Primeval - TV review

We've all been there, at one time or another,

. One minute you're relaxing on your velociraptor farm, shooting the breeze while your livestock tucks into a goat or twelve.

The next, you've only gone and opened up an anomaly in space, and sent a dangerous dinosaur back in time! Okay, if you set the dial for millions of years ago, all's fine and dandy – that's where velociraptors actually live, after all.

But oh, no, this wormhole happens to dump the beastie in Victorian London! Honestly, what are you like?

Then what do you do? The velociraptor patrol officer isn't on duty until Wednesday, Jurassic Park has shut down, and worst of all, you're already 150 years too late to do anything about it anyway.

I must admit, the biggest problems I faced this weekend centred on things like removing dried-on food while washing up, or not being able to find a decent movie on the telly.

But the intrepid team on Primeval (ITV1) don't deal with normal issues. They actually did go and chuck a ferocious monster into the middle of a growing industrial city with a limited framework for understanding dinosaurs.

"This," one of the ITV1 show's immaculately groomed young go-getters says as she calls up a handy computerised archive of Victorian newspapers which confirms the beastie has already done in 12 olden days bods, "is not good."

To be fair, she has a point. Doctor Who would never have committed such a mishap.

I'm sorry if that seems an unfair comparison, but it stands scrutiny. The Doctor looms large over Primeval, in everything from the borderline indecipherable sci-fi language to the demand to leave your cynicism at the door.

Indeed, I am perfectly happy to believe, for one hour of a Saturday night, that a raptor has gone back in time, but you can hop through a floating space-gate to follow them.

It seems I'm not the only one, either. The Victorians don't bat an eyelid at seeing people pass between eras wielding laser guns.

More suspicious is how pretty everyone looks. One world-class scientist is an immaculate young blond, cunningly disguised using a pair of thick glasses and a thicker cardy. Truth be told, I'm not sure what half of their jobs are.

I had never seen an episode of Primeval before Saturday's instalment, and it was hard to dip into.

The characters are fairly well defined – it was easy to pick up on personalities even in just an hour-long instalment and you know who's a baddie, who's the geeky scientist, who's the all action workhorse.

But the script is clunky, and bits of the acting are more than a little wooden. Worse still, the scientific mumbo-jumbo falls well short of the hammy guff spouted by The Doctor ("Maybe the coils were a bit hot or summat," a particularly effort-free bit of scripting), and there's not enough explanation of why everything is happening.

The production values fall short, the theme tune is rubbish, and I have no idea why this group of catalogue models has been put in charge of Britain's growing stray dinosaur problem – a job would be made harder by everyone's simmering carnal urges.

Primeval was clearly created to cater for Doctor Who and Torchwood fans looking for something to fill the gaps between their favourites.

But really, it's the equivalent of snacking on bread while you wait for your tea. It's alright, but you'll have no appetite left for when something better comes along.