ITV are already firing the opening salvos in what is sure to be the head-to-head contest of the spring TV schedules.

It's time travelling dinosaurs vs. a time travelling phone box as the channel pins their ratings hopes on the new Saturday night series Primeval (note the clever spelling there!).

You can read more about the premise for the series, and watch a trailer for it, here: ITV: Primeval.

With effects from the team behind Walking With Dinosaurs this sounds an awful lot like the series – whose name I’ve already forgotten – that ITV pushed out to challenge Who last year, although this time - as the propaganda proudly proclaims - the emphasis is strictly on Adventure! (with a capital A!).

Hit or Miss? I guess time will tell . . .

I saw the ad for this at the cinema last week. Another S Club member makes it onto prime time telly.

Funny thing about the title, we wait years for a monster thingy called Primeval and then two come along at once.

What a croc

Yeah, that threw me for a bit when I saw it as well.

Prehistoric Park. Which was dire. I'm guessing this will be too.

The casting of someone from S-Club doesn't bode well, but then again people said similar things about Billie Piper . . .

Personally I can see what ITV are trying to do here, what with dinosaurs obviously being a big draw an' all, but I'm wondering if they would have been better off putting this up against the next series of Robin Hood rather than Doctor Who, which is surely going to wipe the floor with it?

The fact that it's on ITV instantly puts it into the category of tosh. I have never been impressed by anything ITV has put out. Ever.

They are good at crime dramas, such as Morse and Poirot etc, but they have a seemingly infallible ability to turn a good sci-fi premise into something that doesn't come close to living up to expectations (The Last Train anyone?! ).

ITV produced Chimera in 1991 and aged 11 watching that, I shat myself. I'm not exactly sure how frightening it would be now but it wasn't a bad for a scifi/horror series.

They also produced the very good but overlooked Oktober and the extremely good Second Coming.

Apparently Oktober and Chimera were both done by the same guy, who used to write for Doctor Who in the early eighties, Steven Gallagher.

Yep, to be fair Oktober was good (I haven't seen Second Coming).

I remember seeing Chimera (I was 20 at the time!) but I don't remember it being that good.

Stephen Gallagher also wrote last years Eleventh Hour, which stared Patrick Stewart and Ashley Jensen, and I think it demonstrates quite nicely my thoughts about ITV sci-fi dramas - the concept was good, the cast was excellent, but overall it just dull as dish water.

I hate to prejudge things too much but come on!! - failure straight off.

I wish ITV had taken my idea for time travelling, ninja, robo, dinosaurs ghosts from Mars a bit more seriously now.

Ah well, as long as the sponsorships keep rolling in and the public complains very little.

-m0r

It sounds quite good but I imagine it'll be shit.

I just saw a trailer for this on TV.

The team all stood around in a "striking" V formation.

Looked a lot like Torchwood, but without the rain . . .

Well, the series starts this Saturday at 7.45pm on ITV1.

The timing strikes me as a little odd, given that it's being touted as ITV's reply to Doctor Who. If the Timelord does take to the air again before the end of March, as rumour suggests, the two aren't going to be going head-to-head at any point - do the ITV execs know when they've been beat?

How many Primeval episodes are there? If it's the standard British no-more-than-6 then the timing does sound ill-planned.
Maybe their budget has stretched to a full 13 though, in which case it would still be on when Who starts.

It'd have to be bloody good for people to go "I'm not going to watch Doctor Who. I'm going to watch this show about time travel and monsters instead"

Radio Times has it listed as 1/6.

Let's be the first to say I liked it.

It's bunkum and it knows it. Apart from Douglas Henshall who thinks he's in a serious programme. Someone tell him, please.
While I liked the way it didn't take itself seriously I do hope they cut back a little on the wink-wink comedy. The dinosaur that didn't like Kaiser Chiefs, that was funny. But the playing of the Automatic's Monster on the soundtrack, no, that was too obvious and 'cute' for me.

On the whole though it was entertaining enough. It'll do until Who starts.

Well it's sort of a kids show isn't it? Straight into the action, no uncertainty about what's going on...I was expecting something with a bit more of an X Files style little mystery building up to a big mystery but Lord knows where it's going to go from there. Not terribly scary, a pretty poor script and a bald plot that needs to throw up more mystery from the start.

It was quite interesting to see that the professor appears to teach at an ex-polytechnic. It makes a break from the usual "he's the foremost paleantologist in the country" line to him being a sort of middle of the road academic.

I saw that advert and thought "oh dear, this is why I don't watch TV any more". It's so ridiculously cheesy it made me cringe.

It is a kids show yeah. No real depth to it.

