Primeval co-creator, executive producer and writer Tim Haines. Photo copyright of Impossible Pictures.
It’s a safe bet that you or I will never come face-to-face with a dinosaur or other prehistoric (or futuristic) animal. That, however, would not be the case if we lived in the fictional world of Primeval, where such sightings are not uncommon due to “anomalies” or fractures in time that serve as a gateway for these creatures into the modern world. For five seasons, our heroes risked life and limb to not only protect humanity from these unwanted visitors, but also whenever possible return them unharmed to their proper time.
One of the major creative forces responsible for the hit British Sci-Fi TV series is Tim Haines, screenwriter, producer, director and founder of the production company Impossible Pictures. It was, in fact, an earlier project that he had worked on that provided the basis for Primeval.
“In 1999 I made a show called Walking with Dinosaurs, which was a natural history program set in the past watching dinosaurs wander around places in Chile and New Zealand where the vegetation was just right,” says Haines. “At that time, there really wasn’t a Sci-Fi show on UK television, and I thought it might be more exciting to see dinosaurs popping out from behind the baked bean counter in a supermarket.
Professor Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) and "friend." Photo copyright of Impossible Pictures.
“I came up with an idea for a TV series where there were holes in time and these creatures came out of them. I managed to team up with a great writer named Adrian Hodges. Together we developed three scripts for the BBC, but then they went ahead and commissioned Doctor Who from Russell T. Davies, which meant we were put on the backburner. Funnily enough, although we weren’t commissioned by the BBC, because Doctor Who was so successful, we did end up being commissioned by ITV.
“So that definitely played a part, but also because of Walking with Dinosaurs, people were able to see that we could deliver the quality that this type of series required. That’s always a big question when you decide to do a dino show. However, I’d done so in several programs and Adrian is a BAFTA [British Academy of Film and Television Arts] Award-winning writer, so in that respect it was quite a safe bet.”
Primeval’s first season follows the work of Professor Nick Cutter and his team – friend and colleague Stephen Hart (James Murray), one of the professor’s students, Connor Temple (Andrew Lee Potts) and a zookeeper, Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearitt) – as they track down strange anomalies that allow creatures from the distant past or future passage into our world. In the series opener, Cutter and his team join forces with British government officials, James Lester (Ben Miller) and Claudia Brown (Lucy Brown), to find a Scutosaurus that came through an anomaly in the Forest of Dean, along with a deadly Gorgonopsid. While the characters certainly had their hands full, getting the actual series off the ground was far less of a struggle for Haines and everyone else involved in its production.
(L-R): Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearitt), Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall), James Lester (Ben Miller) and Claudia Brown (Lucy Brown). Photo copyright of Impossible Pictures.
“What sticks out most in my mind is how smoothly things went in the first season,” he recalls. “Some series can be trickier than others, but I think everyone was quite excited to be doing something different. I mean, most of the cast hadn’t really done anything like this before, whereas in North America most people with experience in feature films were by then becoming quite familiar with blue screen work as well as CG [computer-generated] creatures. I think our actors found that a bit of a laugh to start off with, but luckily most performers just take to it after a while and believe in what they’re doing.
“So in that respect it all went very well, and I think in Douglas Henshall we found someone with quite a strong kind of identity playing the Cutter role, which was important, and a lovely pair in Andrew and Hannah, who went on to form the rock bed of the team later on. Of course, the first episode of anything is always a challenge, but that was a script that had been written a long time ago. I was quite familiar with the Forest of Dean,” notes Haines with a chuckle,” which is why I set the story there. Obviously, how we were going to finish the first season was something that we thought very carefully about and I thought we came up with some great ideas for that. Also, by having our characters go back into the past and discover part of a bigger story as well as a big set-piece of animals made for a rather nice season climax.”
A shift in the timeline brought about all types of changes in season two of Primeval, chief among them the disappearance of Claudia Brown, who was replaced in the new timeline by a PR agent named Jenny Lewis (also played by Lucy Brown). She worked at the Anomaly Research Centre (ARC), which was a base of operations established in this timeline to deal with anomalies,
Connor Temple (Andrew Lee Potts) and Abby (Hannah Spearitt). Photo copyright of Impossible Pictures.
At the end of the second season, Stephen Hart was killed when he sacrificed his life to save his teammates. Special Ops Captain Becker (Ben Mansfield) joined the team in season three to help bolster the ranks, along with Sarah Paige (Laila Rouass), a professor at the British Museum. Cutter’s estranged wife Helen (Juliet Aubrey) continued to cause problems, believing that his work with the anomalies would one day lead to downfall of the human race. She ended up killing Cutter, and following his death, a former police detective, Danny Quinn (Jason Flemying), whose brother had disappeared years earlier through an anomaly, became the team’s new leader.
