Latest news with #CarolDrinkwater
The Sun
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
All Creatures Great and Small star reveals Channel 5 bosses REFUSED to have her back for remake
CAROL Drinkwater revealed Channel 5 bosses have snubbed her for the remake of All Creatures Great and Small. The star, who starred as Helen Herriot in all three series of the charming TV show, was once one of the highest-paid actresses at the BBC. 4 Carol, 77, now lives in France with her filmmaker husband, Michel Noll, and is a thriving author. Despite her success, Carol admits that it was a "mistake" leaving the show and has since been cast aside by producers who are planning on rebooting the programme. Speaking to MailOnline she said: "I'd love to have played Mrs Pumphrey in the All Creatures reboot but they wouldn't give it to me. Leaving All Creatures was also a mistake financially. 'What do you think you're doing?' my father asked at the time. "'You're giving away the best card in your hand!' But I don't go in for regrets - it's a waste of energy." Carol and Michel live on a ten-acre olive farm in the south of France, where she writes her Mediterranean travel books, which inspired a series of TV documentary films. The beloved drama returned in 2020 and captured audiences' hearts with the quaint tales of rural Yorkshire life. Following five successful series, viewers have been eagerly awaiting news on whether James Herriot and the gang would be back for more. The beloved cast have now been given the green light to start filming for the much-anticipated sixth series. Earlier this year, Samuel West, who plays Siegfried Farnon, took to social media and unveiled a snapshot of a clapperboard revealing that production for the new episodes already has begun. Taking to X - formerly Twitter - he teased: "Thanks for your kind comments about #AllCreaturesGreatAndSmall Season Five. "Never long enough... Sad that it's over, but we hope this will raise spirits; we started filming Season Six today, More news later." The show's official Twitter account also posted the clapperboard in its own announcement. They teased: "Attention #ACGAS fans. Exciting news the cast and crew have officially kicked off filming for Season 6 in beautiful Yorkshire today! We can't wait to return to Darrowby with all of you soon." Fans rushed to the comment section to share their excitement, with one writing: 'It's that time of year again, and I couldn't be happier about it." Another added: 'You don't understand how excited I am about this.' A third penned: "Fabulous love this programme, can not wait." A fourth said: "So exciting such a long wait!" A fifth chimed in: "The best show on TV." The release date has not been confirmed, but the new episodes are expected to air on Channel 5 in autumn. 4 4 4
Daily Mail
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
I still get royalties from All Creatures Great And Small... five decades on! says CAROL DRINKWATER
Carol Drinkwater is an author and actress best known for playing Helen Herriot in the original BBC dramatisation of All Creatures Great And Small. After three series on the hit TV show, based on the James Herriot novels, the 77-year-old carved out a successful career as an author. Her Olive Farm quartet of books have sold more than a million copies. Her later Mediterranean travel books inspired a series of TV documentary films. She has lived in France with her French filmmaker husband, Michel Noll, since their marriage in 1988, and has two step-daughters from his first marriage. What did your parents teach you about money? My actress sister Linda (who was married to the late Man About The House star Brian Murphy) and I grew up in a Kent village near Bromley. My father Peter, the son of a Brixton cab driver, was very much a self-made man. After working as a band leader, he became a theatrical agent and made quite a lot of money – enough to have me educated privately. My mother Phyllis, an Irish farm girl, came to England to train as a nurse but stopped working after marrying Daddy and starting a family – ever afterwards she was dependent on him financially, but it was a tempestuous marriage and sometimes, if he was away working, there was no money to buy the essentials. I therefore grew up determined to be financially independent. Both my parents encouraged me to dream big – Mummy used to say, 'Think champagne and you'll drink champagne'. And from the age of ten, Daddy got me typing up contracts for his agency, earning sixpence a contract. By Friday, I'd have sometimes made ten shillings, so I learnt the value of money at an early age. Have you ever struggled to make ends meet? Yes, as a young actress when I was doing a bit of telly here and there. I rarely went on the dole because I felt there was a kind of shame to doing so, but worked as a waitress in the evening, or did temping work so I could pay the electricity bills in my rented flat. I'm still terrified of getting into debt all these years on. Have you ever been paid silly money? I was paid £250 an episode when I first joined All Creatures in the late 1970s, but by the time I left the show three series later I was the highest-paid actress at the BBC. I got £5,000 to appear in a couple of one-off episodes – although it was 'peanuts' compared to what an actor in a hit TV drama can earn today. The wonderful thing about All Creatures is that even now I get royalties as the show is still being aired. Three or four times a year I'll get a cheque for a few thousand pounds. It's like magic money! What was the best year of your financial life? I signed a six-figure book contract in the Nineties but Michel and I needed the money