Channel 5 The Yorkshire Vet

Several years of drone filming in Thirsk and across Herriot country in North Yorkshire, spring, summer, autumn and winter

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LocationThirsk, North Yorkshire

ProductionDaisybeck Studios, Leeds

BroadcasterChannel 5

AircraftDJI Inspire 2 with X5S camera

Channel 5 The Yorkshire Vet drone filming

Play film

Location: Thirsk, North Yorkshire

Yorkshire from above, in every season

The Channel 5 Yorkshire Vet programme follows the life of a busy veterinary surgery in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, linked to the famous James Herriot.

On this shoot we provided several years of drone filming, capturing stunning GVs over each year: spring, summer, autumn and winter.

For this shoot we flew the DJI Inspire 2 with the X5S Micro Four Thirds camera, working with the team at Daisybeck Studios in Leeds and the series producer at the time, Lou Cowmeadow.

The Yorkshire Vet has been on Channel 5 since 2015 and has become one of the channel’s best-loved programmes, watched by more than two million viewers and narrated by Christopher Timothy, who played James Herriot in the BBC’s All Creatures Great and Small.

The crew

A two-man drone filming crew

We were one of the first drone filming crews to work on The Yorkshire Vet, working for several years as a two-man team: Phil Fearnley flying the aircraft and his brother Ian Fearnley on camera.

2Crew: pilot and camera operator

4Seasons filmed every year

X5SMicro Four Thirds drone camera

2015The Yorkshire Vet begins on Channel 5

We started on The Yorkshire Vet with the DJI Inspire 1 and, when the new upgraded aircraft came out, changed to the DJI Inspire 2.

The flexibility of these aircraft gives incredible cinematic drone footage, especially as a two-man drone crew, where the team can really craft the perfect drone shot. Myself (Phil Fearnley) flying the drone and my camera operator and brother, Ian Fearnley, using the independent X5S drone camera.

With one of us concentrating on the flight path and the other on framing, focus and exposure, the camera can pan, tilt and hold a subject while the aircraft flies a completely different line. It is how the long, smooth reveals of the Yorkshire countryside in the programme are made.

It’s a superb set-up with long flight times and image quality of the highest level. It’s also a small enough drone to pack down quickly and move to the next drone filming location throughout the Yorkshire Dales.

On the road

Pilot, camera operator and the Inspire in all weathers

The story behind the series

James Herriot, Thirsk and the real Darrowby

The Yorkshire Vet exists because of one man: Alf Wight, the Thirsk vet who wrote as James Herriot and made this corner of North Yorkshire famous around the world.

ThirskNorth YorkshireJames HerriotAlf Wight23 KirkgateDarrowbyAll Creatures Great and SmallWorld of James HerriotSkeldale

Alf Wight arrived in Thirsk in 1940 to join Donald Sinclair’s veterinary practice at 23 Kirkgate. Thirty years later he began writing about his life as a country vet under the pen name James Herriot, turning Thirsk into the fictional market town of Darrowby and the practice into Skeldale House.

The books sold in their millions and became All Creatures Great and Small, first on BBC television with Christopher Timothy as James Herriot and again, more recently, in a new series filmed in the Yorkshire Dales.

The original surgery at 23 Kirkgate is now the World of James Herriot museum, and visitors come to Thirsk from all over the world to see it. The practice itself carried on as Skeldale Veterinary Centre, taking its name from the books.

That is where The Yorkshire Vet began: a real, working, mixed practice, treating everything from pet dogs and cats to cattle, sheep, horses and the odd alpaca, with a direct line back to James Herriot himself.

The practice

Skeldale, Thirsk: Julian Norton and Peter Wright

When we were filming, the two Yorkshire Vets were Julian Norton and Peter Wright, partners at Skeldale Veterinary Centre in Thirsk.

Julian NortonPeter WrightSkeldale Veterinary CentreThirskLou Cowmeadow, series producerDaisybeck StudiosChristopher Timothy, narrator

Peter Wright came to the practice as a young vet and learned his trade under Alf Wight and Donald Sinclair, the real James Herriot and Siegfried Farnon. Julian Norton worked alongside him at Skeldale for many years, and together they became two of the best-known vets in Britain.

We always film the Skeldale vets practice for the opening scenes, which was a little tricky due to the closeness of a major road. So early starts were required to stay safely within our CAA permissions.

We would often meet Peter and Julian whilst on our visits to the practice, and they took great interest in looking at our drones and asking how they work.

What the vets do on screen is exactly what they do every day: early-morning calvings, lambing in a cold barn, emergency operations and routine farm visits across North Yorkshire, with the patience and good humour that Herriot wrote about.

At the practice

Outside Skeldale Veterinary Centre in Thirsk

The locations

Four seasons over Herriot country

Most of our drone flying is spent filming general views of the area, and repeating the same areas about four times a year to match the change of seasons.

ThirskVale of MowbrayHambleton HillsSutton BankWhite Horse of KilburnNorth York MoorsYorkshire DalesFarms and villages of North Yorkshire

Thirsk sits in the Vale of Mowbray with the Hambleton Hills and the North York Moors rising to the east and the Yorkshire Dales away to the west. It is big, open farming country: stone villages, dry-stone walls, sheep on the hill and cattle in the valley bottoms.

It is the landscape James Herriot drove through on his rounds, and the view from the top of Sutton Bank, which he called the finest in England, has barely changed since.

Returning to the same farms, lanes and hillsides in spring, summer, autumn and winter gives the series its rhythm. The same field is full of lambs in April, cut for hay in July, golden in October and under snow in January, and the drone shows the year turning in a way no other camera can.

Winter was always the hardest and the most rewarding: frozen fingers, short days and batteries that need keeping warm, but a covering of snow over the Yorkshire hills makes for unforgettable pictures.

Out on the farms

With the vets’ clients and the film crews across North Yorkshire

Daisybeck Studios

Springtime on the Farm and Our Great Yorkshire Life

Daisybeck Studios produce The Yorkshire Vet together with a whole host of other shows now filming around Yorkshire.

We are proud to be part of the Daisybeck drone filming freelance units and have now also worked on the Springtime / Summertime On The Farm series and the show Our Great Yorkshire Life.

It’s always a pleasure flying drones for Daisybeck, especially when they use presenters such as Helen Skelton, who we know well from filming on BBC Countryfile. It makes life so much easier and fun.

Springtime on the Farm brought the same Yorkshire farming world to Channel 5 as a live event, with lambing sheds, new arrivals and the Yorkshire Vets themselves dropping in. Our aerials set the scene over the farm and the surrounding countryside.

Moving forward with our expanding drone fleet, we are able to offer the DJI Mavic 3 Cine if required, with its 40-minute flight time and the ability to capture 4K drone footage filmed in super-high-quality ProRes, as an alternative to the larger DJI Inspire 2 range.

Plus we have the new FPV drones, perfect for flying through barns, through woodland and following cars down country lanes. A drone for every occasion!

Springtime on the Farm