Down in the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise. Douglas Henshall plays the zoologist who must make sense of the prehistoric creatures causing 21st century havoc in Primeval.
Something strange is happening to Saturday night television: it’s getting quite good. Regenerated in every sense of the word Russell T Davies 2005 take on Doctor Who meant that ‘family TV’ was no longer a term of abuse. Naturally ITV was not going to sit idly by and watching BBC clean up and this week we get to see their riposte. In place of a Doctor we have a Professor, and his field of expertise is in evolutionary science, not intergalactic waffle. Meet Nick Cutter star of the six-part series Primeval.
We’re in dinosaur territory, but rather than a walking –with-monsters-style geography field trip back to the Mesozoic, in Primeval the dinosaurs have come forward in time to reap havoc in the 21st century, Cutter, played by Douglas Henshall, is a zoology professor whose speciality is blips in evolution – fossils that exhibit features thousands of years before they ‘should’ have existed; the bits that Darwin didn’t predict.
It’s fair to say that the arrival in the Forest of Dean of ravening hordes of bizarre beasts through a temporal anomaly represent a sizeable blip. Cutter and a hastily-assembled team – his mach lab technician, a wide-eyed palaeontologist and a lizard-fanatic fresh from the local zoo- are dispatched to try and work out how the dinosaurs got there, with a panicking Home Office official in tow to keep a lid on things (yet more problems for John Reid). And, as every serial drama worth its salt these days has to have an overreaching mystery, it just so happens that Cutter’s wife went missing around the same spot, eight years before.
Although this sounds distinctly unlikely, it’s even more of a surprise to find Douglas Henshall in the lead. A thoughtful actor, who hates the gym, is claustrophobic and scared of heights is hardly your archetypal Indiana Jones. Moreover his CV, with a strong theatrical background and memorable roles in intense, adult dramas such as Psychos, has versatile written all over it – a mixed blessing of TV land.
Henshall recognises he wouldn’t be top of the list of prime time’s leading man: "I read the scripts, and I thought, ‘these are great, but I’m not entirely sure if I’m that guy’. I don’t have a reputation for doing this kind of thing, so it’s a bit of a leap of faith." that’s been amply repaid, such as the emotional depth Henshall brings to the leading role.
“There’s no fun for me just to turn up say my lines and go home- I have to invest a little bit,” says Henshall. “When you’ve got something that’s well written like this it’s got lots of levels to it. I wanted a guy that might make people go ‘I’m a little bit like that’. Part of the fun to be had in this programme is asking what you would do if you were put in a situation where you had to deal with something so enormous.”
Henshall hasn’t seen the new Doctor Who – he didn’t want it to spoil his childhood memories of the original – but he acknowledges how it has upped the ante “Doctor Who did everybody a real favour,” he says “it woke everybody up, going hey, the public still want to be entertained on Saturday night.”
Aside from Henshall’s performance, stealing every scene they crop up in (and then destroying most of them) are the dinosaurs, For the presence of the CGI Gorgonopsid, the Arthropleura and the swooping Pteranodon , we have to thank a rumoured £6 million budget and the same 50-strong team that brought us Waking with Dinosaurs, But at a time when there is a surfeit of computer-generated wizardry in Hollywood movies, Primeval’s CGI is used sparingly-and therefore to greater effect. In fact, compared with a certain rival in the same timeslot on BBC1, ITV’s probably got the most monsters.
Which takes us back to Doctor Who. Primeval, has been labelled as ITV’s facsimile, but to peg it as a “me to” copy is unfair. Only in the sense that Primeval is multi-layered, fast, frightening and unashamedly good fun, does it ape Doctor Who. Saturday nights can accommodate both of them.
Benji Wilson - Daily Telegraph - February 10th 2007