Need another Saturday –night sci-fi? Now ITV enters the fray, with prehistoric creatures – some cute, some fearsome – turning up in modern Britain. How will the boffins cope?
The last time dinosaurs were the highlight of Saturday-night TV, they were called Les Dawson and Tarby. Otherwise the closest we’ve come to prehistoric creatures in primetime has been Walking with Dinosaurs and the two series that followed: Walking with Beasts and Monsters. In theses, CGI wizardry took us back in time to see how dinosaurs lived in their own Mesozoic manor.
Now, in ITV’s new drama Primeval, the dinosaurs are making the return trip;scutosaurs,arthropleura and mosasuars are among us in present-day Britain, and they’re not here to make a natural –history documentary.
It falls to evolutionary scientist, Professor Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) to work out how and why ravenous critters are laying to waste in the Forest of Dean. A team of scientists is assembled to help and, naturally the government is also more than a little intrigued to learn that Jurassic Park has opened of its own accord in Gloucestershire, so the team is soon joined by a civil servant boss.
It seems as if that a rift in the space/time continuum has opened up in the forest –it happens- and all manner of prehistoric beasties have been popping for a look-see. Cutter is excited – all the fossils he has\spent his life studying are suddenly appearing alive in front of him. But he’s also a little perturbed, because eight years ago his wife disappeared in the same wooded area. If that sounds like one brontosaurus-sized, don’t be put off-Primeval is rollicking good fun for all the family from the off, blending credible characters and relationships with a dash of humour and a slew of eye popping effects. The same with team that made Walking with Dinosaurs has brought the monsters memorably to life on Primeval, so that when an angry gorgonopsid turns to the camera and snarls, you can almost smell his halitosis (although you probably wouldn’t tell him to his face).
But with Hollywood churning out special-effects extravaganzas as fast as supercomputers can crunch numbers, the makers of Primeval area all too aware that you can spend a fortune on effects and still end up with Godzilla (the remake) “Effects and monsters can take you so far,” says writer Adrian Hodges [who won a Bafta for the BBC’s Charles II – The Power and the Passion], “but you’ve got to have a human story that works with it. I’ve had an idea for a long time about a man who’d lost his wife in mysterious circumstances, but I never had a context in which to put it. In the fantasy genre, it suddenly clicked. I thought what if a man has not only lost his wife in mysterious circumstances but lost her millions of years back in time? That would certainly add something.”
The responsibility of tying the emotional story (man loses wife) to the action (man saves world) lies Douglas Henshall’s Cutter. Moreover, because the CGI is added after filming, Henshall’s leading man credentials were also given a stern examination.” For someone who is playing an all-action hero, I have a number of phobias, which aren’t particularly heroic. I’m a bit claustrophobic, I’ve never done any deep-water diving before in my life and I have vertigo. We filmed these underwater sequences in the tank at Pinewood Studios. The people down there were really good to me, as I had a bit of trouble. I thought ‘Oh God. I’m supposed to be this Indiana Jones kind of can-do figure and I’m a total wuss who can’t get down to the bottom of the tank.”
It will not have escaped the attention of anyone that there is a precedent for this type of Saturday-night, something-for-the-kids-occasionally hide-behind the sofa television. The shadow of the Tardis looms large over Primeval, and Adrian Hodges is happy to admit it,
“I’ve always had a fondness for fantasy, but for a long time it was something that British TV wasn’t doing. We went through a long period where the Americans took the ball and ran away with it in that area with shows like Buffy and Alias. But after the new incarnation of Doctor Who, once people saw that you can tell ambitious stories in a fun framework using fantasy, that changed the playing field for everybody. Whatever the comparison that have been made between Primeval and Doctor Who, I don’t mind a bit.
Benji Wilson Radio Times February 10th – 16th 2007