Music student Adrian leads band in C5 hit drama All Creatures Great and Small
Music student Adrian Austin recently showed off his skills as a conductor and arranger to a huge audience with an appearance in Channel 5’s All Creatures Great and Small.
Currently in the second year of his BMus in Music, Adrian appeared in the final episode of season six of the popular series, conducting a brass band playing at a village celebration to mark VJ Day at the end of World War 2.
In reality, Adrian conducts the Skipton Brass Band in North Yorkshire, whose admin manager lives near some of filming locations in the village of Arncliffe.
Study Music at the University of Huddersfield
“The back door of our admin manager Sarah’s house is actually used as part of Siegfried's house in the series, and she had been trying to persuade the production company to get the band on for ages,” says Adrian. “They finally gave in to her and said we could be in season six.”
The band were asked to be extras in the episode’s penultimate scene, and are then seen and heard playing Gustav Holst's ‘I vow to thee my country’ in the series’ poignant last scene, where the villagers of Darrowby gather around one of the many beacons that were lit to mark the end of the conflict.
Although unable to attend filming of the last scene, Adrian made his mark having conducted the brass band through his own arrangement of the Holtz piece, which was then mimed to when the cameras rolled.
“I think the make-up people were glad I wasn’t there, as I have a lot of tattoos on show and they had to work hard to cover them up as there weren’t any tattoos like mine in that period!
“I did a quick, fairly traditional arrangement of the music as it is so well known – it speaks for itself, really. It was only recorded a couple of hours before the band filmed the scene that ends the episode.”
Based on a series of books by the vet James Herriot, ‘All Creatures….’ has enjoyed a hugely popular revival. Two films and then a long-running BBC TV series based on Herriot’s books were filmed in the 1970s and 1980s, and Channel 5’s revival has also proved to be a big hit outside of the UK.
“When you're driving through Skipton and nearby through the summer, you get a lot of French and German cars coming over to go through the Dales because they want to see where it was filmed.
“Knowing that a piece of music that I've arranged has been used on the TV performed by people that I'm lucky enough to be part of the band with really has been something for my bucket list.
“Also knowing that millions of people are going to end up seeing this all over the world doesn't quite make sense, because it could have been anybody but it ended up being me. I'm so glad that we've done conducting as part of my course, and that I had the wherewithal to answer the advert for the Skipton Brass Band all those months ago. You just get so many extra opportunities through conducting that you wouldn't normally get through just playing.”