Primeval

Now, my concentration on this was interfered with spending the first half flicking between it and The One And Only, so it was DOUGLAS HENSHALL - FAT TOM JONES - KILLER RAPTOR - SHORT ROD STEWART - HANNAH SPEARITT - GRAHAM NORTON'S DEVIL TAN. Also, I only saw one episode of season 1, so I have very little comparative material to go on and next to no background knowledge. But for all that, I actually really enjoyed Primeval.

The premise is dead simple. A bunch of prehistoric creatures come through a rift in time (they keep calling it an "anomaly" which I'm assuming is because all of the better words have been taken by previous scifi series) and team Henshall have to find them all and shove them back into the past. These anomalies crop up all over the place and each time a different monster gets through and wreaks a different kind of havoc in a different place.

This time it was a bunch of velociraptors in a shopping mall (an empty mall sadly, they probably couldn't afford the extras, so only the odd security guard got munched). (By the way was anyone paying attention and saw what happened to the guy who got his throat ripped out by a baby dino? I saw the bit where he'd mysteriously vanished but that was it.) All very Jurassic Park I'll grant you, but doing surprisingly well given the un-Jurassic Park-sized budget. I think it's easier to make the dinos convincing when they move dead fast. They kept the tension up pretty well over the whole hour, and there were some geniune surprises along the way: full marks to the bods who came up with the chasing-dinosaurs-on-motorbikes sequence, and I loved - scrap that - *adored* the moment when the Daddy raptor ATE the baby raptor.

The human interest stuff fitted nicely around the action without slowing things down too much. A pleasing mystery has been set up regarding certain changes that have happened between the last time Douggie went into the rift - sorry - anomaly, and when he came out, but (and I like this) the changes are mostly subtle and it's hard to see if the world is worse off or just different. Plus I am really looking forward to the reappearance of evil Mrs Douggie, who has also, it's emerged, been boffing his sidekick, repressed macho yet oddly metrosexual Stephen. And bonus points go to the casting of lovely Martin from Green Wing as a bumbling - but surely hiding something - civil servant who only exists in the new reality.

I'm sticking my neck out here and maybe it's just the novelty, but I enjoyed this more than a lot of recent Doctor Who, which, certain genius episodes aside, has been suffering a bit from self-congratulatoriness. This was simpler, fresher, and a lot less smug. Whether I can muster up enough continuing enthusiasm for the central shoot-em-up of humans versus monsters is another matter; it is a bit like a computer game with a lot of different-but-the-same levels, and without any guiding intelligence to the monsters, it's a little hard to invest that much interest in them. Douggie Henshall is a brilliant lead but I failed to engage with any of the other characters: macho-metro Stephen seems rather cold, the only female character in this episode spent most of it unconscious, and I can't decide whether the geeky boy with the rat face is quirky and amusing or just really annoying.

I'll be back for more, then, in the particular hope that we get some good bad guy action complicating the setup next week.