THE UK's favourite vet, James Herriot, is about to make his stage debut thanks to a one-man play called An Honorary Yorkshireman, which is very much a North Yorkshire project. Created by Kate Bramley, the director of Badapple Theatre, which is based in Green Hammerton, near York, all the tour dates next month involve the area's 16 village halls and small meeting places.

Kate admits that she was surprised that no other plays about the fictional character, created by Thirsk vet Alf Wight, were already in existence.

"As far as I know there hasn't been a theatre production before and I don't think its been done by any of the repertory companies across the region. The TV series was so successful and so present on cable and satellite until recently and Christopher Timothy (who played James Herriot on TV) was such a crusader for the Herriot Museum at Thirsk. So I think the visual franchise was cornered for quite a bit."

The Badapple Company started ten years ago as a way of taking a production to the Edinburgh Festival, but Kate says she always had a biography piece in mind. "We were in the process of rebuilding the company to look at a more regional focus rather than national. At the end of last year we thought that James Herriott was such an obvious choice because he's such a celebrated local hero and both myself and director Alice Barlett have had a lifetime interest in his books. So it drew all the strands together really," she says.

Talk of a TV series or a film by the BBC last year did cause the company some concern. "We've been loosely in contact with Alf's family to get permission for everything and I think there was some talk of the BBC having another look at the series, but it doesn't seem to have come through. So we haven't been pipped at the post."

Kate always thought in terms of a one-man show and had Scottish-based actor Neil Kent in mind, having worked with him on shows at Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh, made famous by The Da Vinci Code book.

"He's a very charismatic actor and a great multi-role playing actor and humourist, so he drifted to the top of the pile. He plays eight different parts. I spoke to him the other day and he said he was terrified. We looked at broadening it out with a cast, but when Alison and I were looking at the stories we got very interested in the idea of being able to filter the stories through his eyes.

"We were trying to mix between the biography of Alf (by his son Jim) and also the James Herriot books and it was a big decision to go with the Herriot name because it's obviously that's what people are more familiar with.

"We also wanted to look at that early period when he moved to Yorkshire and found it a little bit difficult to settle into the everyday pattern of rural life. With a soft Glaswegian accent, even though he was an Englishman, it meant he was definitely an outsider looking in ," Kate says of Alf Wight, who was born in Sunderland and raised and educated in Glasgow, before beginning his long connection with the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors, in 1940.

Her play tells the heart-warming story of how James wins over the suspicious farming folk to the point where they regard him as an honorable fellow.

"We tried to set it in a calendar farming year around 1940-41, although it was an interesting decision that he, as a writer, removed all references to the war from his books."

So where do the animals fit into all this? "A couple of people offered to lend us some lambs but we politely declined for health and safety reasons. You can invoke atmosphere with sound," she explains.

But there are some fairly integral stories about calves being the wrong way round "so you could yet see the arm up the cow's rear end scene".

Kate, who somehow has found time to create the play while touring the world as a folk violinist with Jez Lowe's Bad Pennies. is already thinking in terms of Guy Fawkes as the next Badapple project.

* Tickets £8, concessions available. Box office: 01423-339168 or online www.badapple.freeserve.co.uk