,” he says. “I don’t think I ever would have done anything outside the arts, but I modelled an enormous amount of my life on the stuff that I learnt from my parents and thinking, ‘Well, if I’m ever half as good as you, I’ll be all right, I’ll be happy.’"
The problem has been that the career they pursued has now been dismantled. “I grew up in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties watching them play these big classical roles in classical touring companies all over the world. And I thought that’s what an actor could be, maybe even should be. But I’d educated myself into a job that didn’t exist any more, because if I think ‘I ought to be a classical touring actor,’ I can’t. Nobody does it now. So I’ve sort of turned myself into somebody that I thought my parents would quite like.”
If West is a classically trained Shakespearean lacking those classical roles to play, he hasn’t done badly. He appears on Birding bedecked in thousands of pounds of top-end equipment. He is a regular as Peter Judd, a relations consultant and retired Conservative politician in Slow Horses, one of the best shows on television, and his Siegfried Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small is acclaimed and beloved.
Siegfried may even end up being the role that defines him. There is a moment in Birding where he says to Edmondson that this kind of stereotyping used to frustrate his mother. “When she was so celebrated for Fawlty Towers, she said the only downside was that she didn’t get offered any more classical plays.” Edmondson, who to many has been Vyvyan from The Young Ones for his whole career, replies that one of the tragedies of doing great comedy is that it “kiboshes your possibilities”.
West agrees. “She was really grateful for Fawlty Towers because it meant that when she did plays, people came. But it maybe defined her as a comic actress, when the role she wanted the most was Constance in King John.
Prunella Scales ‘was so celebrated for Fawlty Towers, she said the only downside was that she didn’t get offered any more classical plays’ Credit: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo
“Before I did Siegfried, I did almost nothing that was meant to be funny. And I mostly played Victorian murderers or perverts or Conservative Party politicians. When they were commissioning All Creatures, they took it to the BBC and took it to Channel 5. The BBC said, ‘Oh, this is an excellent idea. We’ll make a pilot.’ Channel 5 said, ‘Oh, this is an excellent idea. We’ll make a series.’ So they went with Channel 5. It’s a good job they did, because if it was on the BBC, I wouldn’t have been cast.”
What does he mean by that? “There might have been people who didn’t take it on,” he says, implying that he wasn’t first choice for the role. He won’t expand, but the inference is also that the BBC would have wanted a bigger-name actor than the smaller Channel 5.
Siegfried Farnon, West’s character in Channel 5’s All Creatures Great and Small, may be a career-defining role Credit: Channel 5
“It’s like Tom Hanks in Big. You look up the list of people who turned it down, and it’s endless. Dennis Quaid, Robert De Niro – people who just would have been awful. Sorry, they’re great actors, but Tom Hanks is impeccable.”
You can see why he loves that film: Tom Hanks in Big is a child-like enthusiast and West is one too. “I’m a geek. I was a very geeky child, as you can probably imagine, but I was also quite a shy and sometimes quite a scared one. I always enjoyed things that were catalogued or allowed me to tick bits of it off. It made me feel like I had more of a handle on it.”
Having got into birding 20 years ago, he says, “I always wanted to be a member of the Young Ornithologists club. They’re now called ‘Wildlife Explorers.’ And even as an RSPB ambassador, I’m allowed to say that I wish they hadn’t changed it. But birding never really grabbed me with the force that it does now, until I took over at the Crucible.”
He’s referring to a stint as the artistic director at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield from 2000 to 2007, following Michael Grandage in a job that included programming as well as performing. West’s role was to try and sustain the very regional theatre he knew was struggling. “I wasn’t very good at it, and it was very difficult, and I couldn’t sleep a lot of the time. I lived in the west of Sheffield, quite close to the Derbyshire border, beautiful part of the world, so I used to drive out and walk before breakfast. And I’d hear things that were singing in the spring. I’ve got quite a good ear for music, and it turns out birdsong was my gateway drug into birding.”
It has been a topsy-turvy few years for West. Being out with his notebook and his lists and doing what Iris Murdoch called “unselfing” is his therapy. “I have lots and lots of interests. But birding is one that’s never really left me, just because it’s a way of plugging into the natural world. It’s a great comfort, when someone dies, to watch the world continuing – especially the non-human world, because so much of the human world is in crisis at the moment. Birding calms me down.”
Watching West going birding with his friend is a soothing experience for the viewer too; the perfect balm in a time of turmoil.
