It’s no secret that Britain’s leading commercial television network, ITV1, hasn’t been having the best of times recently. It’s once winning line-up of celebrity-led reality shows has lost its pulling power in the face of the BBC drama revival, so there’s a lot riding on Primeval, its new six-part Time anomaly drama, as star Douglas Henshall acknowledges. “Yeah! I’m aware of all of that and I’m quite nervous actually to see what the reaction will be, I’ve just got that kind of feeling of impending judgement!”
In Primeval, the Glasgow-born actor, who’d previously starred in Common as Muck and Psychos, and played Lawrence of Arabia in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, plays Professor Nick Cutter, an expert on prehistoric life-forms whose wife disappeared eight years ago, and who’s not quite got over that. “No, I think its always kind of somewhere in the back of his head, I think he’s one of these people who works ferociously in order not to think about it. After eight years you build some kind of front or defence mechanism to deal with it, but he gets reminded of it; I think she’s there with him all the time really”. Then one of his students come in with a report of prehistoric creatures roaming the area where she vanished, complete with tabloid picture and… “The minute Connor brings up the Forest of Dean in the first episode, that’s something he’ll immediately pick up on, and he’s in the car and gone”.
The trail leads, eventually, to an Anomaly, a hole in reality that leads to another Time, and leads in turn to Cutter being put in charge of a government-authorised team to handle the situation, whose members are mostly made up of people who’ve already stumbled upon the secret – Cutter’s assistant and friend (James Murray), geeky student Connor (Andrew-Lee Potts) , and reptile keeper Abby Maitland (played by former S Club 7 member Hannah Spearitt), along with civil servant Claudia Brown (Lucy Brown) and Captain Tom Ryan (Mark Wakeling), the head of the Special Forces unit backing them up. After all, anything can come through the Anomalies, and there are plenty of dinosaurs that like to snack on civil servants and scientists just as much as lawyers.
It is the first time Henshall’s done a series with a fantastic element, but, he says, “It was the strength of the scripts, actually, which first got me, and also the ambition of it. I’d never really read anything like that for television before. So I was immediately grabbed by it, and I thought it was quite daring to put that much CGI in the show”.
“Like any boy I’d always been fascinated with dinosaurs and whatever, and to play a scientist going off to do things, and then one with a missing wife… everything involved in it appeals to all your senses as an actor really. It’s not really anything that I get off on, not really anything that I’ve done before, and I didn’t really expect to be offered this – I kind of thought they’d maybe go for someone else, and wasn’t sure whether or not they’d let me do it. So when they offered it I was very pleasantly surprised and then I jumped at it!”.
The series is inevitably being seen as ITV’s answer to DR Who, and you wonder whether ITV would have been willing to go for such a concept if it hadn’t been for Who’s success in knowing that an audience was out there. “I don’t know, I mean maybe that the consensus in the corridors of power in television centres all over Britain, but that wasn’t something that I was ever au fait with,” the actor comments. “I’ve never understood why if this was being presented to a television company before they wouldn’t have jumped at it. It just seems to be very good Saturday night television, and I can’t imagine that someone would have said ‘No’ on the grounds that it hadn’t been done before and nobody else had tried it first”.
Woking with CGI meant Primeval was Henshall’s first experience with green screen work. “It was by turns quite funny actually; the whole idea of working with just balls on sticks or sometimes nothing at all”, he comments. “You have to refer back to a time when you’re not really conscious of what you’re doing, the way that kids play, where they just believe the world that they invent for themselves, and they’re free of any kind of inhibitions. You have to do that and not worry to much about whether or not you’re making a prat of yourself!” he laughs.
“At first it was quite difficult just to get into that idea of trying to see something that isn’t there, but it’s surprising just how quickly we as a group became quite used to it, because you just accept it”, Henshall comments.
“That becomes your normal reality; that’s how you have to work every day… and also we trusted the director and the cameraman as to whether or not our eyelines were on the same thing, or whether we all thought we were looking at the same thing”.
Still, he admits, the added challenge made for a testing working experience. “I think from time-to-time there were times when it was quite tense, because you’re kind of up against it every day to try and get through it. There‘s the pressure of trying to create a new show that there’s been an awful lot of money and time and effort sunk into it. I certainly felt that”, he adds, “the pressure to try and get it as right as possible. But obviously you’re up against the schedule every day, which is quite demanding. That can be quite difficult but it was a great experience; a very positive experience for me. But it’s not always fun and games; it’s not a glee club!”
As Cutter, Henshall’s playing the latest in a long line of fantasy heroes who’re open to the unusual because of personal tragedy – in this case the disappearance of his wife Helen – and that element of obsession can tend to make such characters a little off-putting.
