All Creatures Great and Small star reveals Helen’s journey in season 6 - and how she captures the spirit of real-life figure

“My hands are shaking a little bit so I apologise,” Shenton began, a tremor in her voice. She then went on, with astonishing composure given that she’d just been presented with an Academy Award for the first script she’d ever written, to draw attention to real-life Libbys everywhere. “Millions of children all over the world live in silence and face communication barriers... Deafness is a silent disability – you can’t see it and it’s not life-threatening.”

Then the music struck up as Shenton’s co-producer Chris Overton (her then-fiancé, now husband) was thanking their parents for making cupcakes to raise money to finance the film, and Shenton’s moment in the sun was done. It must have been a surreal, magical experience.

“We’d made the film on a shoestring, it was the first thing I’d written, and we never imagined it might be eligible for, never mind win, an Oscar,” Shenton says now. “While afterwards there was immense pressure that I’m only just getting over now, I’m incredibly grateful for it.”

Shenton was inspired to write the film by a life-changing event. When she was 12, her father lost his hearing after undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Seeing the effects on her family and her dad, who died two years later, she learnt and fell in love with sign language and became involved with the deaf community. “I’ve seen the needless struggles that deaf people and deaf children face,” she’s said. “That gave me the impetus to write.”

How did the Oscar change her life? Shenton, who until then was probably best known for playing Hollyoaks airhead Mitzeee Minniver, pauses for a moment. “It changes everything and it changes nothing. It changes everything in terms of getting a meeting and being able to talk about your project. If I was to send a script somewhere, it would probably get me read and maybe get me in the room. But in another way, it changes nothing. Because ultimately, it’s about the work. You’ve always got to be doing good work. Whether that’s producing, creating, writing, acting... it’s got to be good.”

Luckily, Shenton has been doing good work, although that has less to do with luck and more to do with her talent and industry. This includes All Creatures Great and Small, returning for its sixth series this week, in which she plays the redoubtable – but feisty – Helen Herriot, wife to James (played by Nicholas Ralph).

The Herriots’ relationship is the engine of the show: the first two series driven by the will-they-won’t-they of their romance, the next two by the will-they-won’t-they start a family. As Helen is the north star by which James navigates, she is the drama’s moral centre and its most significant character, yet she’s only really sketched out in James Herriot’s original eight novels. How did Shenton flesh her out so fully?

“I made Helen with what I could pull from the books but everything we learn about her in the books is through James and what he feels about her. So we were really lucky that we had access to Jim and Rosie, the children of the real James and Helen. They’ve been brilliant and so generous with sharing stories and anecdotes. Because we didn’t know that much about her, there’s a freedom playing her because there was no blueprint.”

But there was a real person – Joan, the wife of Alf Wight, the real James Herriot. Doesn’t playing that kind of role come with responsibility? “Although, when we started, I didn’t realise quite how global and loved it was, you know the world of James Herriot, so you want to get it right. Then I met Jim and Rosie and that feeling of wanting to do All Creatures justice becomes very real because here are two people who will be watching their parents on TV. Now, we’re an adaptation and it’s a drama, but of course you want to find and capture the essence of their mum. So I did feel personal responsibility, yes.”

And has she captured the essence of Helen/Joan? “Rosie says so but maybe she’s just being polite,” Shenton says. “When I’ve emailed to ask her for stories and details, what’s stuck with me is Helen’s genuine joy with the small things, that she was very content in her pocket of the world and being at home, that she didn’t take life too seriously, that she was a bit cheeky. I’ve tried to weave those things in.”

While ostensibly about the travails of now postwar Yorkshire vets, All Creatures also explores a period of extraordinary social change, especially through its female characters. However, it does give the period a much rosier glow and endows its characters with more liberal sensibilities than they would have possessed. How does Shenton find the balancing act between truthful and palatable, particularly when it comes to telling women’s stories?

“I know women have always been multi-faceted but more often than not, we just didn’t see it. What’s so wonderful about getting to tell this kind of story through a modern lens is that we do get to tell the truth of these women as they always have been. We get to peek behind the curtain.

“This season, Jenny goes off on an adventure and it prompts Helen to look at her life, at the things she hasn’t done, and to get a bit self-reflective, probably for the first time – and I think that’s probably the truth of the time. Helen is really family-centric: being the head of a house and looking after two small children is a huge responsibility and one that she loved. But I think you do get to see a glimmer of something else in this story. Things only become tricky when there’s a choice.”

Shenton was born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent, where she studied performing arts at the local college, and her choice of parts suggests a fearlessness. Most recently, in The Rumour, 5’s thriller about the real-life consequences of online gossip, she plays Joanna, a single mum who relocates, only to become obsessed with the rumour that a child killer lives in her new home town. What follows is what Shenton describes as “the psychological unravelling” of Joanna as she follows her feeling that something about her life isn’t quite right.

“I loved it,” Shenton says with relish. She shot The Rumour – in which Joanna appears in almost every scene – when she was pregnant. “It was knackering and I was probably maybe even a bit extra tired, but it was brilliant.”

It was also the first time Shenton found herself in the position of number one on the call sheet. “Whatever that means,” she says. Not that she’s taking her first – but surely not her last – TV lead for granted. Not when she considers how much effort it took to get to where she is and what she says are “the practicalities of being a working-class actor”.

“When I was coming up, I was working three jobs at one point just to get to auditions and make it work,” she says, her flattened vowels hinting at her Staffordshire origins. “Often, people can’t even get in [to the industry] because they can’t afford to take time off, or can’t risk losing their job just to audition and take a chance on something. That’s the reality.”

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All Creatures Great and Small returns to 5 on Thursday 25 September at 9pm. You can order James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small from Amazon.

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