Previous reviews: Season 1, Season 2.

James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) and his new wife Helen Alderson (Rachel Shenton) are very much in love and very happy together. They live with the Farnon brothers Siegfried (Samuel West) and Tristan (Callum Woodhouse) and the housekeeper Audrey Hall (Anna Madeley), and the brothers and Herriot run a veterinary practice in the Yorkshire Dales. The year is 1939, and war with Germany looms. This season is six-plus-one episodes (a special Christmas episode as they've done each year), each a TV hour in length.

For the most part, the show holds firm to sickly sweet happenings and plot-lines, with our vets almost never having to put animals down. And every time they do have to, it's played as a big weepy. Most episodes include one or several of our main characters learning a lesson and making a better choice by the end of the episode. I admit that a dark pall is cast over the whole thing with one of the main characters and several of the minor ones going off to war at the end of the series.

I'm not sure I'm coming back for more of this: it's lovely to look at, the characters are well played, but the clear hand of the writers in the decisions of the characters and the outcomes has really started to bother me.