Culture
The Sunday Times February 04, 2007
Out of the mists of time...
...there comes Primeval, the CGI drama ITV sees as its saviour. By Stephen Armstrong
In America, there has been a curious tradition over the past five years that flies in the face of conventional end-of-civilisation logic. When mighty television networks are on their absolute uppers, it is those that dig into their pockets and invest heavily in expensive drama that recover. CBS did it with CSI; ABC did it with Desperate Housewives and Lost; NBC is doing it with Heroes. Over here, the limping network is ITV, and it is hoping Primeval will offer the same solution.
Certainly, the show pretty much smacks the zeitgeist over the head with a spanner.
It is sci-fi-based, with a dashing and witty lead (see Doctor Who, Life on Mars, Torchwood). It has a cast that, like a boyband, has a little something for everyone (some ladies could find James Murray’s smoulder appealing, while gentlemen may be intrigued by the former S Clubber Hannah Spearritt spending plenty of time in her pants). All of them fall in love with each other and there is plenty of knowing, self-referential humour built around a small group of conspiracy- theory student nerds. Even the off-camera team has the right credentials: the director worked on Spooks, the co-creators worked on Lorna Doone and Walking with Dinosaurs. And there is the CGI.
In Primeval, the CGI is basically dinosaurs, giant spiders, dinosaurs, weird slugs that eat people from within, dinosaurs, ancient worlds and a couple more dinosaurs. All the creatures — some improvised just a little bit around the rigid rhythm of absolute historical accuracy — burst through holes in space and time to attack contemporary Britain. A band of glamorous scientists tries to solve the problem, SAS men spray bullets around wildly and greasy Home Office officials try to cover everything up. If you think it sounds like someone has thrown pretty much everything at the screen, you’re not far wrong. ITV has spent an astonishing £6m on the show — that’s £1m per hour, in a UK market where drama usually costs little more than £250,000. Inevitably, it’s playing out in the new television hot spot of early Saturday evening.
“Over the past few years, Saturday night has been reinvented,” says Tim Haines, the co-creator of Primeval, who developed the idea after producing Walking with Dinosaurs. “People go out, yes, but even the most ardent partygoer doesn’t leave until 9pm. So what’s working is something that people staying in and people getting revved up both enjoy. What drama can do — along with Strictly Come Dancing and X Factor — is have real energy. We’ve designed this to make sure you never know what’s going to leap out of the cupboard and bite you. It’s TV as a shot of vodka, as a pick-me-up at the start of the night.”
Certainly, with Doctor Who and X Factor pulling in kids, teens and adults alike, Saturday night is hip again after years in which schedulers had written off the entire evening. As a result, Primeval has secured the serious, grown-up actor Douglas Henshall to play the lead. He is Professor Nick Cutter, an evolutionary scientist whose more romantic wife disappeared on a monster hunt eight years ago. Henshall is usually found on stage at the Donmar or the National, or in gritty television dramas such as Psychos, so when he faces off a poisonous giant centipede as it skitters down the London Underground, it’s almost cute to see. How did he apply his famous deep-method approach to the role? “I had the best intentions,” he laughs. “I bought all these books about chaos theory, and A Brief History of Time, and this was going to be my reading for the next four months. But in the end, it’s about character. I wanted him to be a believable hero by not being terribly good at it. There’s a bit where I end up with a gun, and I didn’t want him to be somebody who could lock and load. I wanted him to be hopeless. It’s about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
Henshall is almost evangelical about his character — and he does imbue the egghead with an entrancing sense of loss as Cutter tries to pursue his wife through endless lost worlds. “Reality television has a lot to answer for,” he snorts. “If people will watch it and it’s cheap to make, then it gets made.
“Drama takes time, effort and money, which is why I think this is an important show — it’s old-fashioned,” he adds. “I was fortunate enough to work with Dennis Potter, and he was a television man through and through. He believed it was so important because it was in every house in the land. That’s what drama in television is supposed to be for. This show is getting back to entertaining, rather than watching a bunch of people being foul to each other in a laboratory experiment.”
If Primeval is going to save ITV, however, it has a big job on its hands. The past few years have seen the network clinging to tottering, long-running drama serials such as Heartbeat, which, though it pulls in 8m viewers on a Sunday night, absolutely justifies its scornful industry epithet — Sunday sludge. Indeed, vibrant and fresh haven’t been the kind of words you would associate with any of the output from the creative home of Cracker, Morse and Prime Suspect.
“Last year was terrible for ITV — when the final of I’m a Celebrity is 16% down, you know it’s in trouble,” says Neil Jones, managing director of Carat, an agency that buys advertising airtime. “But it has presented its plans for this year to us, and I’m encouraged to see it has killed off many of the old, long-past-it series and is investing in new scripts at last.”
Indeed, picking up on the American model, ITV is using Primeval finally to launch a range of new drama over 2007. This year sees Catherine Tate adapting and starring in The Bad Mother’s Handbook; Andrew Davies and Billie Piper working on a Jane Austen season; the former Brookside writer John Fay delivering a conspiracy thriller called Mobile; and a satirical drama about John Prescott, Confessions of a Diary Secretary. As first show over the top, of course, Primeval is under pressure to perform.
“Doing a show like this on Saturday night, you’re setting yourself up for a kicking if it doesn’t work,” Henshall admits. “It’s going to take a lot of people at the top of their game to pull this off. But I think the appeal is there. When I was a kid, the Natural History Museum was my favourite place, so if I’d turned this down, the eight-year-old me would never have forgiven me.
“It’s like space travel, Egyptians and Romans — everyone is fascinated by dinosaurs. Even so, I’m nervous about it going out. You can never tell what is going to tickle the nation — I just hope it’s us.”
Primeval starts on ITV1 on Saturday