WRITER: Adrian Hodges
CAST: Douglas Henshall (Prof Nick Cutter), Hannah Spearritt (Abby Maitland), James Murray (Stephen Hart), Andrew-Lee Potts (Connor Temple), Juliet Aubrey (Helen Cutter), Lucy Brown (Claudia Brown), Ben Miller (James Lester) & Mark Wakeling (Capt Tom Ryan)
When a dinosaur is sighted around the Forest Of Dean, a small team of experts soon discover a strange anomaly leading back in time...Aiming for the same demographic as the BBC's Doctor Who, ITV 1's new Saturday night adventure series arrives on our screens, hoping to ensnare a lucrative family audience with its time-travel and monsters.
Primeval works from a predictable template; a plucky team of scientists battle monsters being spat out through a space/time anomaly. On the surface it's a Torchwood clone with a dinosaur fetish, but scratch the surface and you'll find... well, not much else, to be honest.
On the evidence of the premiere episode, this isn't going to win awards for originality or characterisation. The cast are written in broad strokes, with only Douglas Henshall, Hannah Spearritt, Andrew-Lee Potts and Ben Miller actually making any kind of impression. The episode is far more interested in wowing you with often impressive computer-generated creatures, courtesy of Framestore CFC who made Walking With Dinosaurs.
If it's unique characters, unpredictable plotting and actor chemistry you're after... you won't see any of that here. Douglas Henshall takes the lead as Professor Nick Cutter, a Scottish palaeontologist whose wife, Helen, went missing in the Forest Of Dean eight years ago. When well-meaning geek Connor Temple (Potts) brings a dinosaur sighting to his attention, the creature's proximity to the Forest provokes Cutter to investigate with lab technician Stephen Hart (James Murray).
Thrown into the mix is former S Club 7 pop-star Hannah Spearritt as a "zoologist" (ahem, she feeds lizards at a zoo...), who discovers a local boy's pet lizard is actually a prehistoric Coelurosauravus. Eventually, after a few dinosaur attacks to prevent the audience drifting asleep, the team discover a sparkling "anomaly" that leads back to in time twenty million years.
The script, by co-creator Adrian Hodges, is uninspired hokum that has been recycled for decades. The show only seems to exist so the effects team can throw CGI monsters at the screen, in the vague hope you'll forgive the cookie-cutter characters and lazy storyline.
Young kids will probably find brief thrills with the dinosaurs and the simplistic plot suggests everything has been designed for the under-10s. There was one moment that revealed the show isn't taking its concept seriously either; when a tiny dinosaur manages to work a lift and nods along to the muzak playing inside. How did it reach the button and since when do reptiles appreciate music? Sigh...
Overall, Primeval should have been far more enjoyable and complex than it was. The idea of ancient creatures slipping through time into modern day Britain is juicy; immediately inspiring thoughts of The X-Files meets Jurassic Park. Unfortunately, this opener was a huge disappointment and relied too much on CGI -- never once considering that people aren't impressed by realistic dinosaurs these days. We've had three Jurassic Park movies and countless Walking With Dinosaurs spin-offs since 1993, thank you.
It's possible the characterisations will deepen, relationships will take shape and the concept will become more elaborate, so I'm certainly not dismissing Primeval outright. It's early days, but the first episode didn't get me excited and didn't hold my interest for long.
ITV's $6 million series is only six episodes long, so things will have to improve very fast, or risk becoming just another toothless wannabe.