“In the case of Cutter’s death, I think we were rather forced into that because Douglas Henshall wanted to leave after the second series,” says Haines. “In truth, he would have probably lasted to the end of series three, but we had to then think of other ways to engineer that with Jason’s character. As the new lead, Jason’s character of Danny became much more practical and down-to-Earth as an ex-policeman, and, of course, he was looking for his brother, who was lost, and that brother then came back in season five, which worked very, very well.
“So it was just a matter of weaving a new dynamic within the team. Jumping ahead for a moment to season five and the advent of the Phillip Burton character [an entrepreneur funding the ARC and played by Alexander Siddig], the science end of things got slightly twisted so that the hero didn’t need to be a scientist anymore. In fact, he’d be someone who’s trying to stop the scientist, and then as you know, Connor is drawn to the dark side and then comes back. With all these things, you come up with a new character and then your story has to be true to that individual.
Season three's Primeval team (L-R): Captain Becker (Ben Mansfield), Sarah Paige (Laila Rouass), Danny Quinn (Jason Flemying), Connor Temple (Andrew Lee Potts) and Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearitt). Photo copyright of Impossible Pictures.
“When it comes to the Becker character, we had always intended Captain Ryan [Mark Wakeling] to die, which was a bit of a shame because he was extremely popular, but we found ourselves another character like that in Captain Becker, and Ben Mansfield did a lovely job of playing him. In the mix there had to be a can-do person, someone who wants simple answers and is prepared to stand up to the dinosaurs or whatever. As for Sarah Paige, she was a good foil in the third season to Jason’s character, and I think did a good job of providing a little bit of the science that was lost along with the Cutter character. So I think that was the thinking behind bringing her in when we knew that we were going to be losing the professor.
“Funnily enough, when you actually look back at the first season, we didn’t answer many questions at all. I would have sacked the team myself because they were meant to be a scientific team finding out what was going on. However, that always gave us somewhere to go insofar as slowly discovering how to better spot the anomalies in addition to how to close them and what was causing them. Indeed, we kind of felt that once we knew what was causing them, we were then getting to the heart of the show in that respect. Ultimately there’s the big set piece at the end of season five where Phillip tries to manipulate all the anomalies using a massive machine. I think that formed a great kind of story end.
“Obviously, a big emotional arc of the first three seasons was Helen and her behavior, but when she was killed, we still had questions and there was a legacy, which was her influence on Phillip.”
Abby (Hannah Spearitt), Connor (Andrew Lee Potts) and Becker (Ben Mansfield) fight for their lives! Photo copyright of Impossible Pictures.
In Primeval’s third season finale, Danny is trapped in the Pliocene era while Connor and Abby are marooned in the Cretaceous era when they chase after Helen, who ends up being killed by a Raptor. This was nearly the end of their story, at least on TV, as the series was not renewed by ITV for financial reasons. Fortunately, the creative team was successful in securing other funding sources, which resulted in moving the production to Ireland, and a fourth as well as fifth season was commissioned. The ARC received an upgrade and in addition to Philip Burton, a new team leader was introduced, Matt Anderson (Ciaran McMenamin), along with field coordinator Jess Parker (Ruth Kearney). Once again, the series weathered the changes and this turned out to be a positive step forward for it.
“Strangely enough, although we had to move to Ireland for funding purposes, we actually found that it was perfect for us,” says Haines. “Series two and three had been produced at an old military site in Surrey, and there were the practical problems of re-using locations as well as traveling to a variety of new environments to shoot, like the coastline, forest, hills, the inner city, etc. Moving to Dublin was fantastic because within about a 20-minute radius you have the old and new town, the city center and the suburbs, the moorland and villages, and the coast and ports. It’s all within reach of your base.
“You might have noticed that the location is as much a part of the flavor of Primeval as the creatures. It’s a show about a creature turning up in a location, so suddenly we had a much wider choice in that, which was really helpful. The Irish crew was terrific, too, so everything turned out quite well in the end.”
Connor (Andrew Lee Potts) and Matt Anderson (Ciaran McMenamin). Photo copyright of Impossible Pictures.
As characters came and went throughout Primeval’s five seasons, there were three, Connor, Abby and James Lester, who remained familiar faces throughout the show’s entire run.