The big example being what to do when they found the Stargate portal thingy. In a more thought-provoking drama they could have talked about being wary about going in and maybe altering the past somehow. But in this they did a very quick "Ok sign this. Take the bloke with the gun with you. Be back in one hour and five minutes"

They do have a tiny ongoing mystery in what happened to his wife. That'll probably keep popping up while they introduce their monsters of the week.

I thought exactly the same thing in connection to Stargate.

well doctor who will go into bbc's 7pm on saturday slot so this show will be on after.

Makes a change from them playing in Doctor Who montages.

I watched Shrek, but taped this and watched it later in the evening.

It wasn't the total disaster I was expecting, the initial build up wasn't too bad for instance, but the acting was piss-poor (hell, the little kid was more convincing than the leads!).

There was far too much running around in the woods and the sequence in the school was plain silly . . .

And what was that with the posed shots of the lead bloke's wife?! "I'm stranded millions of years in the past, but I'll take some pin-up shots just in case my camera is found one day . . ."

The premise does have some potential, but it's pretty basic and straight out of Sci-Fi by Numbers, a Beginners Guide.

Do ITV have a special spray for their sci-fi dramas? Something to give them that distinct half-baked flavour?

It'll be no worse that crappy Doctor Who. It just doesn't have the established fanbase waiting to verbally fellate the creative team, regardless of quality.

The SFX and a lot of the acting in Doctor Who is utter cackhouse, and I expect rather the same of Primeval.

I think half the problem is that Tim Haines is writing it. He's more of a documentary man, surely?

And the guy in the black leather jacket is perhaps the worst actor I've seen. Ever.

I don't think any of the cast were very good, but then again it could be argued that you can only be as good as the material you are given to read . . .

I think the thing that disappointed me the most was the effects.

Given that they were done by the same people who did Walking With Dinosaurs, you would have though that they would have improved more noticeably over the last eight years . . .

Fact.

The Gorgonopsid was pretty poorly realised. The Anapsid wasn't so bad.

And Rex is the new Uni, as far as I can tell. All it needs it Frank Welker doing it's voice.

Well that was shit

Only just got round to watching it after taping it, its worse than a kids show if you ask me, it has no depth and its plain boring...its Jurassic Park 3 all over again....no thanks

What's the pretty one out of S Club like in it?

She danced around in her undies in Saturdays episode. Not a bad actress either.

The show's ok. Still much better than Torchwood.

Yeah, she's not the worst thing about it by a long way.

I half watched the second part on the repeat yesterday whilst I was doing stuff around the flat, and as a consequence I wasn't really paying attention, but it didn't seem that bad - although it was a bit by the numbers again.

I think it always will be, to be fair.

Apart from the silly "Go stand in the monster infested lake to get a water sample" scene, I thought this week’s episode was quite good.

It is going to be interesting to see how they build up the plot with the chaps wife.

I saw it this weekend and didn't think much of it. The government interference parts are nicely X-files, but Ben Miller is playing it too pompous for it to work, so it jars with me.

Primeval gets second series.

That's a turn up for the books, a non-crime drama on ITV getting renewed!

I'm astounded. It's been panned by the critics, and viewing figures seem to be poor.

Then it's ITV1. After all, Benidorm's getting a second series.

Not all of them, and I believe it has been holding its own it the time slot it's in.

To be fair though, it hasn't been up against much, has it? When Will I Be Famous? and Weakest Link specials aren't exactly competition. If ITV1 wants to compete against Doctor Who, it needs to come up with better stuff than this.

It hasn't been up against much, but it has been doing its job - beating the opposition in its time slot.

I think it's fairly clear from its time slot that ITV had no intention of putting this up against Who.

I dunno, I think at some point they had a feeling that they could. And then chickened out royally.

Well it was a pretty average series as a whole, apart form the large amount of Hannah pantie shots. And then in the last episode they end with a corker of a twist. Bastards!

Sort of . . .

It would have been highly predictable, but I think it would have had more of an impact if they come back to the future to find everyone gone (and dinos running amok or something!).

Why didn't I watch this?! Gah!

I caught the trailer for series two last night - is it wrong to be looking forward to another dosh of dino-tosh so much?!

I caught the trailer too, but the cgi looked so bad. I really hope the only reason for this was because they haven't fully finished it yet and they just used what they had for the trailer.

But apart from that I'll still watch it, I enjoyed the first series and it can't be as bad as Robin Hood.

Yes, some of those dinosaurs did look pretty ropey!

Never saw the original, and was not impressed with what I saw in the trailer... The CGI god-awful!

I'm sure I'll end up watching it again!

I'd forgotten all about the big eyed puppy boy.