to bail out his film company, which nearly went bust after a partner on a movie project let him down badly. A series of Amazon Kindle novellas I wrote from 2010-2015, such as Hotel Paradise, also did very well, topping the charts in both the US and Germany. That was seriously good money. The most expensive thing you bought for fun? A nearly new, top-of-the-range navy blue Mercedes convertible, costing £45,000 in the late 1980s. I loved driving it along the French Riviera in a silky top and sunglasses –- in the days before I became more environmentally aware. It gave me a decade-plus of fun, though it wasn't cheap to run. What is your biggest money mistake? Our ten-acre olive farm in the south of France has proved cripplingly expensive and a money pit, and frankly it's getting a little beyond us now. I'm considering whether it's time to move on, though it would break my heart to do so. Leaving All Creatures was also a mistake financially. 'What do you think you're doing?' my father asked at the time. 'You're giving away the best card in your hand!' But I don't go in for regrets – it's a waste of energy. I'd love to have played Mrs Pumphrey in the All Creatures reboot but they wouldn't give it to me. Best money decision you have made? Buying our olive farm might have been a mistake financially, but it's also given me a huge amount of pleasure and the land is now worth a few million. Landing my All Creatures role was like winning the lottery, not just for the job but for the doors it opened, such as working in Australia. Will you pass your money down or spend it all? If I go first, I'd like to make sure Michel is financially secure. I also want to ensure that my step-daughters and grandchildren are OK moneywise when I'm gone. Do you own any property? Yes, a six-bedroom olive farm with a large pool, overlooking the Bay of Cannes, which Michel and I bought for £220,000 in 1985. We also own a 16th century former priest's house near the Champagne area, which I bought for around £180,000 about ten years ago. My father was a great believer in investing in property, and I am too. Do you have a pension? I don't have ISAs or stocks and shares, just a very basic British state pension. If you were Chancellor what would you do? If I'd bumped into Rachel Reeves after the PMQs where she was so tearful, I'd have dabbed her eyes with a hanky and given her a hug. If I was doing the job in France, I'd stop everyone moaning about the age of retirement and trying to get it back to 60. What is your number one financial priority? To ensure Michel and I are secure in the years ahead. I've no plans to retire – I'd like to keep writing until my words are too doddery for anyone to understand.
Irish Independent
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Carol Drinkwater: ‘Playing a character on stage every night, so finely drawn, offered me the opportunity to inhabit Hardy's powerful storytelling'
Carol Drinkwater is a multi-award-winning actress best known for her portrayal of Helen Herriot in the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small. Her latest novel, One Summer in Provence, has just been published by Corvus.
Irish Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Amelia Loulli wins Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize
In The Irish Times tomorrow, a host of our leading authors and well-read critics recommend the best books of the year so far for your reading pleasure. Gill Perdue tells Fiona Gartland about her latest thriller, The Night I Killed Him. Stephen Collins reflects on Telling the Truth is Dangerous: How Robert Dudley Edwards changed Irish history forever, Neasa MacErlean's biography of her grandfather, who taught Collins at UCD. And Carol Drinkwater discusses her latest novel, her career and Irish roots. Reviews are Séamas O'Reilly on the best graphic novels of the year so far; Andrew Lynch on Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power by Augustine Sedgewick; Ruby Eastwood on It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me: On Femininity and Fame by Philippa Snow; Claire Hennessy on the best YA fiction; John Boyne on Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told by Jeremy Atherton Lin; Jessica Traynor on Ocean by Polly Clark; Huda Awan on The Boys by Leo Robson; Tim Fanning on Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Tao Leigh Goffe; Philippa Conlon on All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman; Lucy Sweeney Byrne on Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski; Adrienne Murphy on After the Train, edited by Evelyn Conlon and Rebecca Pelan; Stan Erraught on Rebecca S Miller's Are You Dancing? Showbands, Popular Music and Memory in Ireland ; John Walshe on Human Resources: Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain – in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things by Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba; and Kevin Power on Oddbody by Rose Keating. This weekend's Irish Times Eason offer is The Drowned by John Banville, just €5.99, a €6 saving. Eason offer Amelia Loulli has won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025, supported by the Atlantic Philanthropies and run by The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast. READ MORE Loulli was announced as the winner for Slip, published by Jonathan Cape, during the award night readings in the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast. She is a PhD candidate at Newcastle University where she researches the poetics of breath and writing trauma. In 2021 she won a Northern Writers' Award and in 2023 she was writer in residence at the British School in Rome. She lives in Cumbria with her three teenagers. 