Television
Let's do the time warp again
Published 19 February 2007
A genre-hopping drama on ITV is a throwback to a more childish age
Primeval ITV1
It was, thought the professor, some kind of experiment: a hybrid, a throwback. The professor goes by the no-frills name of Nick Cutter and is played by Douglas Henshall, who has had his red locks softened and shorn since he was a mere doctor in Channel 4's Psychos eight years ago. The prof is talking about a whacking great but, thankfully, herbivorous dinosaur he has come across in a wood, but could equally well be talking about Primeval (started 10 February), which has arrived to help ITV make something of a fight out of drama on Saturday nights.
Primeval is certainly a hybrid. One of its directors boasted in the trade press, "We hit every genre: horror, thriller, comedy, romance and straight drama; a lovely balance to play with." If the nation's families end up loving Primeval, we must count the ways. But it is also a throwback, not just to the Jurassic Park films, but to BBC1's one-off Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation The Lost World, seven years ago. The monsters come from the Walking With Dinosaurs stable. Specifically, although it was commissioned back in 2005, Primeval looks like ITV's response to the BBC revivals of Doctor Who and Robin Hood. From Doctor Who we get time travel - the dinosaurs are from "hundreds of millions of years ago", as Cutter announces a little vaguely. From Robin Hood we get the forest as adventure playground. Primeval may be the most interesting television to come out of the Forest of Dean since Dennis Potter, but only because I can't think of anything else that has.
So let us not accuse Primeval of originality. Yet it has a bounce to its outsized step. Leaving the obvious childish appeal of monsters to one side for a moment, there is enough here to keep adults from stupor. You had to admire the pacing of the opening episode. It began with an empty shopping trolley rolling across an Asda car park at night. Next moment, a dinosaur was crashing through it, chasing a presentable young woman who ended up at the window screaming to be let in (you sometimes see this sort of thing at my Asda round about five to eleven on a Sunday morning). One might have expected a flashback to take us up to this exciting climax. Instead, a caption read: "Eight years later".
Primeval does not hang about. Dinosaur denial scenes are kept to a minimum. We soon met the giant lizards again and, in no time at all, the professor and a "Gulf war" SAS veteran with a machine-gun were leaping through the space-time "anomaly" in the woods and back to prehistoric Gloucestershire.
The woman at the wrong end of the Asda scare turned out to be Helen Cutter, the professor's wife, who had been missing all those years. This accounts for the occasionally moist look in his eyes, provides the customary quest plotline and may make grown-ups care a bit about him. He is aided by a competent lab technician, a cowardly student, and Abby, a sexy zoologist with a peroxide hairdo whom, a preview promises, we meet in her knickers on 17 February.
Doing the reverse of aiding the professor is - guess who? - the Home Office, which proves unfit for purpose even when it comes to prehistoric monsters. It is represented by a bit of posh called Claudia Brown (Lucy Brown), who has her own primeval designs on the professor and James Lester (Ben Miller), a troubleshooter without portfolio to the PM. James represents bureaucratic scepticism, as in: "I used to think the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy was far-fetched."
If the children are allowed up this late, they'll find the dinos just scary enough. The computer-generated imagery is more than fine. And there's a cute avian called Rex, which becomes Abby's pet. Primeval is not sophisticated like Buffy, or witty like Doctor Who, but it's fun. The sad thing is that the sylvan rip in space-time is not the only anomaly in this story. Anyone who grew up with Thunderbirds, Sexton Blake, Magpie or Rainbow will surely be horrified to learn that, save for an hour on Saturday and Sunday mornings, ITV1 simply does not do children's telly any more. My Parents Are Aliens must now be hunted down on the dedicated CITV digital channel. That ITV1 is showing any interest in children at all is an anomaly. It shouldn't be.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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Michael Cockerell relives ten years of triumph for the next three weeks.
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