Oh dear. We all wanted this to be really, really good didn't we? But as with anything that it's impossible to avoid in the run-up to its premiere, with blanket-coverage trailers, house-sized posters at the end of every street and the side of every bus, and a Flash driven website that must have cost almost as much as the programme itself, there was always that worry. That nagging doubt at the back of your mind. The suspicion that, in the end, it would turn out to be pants. And if it's pants that have been around since the Permian Era, then it's bound to stink.

ITV really needs this new science fiction drama series to work. Series Three of Doctor Who will be kicking off in a few weeks' time and they need to have everyone's feet firmly under their table to lock in the Saturday night audience.

Let's just pause right there for a moment. Firstly, does anyone actually believe an audience can be "locked in" to a channel by a single early-evening programme any more? If this was ever true, it's most likely to have been true when channel changing involved some physical effort. Levering oneself out of the corner of the sofa and walking a few feet across the living room to press the channel button or twiddle a dial on the old telly. But that hasn't been true for thirty years or more. Channel surfing is no more demanding than looking down at your remote and lifting a finger. It has no physical, emotional or psychological barriers. People watch what they want to watch, not what follows the thing they just finished watching. Secondly, how can the concept of one programme being "up against" another have any meaning when over 90% of UK households have some form of recording device? Even old steam-driven VCRs allow you to watch one thing while recording another (and if most people are like me, the thing they choose to record is whatever has adverts in it), and more modern PVRs can record two things while you watch another. So any idea that your target audience will choose to watch either Primeval or Doctor Who is patently false. Science fiction fans are much more likely to watch both. Well, except this science fiction fan, which brings me neatly back to the matter at hand.

I have to say right from the off: the CGI dinosaurs were great. From the cute little green flying lizard - Coelurosauravus - which was vaguely reminiscent of the pet monster from Surface to the Gorgonopsid (how does every dinosaur programme manage to come up with another you've never heard of?) they were all designed and rendered extremely well, and clearly explain where most of the drama budget went. Because unfortunately, they were also far better actors than anyone else in the show.

I shouldn’t lay all the blame on the actors though. Faced with portraying such two-dimensional characters as Connor Temple, James Lester and even Nick Cutter, and with some of the cheesiest dialogue since Wallace & Gromit, they were probably doing their best. Connor Temple, the overgrown adolescent. "Loves pizza" according to his character "profile" (how apt. Profile: a picture or representation of the side view of a head - i.e. another two dimensional object) - which reads like a Boy's Own guide to character definition. James Lester, the stuffed shirt, buttoned-up-tight civil servant who's only good for getting in everyone's way. And Nick Cutter, the "scientist" who can't deliver a line of pseudo-scientific bollocks without it sounding like he can't quite get his tongue round it and whose overriding goal is to find his wife, missing these last eight years. So...where has he been looking before now?

Here's a test. Listen to Geordie LaForge talking about iso-linear chips, flux capacitors and tachyon bursts. Then listen to Nick Cutter saying with exasperated insistence: "some...force...out there, ripped the boundaries of space and time ... to shreds..." See what I mean? Some people can write it, and have it sound right. Others can't. Some actors can deliver it and have you believe it. Others can't.

I didn't come into this show with anything but hope - no desire - for it to be good. There's not that much sci-fi about to be able to pick and choose. And good sci-fi is even rarer. I needed it to be good. But I can't pretend it was. Neither is it true that this was so perfectly targetted at the "youth" audience that I just didn't get it. The ages of the people I watched it with spanned early teens, late teens and middle age, and we all agreed it was bad. Not just painfully bad, but it had us laughing out loud at how bad it was.

Cutter stepped through the "anomaly" eventually, as we knew he would. And having arrived with his bodyguard 250 million years in the past and eight years after his wife, what's the first thing he did? Wander off shouting her name. Yeah, surrounded by a desert landscape and in plain view of any predator within 100 miles, she'd be bound to sit in the same spot for eight years, right? Oh, and here's a surprise: the anomaly is closing! We have to get back! I'm staying here, oh alright then, I'm not. Please.