By BRIDGET BYRNE, For The Associated Press
2 hours, 11 minutes ago
"Basically it's a man in a very colorful jumpsuit with something attached to a long pole going, 'It's swooping, it's swooping, it's coming around, it's coming down. Araaagh!'" says Ben Miller, mimicking an on-set stand-in for the beasts, later to be fully realized by computer-generated special effects.
As Sir James Lester, an arrogant government official, Miller only occasionally encounters a dinosaur. But the rest of the cast of BBC America's "Primeval" continually meet up with the fiercest of the species — or cozy up to the cutest.
"At first when you are reacting to a traffic cone on a stick it's a bit hilarious. The hardest thing was not to laugh," says Andrew-Lee Potts, who plays dinosaur-obsessed computer geek Connor Temple.
"It was a learning curve for all of us and there were a lot of giggles along the way," Potts added. "But now when you see new characters come to the show and you see those actors struggle with it, you realize how it's become part of your life, so I don't find it tough any more."
The series, which premieres on Aug. 9 at 9 p.m. EDT, is built around the adventures of a group of scientists turned action heroes. Attached to the so-called Anomaly Research Centre, they're investigating the sightings of alarming and intriguing creatures, which pop up in modern life via time warp holes in the universe.
On a recent rainy day in Chertsey, about 25 miles west of London, filming of the series continued on the Anomaly Centre set, which was built on an old industrial site.
A small dinosaur, a Diictodon, has escaped from its cage. But, of course, there's no sign on the set of anything that even remotely resembles a prehistoric beast.
"It looks like a big guinea pig," says Miller, helpfully describing a Diictodon to the uninitiated.
"Primeval," which airs in Britain on ITV, is the creation of Tim Haines and Adrian Hodges.
A science journalist turned filmmaker, Haines produced the Emmy-winning BBC documentary series "Walking with Dinosaurs," a huge hit when it aired on the Discovery Channel in 2000. He also used similar CGI, animatronics and location footage to create plausible images of extinct creatures in the 2001 series "Walking with Beasts" and "Walking with Monsters" in 2005.
"It gave me a skill set where you say, 'Well, what else can this do?'" says Haines.
So he devised this TV drama with "a creature of the week" — often scary, but never so ghastly that it oversteps the bounds of
family-friendly programming.
Haines explains that most of the creatures are drawn from historic truth because "if you obey the rules and design a creature based on biology or something that did exist, then people go, 'Oooh, that looks real!'"
Yet the fantasy element of the show provides license to let the imagination soar. "It's a fantastic relief not to have to worry about the length of their teeth and the size of nostril hair," Haines notes, "so I could add an extra sabre tooth to the Gorgonopsid and no one cared, because this is drama."
Besides the huge, predatory dinos, the show also features a harmless Scutosaurus, which looks like an elephant but is actually related to a turtle. On a smaller scale, there's Rex, a domesticated flying lizard. There are also giant spiders, millipedes, scorpions, worms, cute but deadly Dodos, the alligator-like Mosasaur, and a flying Pteranodon, which invades a golf course.
On the Net: http://www.bbcamerica
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