Sam & Ade Go Birding is on Channel 5 on Tuesday April 14 at 8pm
[ID: Sketch in dark reddish brown of Siegfried Farnon and Audrey Hall from All Creatures Great and Small (2020). Both are sitting on a sofa, and Audrey has pulled Siegfried in, hugging him with one arm behind his back and the other around his neck, her head tilted town against him. His face is partially hidden behind her arm, and he is turned towards her, one hand, which is bandaged in gauze, resting on her waist. End ID]
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First attempt at drawing Audrey and Siegfried. One I'll hopefully revisit when art is working better than atm and try to tidy up/correct/generally improve
There’s a difference between a female character who exists in a story and has a romantic relationship with a male character versus a female character who exists in a story to have a romantic relationship with a male character
Other than all of the shippers writing the beautiful fanfics that are keeping me sane until season 7 here are who I believe may have caught on to this amazing ship that has yet to sail 🚂
#1 Good Ol’ Gerald:
Regardless of how you feel about the notorious 🥸 this bro totally clocked A & S’s budding feelings. A said she wouldn’t follow him to the lakes because she needed to be there for Helen and Mr. Farnon; Gerald said he always knew this would happen. Based on this and the unspoken beef S and Gerald had for eachother (I mean come on S’s rat is named Gerald for crying out loud!) it totally seems like he saw something between them.
#2: Pony Gal Susan:
Although Susan was only seen briefly she seemed to know S pretty well…. She obviously seemed a little jealous and uncomfortable during this exchange when she asked how S & A know each-other and why A is back. When S kicked her to the curb it was a little obvious as well 😬
3. Literally Anyone on the Train Platform:
All one of those patrons had to do was turn their head to see two lovers embracing after three years apart- ‘nuff said.
4. Tristan the Bird Boy Farnon:
Tristan knows S & A probably better than anyone since they have been surrogate parents to him for so many years. I find it hard to believe he doesn’t have some inclining as to the feelings they have for one another. If I walked in and saw my brother caressing the housekeeper’s pinny I would sure hope he was in love with her otherwise that is just creepy… 😶🌫️ Also Tris is who brings up the fact that S is acting worse since A left than when Evelyn died… I think he done clocked ‘em.
5. The Incomparable James and Helen Herriot:
First of all, James has probably spent the most time with S these last three years and he experienced S’s crash out on the hill while searching for Fly. Helen and A are close pals, I find it hard to believe she wouldn’t notice a little something brewing between the two. Also, you know these two lovebirds are pillow talkin’ about their pals and strengthening an argument to clock the feels.
6. Wee Jimmy:
POV you are 5 years old and you walk in on your Godmother-Auntie Audrey caressing your Godfather-Uncle Siegfried’s cheek… You are 99% sure they are married anyway… You don’t even need to clock what’s has already been canon since your birth.
7. The Alderson Clan:
Jenny and Richard are chatting it up with Helen and James over at Heston all the time. Richard flat out called S out at Jenny’s dinner asking what is he going to do without A. Obviously they know about S’s breakdown without A and have come to conclusions.
8. Our Main Man Richard Carmody:
Carmody may have been inebriated when he spilled the fact that S called A “quite quite remarkable” but he is very intelligent and did a lot of research on “pair bonds”. I bet all the money in the bank that he clocked the feels when he sobered up.
9. Girl’s Girl Maggie:
Maggie has know the Farnons and A for a long time and her and A seem pretty close. You can see her knowing look in this GIF when she tells Mrs.H- “It’s not always just about what he wants”. Maggie is too polite to pry but she clocked em’ a mile away.
10. Jess, Dash and Lucky the Fox:
We all know animals can sense way more than people can. 🐶 🐶 Jess and Dash know their people better than they know themselves, they sense the love that hasn’t been realized yet 💕 Also are you kidding me that fox was the only witness to this adorable moment, he may have thought it was a fever dream momentarily but he knows what’s up!
Anyone I missed?? I had fun with this 😂 please pass this on to the writers to remind them this can be a blatant love story now… we all know what is up.
I never thought I could love a "housekeeper ship" or possibly any ship more than this pair. It was this moment right here that sealed the deal for me...
Then I started watching ACGAS and fell in love with these two from the very first episode. I mean, how could I not ship them after this scene...
But then once again, and very late to the game this time, I discovered The Doctor Blake Mysteries and what do you know, I'm suddenly falling down that rabbit hole of the beautiful housekeeper and her slightly grumpy/eccentric man again.
Two out of three ain't bad, still living in hope that ACGAS might make it three out of three in the coming series. 🙏🏻 They are meant to be together.
"I would sometimes phone his house, and Auntie Audrey would say: "Sorry, Donald can't speak to you now. He's turning his sardines." That was the sort of man you were dealing with.” / it only took six years until we finally got this scene
I definitely have a thing for brokenhearted Docs / Vets running through town like men possessed to try and stop their (soulmates) housekeepers from leaving 😭😭😭
Something a little bit silly. But silly is good. Especially on a dark and cold day like today. Don't ask what my living-room table looks like right now. Baking soda *everywhere* 😅
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