Almost midnight on a stunningly cold night in woods just outside London. Douglas Henshall suddenly thunders into view, closely followed by co-star Lucy Brown.’ Run,’ he shouts, grabbing her arm and looking at an invisible Gorgonospid.
If TVTimes hasn’t wandered into a real space-time anomaly, then this must be the set of Primeval – the new six-part, £6million drama epic in which extinct lizards invade Britain through rips in time.
They’re here!
The woods are doubling as the Forest of Dean, and it’s here the dinosaurs begin popping into the present day, much to the disbelief of everyone. Sceptic number one is Professor Nick Cutter (Douglas), an evolutionary Scientist who’s an expert on creatures that ought to be long dead.
When one of his dino-obsessed students, Connor Temple(Andrew Lee Potts), persuades him that mysterious things are afoot in the forest, he grabs lab technician Stephen Hart (James Murray) and heads of for a look. En route, they bump into Home Office investigator Claudia Brown (Lucy) and young zoologist Abby Maitland, played by former S Club 7 star Hannah Spearritt,
The most horrible thing!
They soon find a strange shimmering ‘anomaly’ that has opened a doorway into prehistory, and before long they’re fighting off ravenous dinosaurs left, right and centre. The monsters were devised by the team and based on the creatures that genuinely stalked the earth As Douglas, 41, explains: “The designers have tarted them up a bit, but essentially these are beasts that existed 300 million years ago, based on facts and fossil records.
‘The Gorgonopsid we’ve just run away from, for instance was the most horrible
thing. Had a brain the size of a pea and just ate, killed and reproduced. Nothing going for it at all.’
It could all go seriously wrong!
Creating theses thundering beats – a combination of computer graphics and hand-operated models – was a risky undertaking for ITV, Douglas admits. Would they work in drama, with humans scampering around them? Would viewers take them seriously?
‘When I first read the scripts, I thought “This could be fantastic, or it could go seriously,” says the actor ‘It’s OK if you’re Stephen Spielberg and you’ve got $100million behind you, but on TV it’s a big risk.’
Primeval was also a big step into the unknown for Douglas, since he’s better known for period (Anna Karenina) or grit (Psychos) rather than primetime fantasy.
To be honest, I never thought they would cast me,’ he smiles ‘I thought it would be a nice idea to go and audition for Cutter, but I never thought for a minute they would offer me the part.’
My worst nightmare
‘We filmed some underwater sequences at Pinewod Studios,’ continues Dougie ‘I’ve never done any diving before, I’m a little claustrophobic, and I get vertigo, so I found myself halfway down this ladder into a 30-foot deep pool, worrying that I couldn’t breath properly and that my ears wouldn’t pop. My worst nightmare was that someone would discover I was a wuss! Any thoughts of being an all action hero went out the window at that point.. .’
The show’s lavish special effects also took some getting used to. ‘The computer graphic stuff was quite hard to do at first’, admits Hannah Spearritt. ‘When you’re running away from a dinosaur in a forest, what you’re given is a bal on a stick to show you where the monster should be. I’d be lying if I said that made it frightening to film. But we got used to it. And there was an animatronic version of Rex, the cute dinosaur my character finds, which helped as I could see and touch him.’
Scary
Rex aside, says Dougie, Primeval is good family entertainment-but with its fair share of scares. ‘When I was little, the Daleks had me hiding behind the sofa. I can’t stand stories that take the delight kids get out of being scared! We all have images of the shark’s head coming out of a boat in Jaws. Every generation has shows that they remember. Hopefully, this will be one for a new generation.’
Olly Grant – TVTimes 10th -16th February 2007