CREATOR CHAT

Simon Guerrier

Soon after the events of season three's fifth episode, Danny and Lester are called out to South Africa. A dinosaur has been seen in a game park, amid the lions and hippos. Meanwhile the rest of the team battle multiple anomalies in flooded Maidenhead and London. It's one of their quieter weeks.

I watched Primeval when it was on, and quickly bought the DVD of season one when I knew I was up for the job. The nice folk at Titan kindly provided me with DVDs of season two and scripts for season three, and pointed me in the direction of Tim Haines and Paul Chambers' book, The Complete Guide to Prehistoric Life.

The production team couldn't have been more helpful, but I was very keen to get things right. So I devoured the scripts and notes they sent me. I also got to visit the set twice last summer during filming and bother the cast and crew. I copied down everything: the number on Connor's security badge, the names of their different guns, all the things the actors told me. That all went into the book.

As for development, a book lets you get into the characters' heads more than TV does. Since this is the first time Danny and Sarah have appeared in print, I made sure there's a lot about how they think and how they see their roles in the ARC. There are things that happen in the book that the TV series couldn't do - I've got a much bigger budget. But you don't want to alter the characters too much because they need to be recognisable.

I'd be hard-pressed to pick a favourite; they're all smart and sassy so you can give them jokes. I enjoyed seeing the development of new characters Sarah and Danny - I'm not sure they'd even been cast when I first got involved. It's impressive seeing what an actor brings to the character on the page - I had to rewrite quite a lot of my early chapters having seen Leila and Jason on set. Leila makes Sarah much warmer and sympathetic than I first thought the character would be, and Jason brings so much energy to Danny.

I think I've always written; realising I could maybe do it as a job took a bit more time. In 1997 I got to meet one of my writing heroes - Paul Cornell, who wrote an episode of last year's Primeval. I nervously asked him his advice because I wanted to be a writer. "Well, um, write..." he said. And so I did. After about five years of sending stuff out everywhere I could think of, I started to get published.

You can think a lot bigger: you can have all the emotion and jokes and excitement of the everyday, *and* have monsters and explosions going on behind it. Some people think science fiction must make things easier, that it frees you from all sorts of rules. But there are *more* rules with science fiction: you have to define your own limits, and early on so the reader knows where they are. Primeval, for example, sets out what anomalies can and can't do all within that first episode, and everything that follows on TV and in books is us exploring those limits. That's the fun of it; it's like a parlour game - here are the rules, now make something that's the same but different.

I got the job because I'd already written several Doctor Who books. I've also just done an audio book for the BBC's Robin Hood, read by Richard Armitage. And there's a few things in the pipeline I can't really talk about yet. So, er, yes, but it's a secret.