“Yes, I wanted to try and find a balance in that”, Henshall agrees, “and also in that he’s still open to the charms of Ms Claudia Brown”, he adds, referring to the civil servant whose attraction to him is immediately obvious. “Quite a fine line to walk really I guess I’ll find out pretty soon whether or not I managed it of not!” the actor laughs. “I wanted that kind of reluctantly optimistic thing – somebody whose front is quite stern but actually underneath he’s quite hopeful and has a sense of humour and is quite likable. That was one of the things I wanted to come across”.
It’s an interesting new take on the essential element of sexual tension, in that the discovery of the Anomalies soon give Cutter hope that his wife might, after all, be alive, but they also lead to him working closely with Claudia, in the sort of situation where things are naturally likely to happen, but where the hope of Helen’s return cause him to pause back. Henshall found handling those conflicting feelings an interesting challenge.
“Exactly, because you don’t want to make him fickle! So you don’t want to appear as if he was leading someone else on, “This is okay, but if my wife every turned up I’d drop you like a ton of bricks”, you know that I mean? I was aware of that while they were shooting it; “I’ve gotta be really careful here”.
But I think what he does is he gets quite surprised by Claudia, and also quite surprised at his own feelings. I don’t want to give anything away but…things happen. That adds and interesting dynamic to it”.
There’s an equally charged dynamic with Claudia’s superior, Sir James Lester, the wily head of an emergency planning who none the less never expected to have to deal with voids linking the present days to a variety of time periods – because Primeval isn’t just about the dinosaurs. Lester’s played by Ben Miller, best known for his comic talents in the likes of The Worst Week of My Life, but here he deadpans it, resulting in some parkly underplayed humour as Cutter and Lester clash. “Yeah, I think there’s a bit of that, the two characters are diametrically opposed”, Henshall comments, “and so I suppose there’s a little of bit of a competitive edge between the two of them, and hopefully some of their sparring will be humorous. But I think Andrew-Lee Pott’s character Connor takes care of a lot of the humour”, he adds, referring to one of Cutter’s university students, a walking encyclopaedia of extinct species with no understanding of a present day one – woman. “I think he does that very well”.
As well as the bureaucracy, Cutter also has to work with the Special Forces assigned to protect him, in a new twist on the classic scientific-military tension of the Doctor and the Brigadier. “Yes, I think the character that Mark Wakeling plays”, Henshall says of the Special Forces chief, Captain Tom Ryan, “I think the relationship that we have there in the first episode is very good, and that runs through the whole series. Mark did such a great job actually. Because of his own military background he was perfect, and a lot of the guys who were playing the special forces guys also had military experience, and they had a great respect for Mark. He controlled them like his own kind of unit. And it gives that side of the show a real kind of weight and gravitas that it might not have had, and makes that side of the story a lot stronger and believable”.
In the first episode, it’s Cutter and Ryan who’re actually sent through the Anomaly into another time, which involved some overseas shooting that Henshall enjoyed immensely, though his favourite episode is a later one. “I liked them all for different reasons. The stuff that we shot out in the Canary Islands that appears in episodes one, three and six was fantastic”, he says, “but episode five, I had a lot of fun in. I don’t want to give away why but I suppose if I had a favourite it would probably be five.
So will he be watching the episodes himself? “No, I’ll be doing something else,” he says. On his next project? “I’m doing something for television at the moment”, he agrees, “but I didn’t mean in that way, I mean I will be as far away from the television as possible.”
It doesn’t sound as if he’s one of those actors who enjoys watching himself. “No, I’m not that great with it actually”, he agrees. “I don’t tend to be particularly objective and I tend to see things I don’t like about myself rather than anything that’s good. But I was able to appreciate other people. The merits of other aspects of it except for myself, to get away from being a self-obsessed actor for five minutes, I could kind of appreciate there was some very good work going on. But I don’t feel the pressure from watching myself; I get more please from the doing of it rather than the seeing it”.
But he was tempted into a viewing by the chance to see the finished effects. “For a long time, any special effects were just these green blobs on the screen”, he explains. “I didn’t see anything until I went in to do some ADR [dubbing], and then I started to see some stuff, but I didn’t see anything finished. Luckily the producer sent me a DVD of the first few episodes and I could sit in a darkened room and watch them on my own and cringe a little bit, and get over myself, and then go to the cast and crew screening where they showed episodes one to six with all the music and the titles and everything.”
It’s left him confident about the series’ chances of success. ‘I kind of felt after that,well if people don’t like it, it’s not because we haven’t done it right’. I think there are some great performances in there, think it’s really well lit, well shot, I think the CGI looks great, I think Framestore has done a great job with it. So, I don’t think there is anything more we could have done”.
TVZone Issue 212 page 30