“Ben Miller was a delight, and I think that Adrian Hodges especially enjoyed writing for the James Lester character, who was the sarcastic guy in charge,” says Haines. “For a long time James was quite a foil, but eventually he had to become a bit more engaged in the story and goes much more native in the end as opposed to being a little standoffish. We got a lot out of Ben and everyone liked him. Also, there is something about casting comedians in these types of roles. Ben is also a comedian, and audiences are very fond of comedians/actor, so despite the fact that Ben’s character was a sarcastic bastard from the very beginning, the audience always assumed that deep down he was quite soft.
“With Andrew and Hannah, that’s one of those things that just happens. Andrew is great and an experienced actor; he has been since he was a child actor. Hannah, of course, had a previous singing career in a pop group, and therefore it was a bit of a leap to cast her in something like this. However, she is exactly like her character of Abby and that kind of fresh, wide-eyed young girl. We started off the first season thinking, ‘Oh, we’ll probably match Abby up with Stephen Hart,’ who was there at the time, but that just never worked. There was much more chemistry between her and Connor, the geek.
(L-R): Connor (Andrew Lee Potts), James Lester (Ben Miller) and Abby (Hannah Spearitt). Photo copyright of Impossible Pictures.
“As time went on, though, Connor stopped being so much of a geek and much more of a core member of the team and an essential part of the overall storyline. In the end, he becomes the lynchpin. That’s what the Matt character recognizes – the fact that Connor has become the problem and he has to stop him. Getting back to Connor and Abby, I don’t know if you remember it, but there’s that great little scene where the two of them are underground and Connor is giving up. Abby leans down and whispers something in his ear, which everyone thinks is, ‘I’m pregnant,’ but, in fact, she saying, ‘I’ll marry you.’”
While there are no new episodes of Primeval currently being made, that does not mean its story has ended. A new group of anomaly hunters based in Vancouver, British Columbia are on the job in the new Canadian-made spin-off Primeval: New World. It stars Niall Matter (Zane Donovan from Syfy’s Eureka) as Evan Cross, who along with his team investigate anomalies and the appearances of some strange creatures across the pond. Not surprisingly, Haines, who serves as an executive producer on New World, and the rest of the UK Primeval creative team have been happily cheering their North American counterparts on from the very beginning.
“When Primeval: New World started off, we were very much involved, and it was something we thought was and is exciting,” he says. “Like the CSI programs or whatever, if it’s happening in one place there’s no reason why it shouldn’t happen somewhere else. In the beginning we had several meetings where people gracefully allowed me to ‘sound off’ for hours about what Primeval was in the UK, but equally from the beginning, we also knew that New World wasn’t exactly like our show. In the UK, Primeval is a pre-watershed or 7 o’clock show, whereas New World is going to be, I believe, a 9 o’clock show for the SPACE Channel.
Two new "anomaly hunters" - Primeval: New World's Evan Cross (Niall Matter) and Dylan Weir (Sara Canning). Photo by Bettina Strauss and copyright of Omni Film Productions.
“So they’re kind of tonally different, and one of the problems you can sometimes have as an originator of a TV show is to sit there and go, ‘No, no, no, that’s not our show. Our show is like this.’ If you do that too much, you realize that you’re just trying to clone your own show, which is not what I think anyone wanted here. So it was a matter of setting balls rolling, but then leaving them to play.
“I think our guys had one or two conversations with the great graphics group that they have over there, Atmosphere VFX, who is doing the creature work, but, again, only letting them know anything we learned that caused some problems for us. Otherwise, though, in the end, once New World gets up and running, it’s very much SPACE’s show as well as [executive producers] Martin Wood’s and Gillian Horvath’s, and all you then do is stand on the sidelines and watch.”
Having graduated in 1982 from Bangor University with a degree in Entomology Applied Zoology, Haines began working in journalism before moving into radio and then television. Best known for producing the aforementioned Walking with Dinosaurs TV documentary series as well as Walking with Prehistoric Beasts and Walking with Monsters, the BAFTA and Emmy award-winning Haines also helped executive produce the Sci-Fi series Defying Gravity and currently the new Sinbad series. Listening to the enthusiasm in his voice, there is no doubt that he was meant to be a part of this industry.
“I know this sounds blindingly obvious, but people who work in creative industries enjoy creating something,” says Haines, “and whether I was writing an article or doing a radio or TV show, I don’t think I could do a job where I couldn’t come home with something at the end of the day and say, ‘I made that.’”
Steve Eramo
As noted above, Primeval photos copyright of Impossible Pictures and Primeval: New World photo by Bettina Strauss and copyright of Omni Film Productions, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!
