Primeval’s filming would be centred on Central London, Sussex, Surrey and even- for a lucky handful – the exotic island of La Palma in the Canaries. But it began with a night shoot, with Black Park doubling up for The Forest of Dean, as Cutter discovers that the rogue animal sightings are actually of a rampaging, carnivorous Gorgonopsid.
“It was April, it was freezing, raining and muddy,” grimaces Dougie Henshall. “Most of the time I was trying to stop myself from shaking.”
Additional challenges were presented by the temporal anomaly, the gateway between the prehistoric past and out present. On screen the portal resembles a shifting, gyrating shattered window- in fact; it’s so iconic that the emblem was chosen for the title sequence. On location, however, there was nothing there but the imagination of the actors.
“The very first shot that we did in Black Park was the group of us running up and seeing this anomaly for the first time,” recalls Henshall. “There was just nothing there. I remember Cilla (Ware, the director) saying ‘You see that tree over there and that tree there? It’s kind of in between, but we don’t know what it looks like yet. But it’s shimmery.”
“I was thinking ‘Where should I pitch my degree of awe at this thing? And is everybody doing the same thing or is it just me that just looks stupid?’ That was my first experience of the first four weeks.”
While many of the cast and crew endured the winter weather and driving rain in Black Park, only a select few were lucky enough to enjoy a trip to sunnier climes. La Palma- a volcanic island previously used for background plates on Walking with Dinosaurs – doubled for the Permian Era. During episode one, Nick Cutter and Captain Tom Ryan step through the anomaly and find themselves in a past world of flying lizards and herds of dinosaurs, and they also discover evidence concerning Helen Cutter’s disappearance.
“We were only on La Palma for about a week,” says Henshall. “That was amazing. I guess if there’s anywhere on the planet that looks slightly prehistoric it’s there. It’s a geological miracle as the island is pretty much split into two. There’s an active volcano on one side and a dormant volcano on the other side, and the last time the active one went up, a fissure appeared and it came away by a metre. There’s cloud over one side of the island, and it disappears on the other, and it’s only a small place.
“When we were up above the clouds filming, there’s volcanic ash everywhere. But they take very good care of it – there were people with brooms sweeping away our footsteps everyday, just to preserve the way it’s supposed to be. I’ve never been 6,500 up on the rim of a volcano before- there wasn’t much acting required for those scenes!
“As an actor you’re not really allowed to have vertigo. It was hideous – this awful moment when the rim of the volcano just seemed to be stretching away endlessly and the drop was getting steeper and steeper on each side of the crater. But I Just didn’t want to let anybody down and I didn’t want Cilla Ware to have to compromise the show that she wanted to get.”
It involved months of cold weather, rain, injuries, painstaking effects work and sheer determination, but Primeval was completed and ready by the end of 2006. Ahead of transmission a screening was arranged for the cast and crew many of whom were curious to know how the imagination involved would translate to the screen. They were not disappointed.
“As far as the CG is concerned, I haven’t seen anything like that on television in a long time,” comments Henshall. “Especially something ambitious because 40 per cent of the success of the programme is down to that. I think Framestore pulled it off in a remarkable fashion.”
Adapted from an article in Starburst issue 347 – interview by David Richardson