Douglas Henshall and the team return to battle more prehistoric monsters
Beneath a High-teque dome, armed guards are protecting sate-of-the-art labs with packed with impressive looking equipment. We’re on the set of the second series of ITV1’s exciting sci-fi adventures Primeval, at the awe inspiring new high security base, known as the Anomaly Research Centre (ARC).
It is here that Professor Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) and colleugues Stephen Hart (James Murray), Connor Temple (Andrew-Lee Potts) and Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearrit) continue to investigate why rips in time have caused the arrival of long-extinct beasts in Britain.
The new HQ is just one of several changes fans of the show will notice since the last run when Cutter and estranged wife Helen (Juliet Aubrey) unwittingly altered the course of history during a trip to the past.
Scheming Helen escaped back through the anomaly after confessing to an affair with Stephen, and Cutter discovered his on-off love, Home Office aide Claudia Brown (Lucy Brown) never existed. She’s been replaced on the team by the fawning Oliver Leek (Green Wing’s Karl Theobald). So as the new series develops, will Cutter ever see Claudia again?
‘The group dynamics is different in this series, but we’ve also got more ambitious.’ says Henshall ‘it’s bigger, more confident, amd we push it further. The monsters are even more fabulous this time round. In one episode we encounter creatures from the future again, so the CGI team had free reign to come up with whatever they wanted.’
There are also more action scenes, including a sequence filmed near Canary Wharf that would do James Bond proud. The latter caused Henshall difficulty when he had to dive off a boat into the Thames ‘enjoy the physical stuff, but I was trying not to look like a prat’, he admits ‘But I don’t like to look too slick because Cutter’s just a normal guy in a weird situation. He has no choice about doing these things and he’s not superhuman.’
Even so, this hasn’t stopped Henshall and his co-stars from being immortalised as action figures. ‘It’s the crowning glory of my career,’ laughs Henshall. ‘The show has such a wide appeal. Mums ask me to talk to their children, but I’ve also had a woman in her fifties run out of a shop with her shoes in her hand to hug me and tell me how much she liked it. There’s no job like it.’
TV& Satellite Week 12th -18th January