'Thank you to the judges for choosing Slip as their winner,' Loulli said. 'It's hard to articulate how much it means, all these years after beginning to write Slip's first poems, to have this work recognised with such an honour. 'I wrote Slip in the hope that it might challenge inherited shame by opening conversations about the stories and experiences we find it hardest to share. I also wrote these poems as I write all of my poems- in a state of wonder at the immense power of language and in conversation with the poets I most appreciate and admire- many of whom are past winners of this very prize. I'm extremely grateful to the judges and to the Seamus Heaney Centre for confirming Slip in such excellent company.' This year's judges were Prof Fran Brearton, Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow Fiona Benson, and Dr Dawn Watson. The shortlist also included The Butterfly House, by Kathryn Bevis; High Jump as Icarus Story, by Gustav Parker Hibbett; rock flight, by Hasib Hourani; The Iron Bridge, by Rebecca Hurst; and Food for the Dead, by Charlotte Shevchenko Knight. The prize is awarded annually to a writer whose first full collection has been published in the preceding year, by a UK or Ireland-based publisher. The winning writer receives £5,000 and is invited to participate in the Seamus Heaney Centre's busy calendar of literary events. * ONE, an imprint of Pushkin Press, is to publish Little Vanities, the third novel by prizewinning author and critic Sarah Gilmartin next May. Set in Dublin, Little Vanities follows the decades-long friendship between two couples from their Trinity college days to early middle life. Exploring their marriages and intertwined relationships, the novel circles around a performance of Pinter's Betrayal, with the play's depiction of deception, hidden emotions and veiled motivations all too present in the real world. Displaying Gilmartin's flair for magnetic storytelling readers will expect from her novels Dinner Party and Service, Little Vanities weaves multiple timeframes and points of view into her most compelling and ambitious work yet. Gilmartin said: 'I'm very happy to be published once again by the brilliant Pushkin Press and can't wait for them to share Little Vanities with readers. It's a story about the messy, interconnected relationships of two couples approaching 40 who can't quite let go of their youthful desires and ambitions. An exploration of longing, as driver and destroyer, it looks at the lengths people are willing to go to in the pursuit of pleasure over pain.' Publisher Laura Macaulay said: 'I'm in awe of what Sarah Gilmartin has achieved with Little Vanities: it's a sexy, funny, irresistibly clever novel about betrayal and desire written with incisive bite – the characters are living with me still. Readers are going to love it.' Gilmartin won the Máirtín Crawford Short Story Award in 2020. Her debut novel Dinner Party (ONE, 2021) was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Kate O'Brien Award. Her second novel Service (ONE, 2023) was a Washington Post top books of summer and included in the Irish Times list of the best Irish fiction of the 21st century (2025). She is the current Arts Council Writer-in-Residence at Dublin City University. * Bestselling thriller author Jo Spain has moved to Zaffre, the flagship adult commercial fiction imprint of Bonnier Books UK, in a six-figure deal. World English rights for three books were acquired by Zaffre publisher Ben Willis from Nicola Barr at Rye Literary. Never To Be Found, the first book in the deal, is a standalone thriller to be published June 2026. It's based on a chilling phenomenon in Japan known as Jōhatsu - people who vanish voluntarily from their lives. Spain is the author of 13 bestselling thrillers, including three No.1s. She is also a successful screenwriter, and, along with her writing partner David Logan, she showruns Harry Wild, now in its fifth season. On her own, she has written the new mini-series Mix Tape, which won the audience choice award at the prestigious U.S. festival SXSW and has just been released in Australia to rave reviews. The series has been picked up by BBC2 for a late summer release. She is currently adapting her own novels The Trial, with Metropolitan Pictures (Wednesday), The Last to Disappear with Finland MTV and Don't Look Back with Archery Pictures. * To mark the publication of Two Kinds of Stranger by Steve Cavanagh, the thriller writer will be doing an event at Eason's, O'Connell St, Dublin on Thursday, July 24th, at 7pm. Tickets at €5 will be available to buy from and are redeemable against the book. * The National Concert Hall, in collaboration with the ARINS project (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South), the Royal Irish Academy and Notre Dame University, will present a landmark public event, For and Against a United Ireland, on November 30th, at 7.30pm. As part of the NCH Talks series, two of the island's most respected journalists and commentators, Fintan O'Toole and Sam McBride, will each present their arguments for and against a united Ireland, a timely and thought-provoking discussion based on their forthcoming book from the RIA. Tickets: €20 (Book & Ticket Bundle €35) * Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland, will discuss her memoir Frankly with writer and journalist Susan McKay at the Seamus Heaney HomePlace on Tuesday, August 19th, at 7.30pm. Tickets are £22.50. Frankly recounts her journey from working-class roots in Ayrshire to the forefront of Scottish politics as the country's first female - and longest-serving - First Minister. Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire receiving his second PhD in March 2025 Irish Food History: A Companion, co-edited by Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire of TU Dublin and graduate Dr Dorothy Cashman, has been named Best Culinary History Book in the World at the 2025 Gourmand Awards, held during the Cascais World Food Summit in Portugal. This global recognition highlights TU Dublin's international leadership in culinary arts scholarship and affirms the university's reputation as a centre of excellence in food culture, history, and academic publishing. Published by the Royal Irish Academy, Irish Food History: A Companion takes readers on a compelling journey through Ireland's culinary heritage from the Ice Age to the contemporary food scene. The richly illustrated volume features contributions from TU Dublin staff and graduates, including Dr Elaine Mahon, Dr Brian J. Murphy, Margaret Connolly, current PhD candidate Fionnán O'Connor, and PhD graduates Dr Tara McConnell and Dr John D. Mulcahy. The book's distinctive visual design is the work of Brenda Dermody from TU Dublin's School of Art and Design. Speaking at the award ceremony at the Estoril Congress Centre, Gourmand Awards founder Edouard Cointreau praised the publication, stating: 'Congratulations to the Royal Irish Academy, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman on the publication of Irish Food History: A Companion! This expertly curated and richly illustrated volume offers an extraordinary journey through Ireland's culinary past. With contributions from leading historians and a masterful blend of storytelling, research, and evocative descriptions, the book is a treasure for anyone passionate about food, history, and cultural heritage.' Established in 1995, the Gourmand Awards are the only international competition dedicated to books on food and drink culture. Open to entries in all languages and involving over 200 countries annually, the awards are a global benchmark of excellence in food writing and scholarship. Mac Con Iomaire welcomed the award as a milestone moment for the university: 'We are overjoyed to have our book appreciated on the global stage. This accolade reflects not only the calibre of research and collaboration taking place at TU Dublin, but also the university's growing global influence in the culinary arts.'
Irish Times
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Niall Williams's Time of the Child wins Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award
Niall Williams has won the 2025 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, worth €20,000, for Time of the Child at a ceremony on the opening night of the Listowel Literary Festival in Co Kerry. This year's adjudicators, authors Carol Drinkwater and Paul McVeigh, reviewed more than 50 submitted novels before selecting the winner from a powerful shortlist that included Christine Dwyer Hickey, Joseph O'Connor, Colm Tóibín and Donal Ryan. 'Judging the prize this year was no small task,' McVeigh said. 'The quality of the entries was superb, a testament to an extraordinary time in Irish literature. Any of the shortlisted books could have won but, in the end, Time of the Child by Niall Williams rose to the top. I don't remember the last time I read a book that made me stop, so frequently, unable to continue until I had savoured a sentence. He is an extraordinary writer and a worthy winner of the Irish Novel of the Year.' Drinkwater said: 'Niall's writing is so exciting. It is exquisite. Reading his sentences was like sitting in a magnificent cathedral and listening to a great soprano singing, notes reaching to the rafters and returning to me, to nestle in my heart. It is a novel full of compassion. The characters are so vulnerable, they tear you apart. It has been several weeks since we chose Niall's novel as our winner. Still, I sit at my desk and picture myself in that doctor's surgery. I hear the child crying; I can smell the newly washed nappies; I long for these people, that father and daughter, to be given the miracle they so crave.' READ MORE Reviewing it for The Irish Times, Sarah Gilmartin praised the lushness and lyricism of the language and called it 'a warm and life-affirming story about ordinary people going to extraordinary lengths. 'Set during the advent season of 1962 in the fictional village of Faha on the west coast of Ireland, the grimly familiar scenario of an abandoned baby becomes fresh again through the heroic acts of a local doctor and his eldest daughter, as depicted by a writer who has long been interested in the wonders of the everyday.' Time of the Child is the 11th novel of the Dublin-born writer, who turns 67 next month, and his third set in the fictional village of Faha, west Clare. He has long lived in Kiltumper, Co Clare, with his wife Christine Breen. His 1997 debut novel, Four Letters of Love, has been made into a film starring Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne and Helena Bonham Carter. It will be released in July. 'I am the great unknown novelist,' Williams told interviewer Roisin Ingle last October , laughing. 'Even after being longlisted for the Booker ,' his wife added, talking about Williams's first book set in Faha, History of the Rain, which was published in 2014. 'It took me a long time to have the confidence to write [about rural Clare] in fiction, after living it for years. Because Ireland has moved on and the intelligentsia in Ireland has really moved on. So, writing these stories, you were going to be viewed as sentimental, nostalgic ... or people would think it's not real.' Whether real or not, it has certainly paid off.
