New Year’s Day sees the return of ITV’s Primeval, 18 months after the show’s shock cancellation. Series co-creator Adrian Hodges explains the changes that have occurred both sides of the camera during the hiatus… Words: Paul Simpson

What happened after you heard about ITV’s decision not to renew Primeval last summer?

It looked pretty bleak – we couldn’t quite see how we could get out of that situation.

However [Hodges’ co-creator and Impossible Pictures boss] Tim Haines worked away tirelessly with Pro Sieben, the German co-producers, and BBC Worldwide. He reconceived how the budget worked, bringing in BBC America as a co-producer. Pro Sieben kept the slot open and Worldwide went to bat for us and got various guarantees from distributors.

Tim managed to put together this very complicated but satisfactory deal whereby with an Irish location, we could make the budget work, albeit with less money than we had before. We took it back to ITV and it’s a very sweet deal for them: they get the same programme, the same kudos and pay a lot less money.

Then of course the cast had all gone on to do other things. Jason Flemyng [team leader Danny Quinn] had always had a good career doing small parts in Hollywood films, and then had great success in quick succession with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Clash of the Titans, both of which were very big jobs for him. He was lovely about it, but he didn’t want to go away to Ireland for a year. All the actors had slipped out of option, so he was perfectly within his rights to say he wanted to do other things. And he is in the new series…

Sarah Page has gone as a character – just one of those creative decisions that we took in the downtime. It was nothing to do with Laila Roussas; Tim and I felt that we had to have new characters and to do that we had to let one or two of the others go – we couldn’t afford them all! There is some dialogue about her death, and there’s an expanded reference in the webisodes on the ITV website.

Let’s talk about the new characters, starting with Matt Anderson.

Obviously there was a simple production trigger – once we knew Jason wasn’t going to come back for the whole run, we needed a new leading man. We wanted to take what had worked best about [Douglas Henshall’s character Nick Cutter] combined with what we liked about Danny, and we wanted to go slightly younger.

Cutter brought a strong backstory with him. I wanted another go at that sort of story. Danny does have a backstory, which is explored in this series, but he had a lighter feel as a central character than Cutter. I wanted to get a balance of the two into Matt. I think he’s likeable and charming but he does have another thing going on.

We spent more time in development on Matt and his backstory than on anything else because we wanted to make the text and the subtext come together over the whole 13 episodes.

When he was talking about his character, entrepreneur Philip Burton, Alexander Siddig said that he didn’t want to make him an obvious villain…

I don’t think he is a villain, actually. I think it goes in a very interesting direction – he’s not Helen, let me put it that way. That’s why we’ve got a great actor like Sid, because we wanted somebody who could play different levels of good and bad.

He says he’s based his performance on Tony Blair. Is Philip actually based on anyone particular?

He isn’t. It’s interesting that Sid mentions Blair; that makes very good sense in terms of the character, and the private and public perception of the character. Those kinds of men – and they usually are men who have that kind of money and power – do tend to have enormous charm and presence when you meet them. It’s only after the event that you wonder if you have been manipulated. It doesn’t matter whether you like them or not; it matters whether they get what they need from you.

That quality of enormous personal charm mixed with incredible determination is what you get from Philip.

Are Philip and Ben Miller’s Lester equals?

Yes, which is incredibly annoying from Lester’s point of view! In the history of the world, co-leaderships have never worked. Philip is broadly in charge of scientific policy, and Lester day-to-day policy… but neither has a veto over the other.

I thought it was amusing and appropriate that the ARC should be semi-privatised with this entrepreneurial character involved while in the downtime; it seemed a very 2010 thing to happen to them.

The new girl, Jess, feels like she’s fulfilling the same role Connor did for Cutter…

I think that’s absolutely right. Connor had to be literally replaced while he was away in the Cretaceous so they needed somebody to occupy that role. One option was to go hardcore military, the other was to go geeky – but we wanted a bright ordinary girl who happens to be brilliant at organising things. She’s young, a bit fashion conscious but bloody good at her job – and I loved the idea of somebody completely unintimidated by Lester as well.

In episode three, we meet Emily, a new kind of human...

She has a very significant role to play. Up until the development on this series, we’ve generally avoided human contact. We thought it was probably time to address that full on. She’s one of a group of wanderers who have gone through anomalies in various human eras, found each other and travelled together looking for their own times. We had a name for them originally – the Time Tribe – which we didn’t bring into the episodes.

There seems to be elements of the Pools Between the Worlds in C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew…

That’s a very nice comparison but I don’t think either Tim or I were consciously thinking of it. We both know C.S. Lewis’s books very well and it may well have been buried in there somewhere.

What sort of creatures are we likely to see this year?

We keep pumping poor old Tim for new and better creatures. There are certain greatest hits in the series, as well as certain things we know the audience is keen on and we do a little bit more of that than we have in the past. And there are those we make up based on reasonable guesses about the past, and indeed the future.

I don’t think we would write a story just to get a creature into it, but the great thing is that the creatures work in most contexts.

What was the biggest challenge for the writing in terms of the Irish location?

I don’t think it affected us too badly – rather the reverse. I think it helped us in many ways. It did give us a broader canvas to work on. There are more locations near to Dublin: Ireland is a very modern and a very rural country at the same time, which does give us a lot of options.

Tim was keen to go back to using ancient mythology more and we were able to do that in Ireland a bit more easily than in England – and they’re much nicer about letting you use the land as well. It does make it easier to do the past – we’ve always had to go abroad in previous series, but I’m very comfortable with the Cretaceous that we’ve created in Ireland for the first two episodes. I think the waterfall is one of the best things we’ve ever done.

We always took the view that we were doing the same show and we didn’t need to compromise in any way. Going to Ireland hasn’t made any difference in terms of the scale or conception of the stories.

Primeval Season 4 begins on ITV1 on 1 January 2011.