In what must rank as one of the most staggeringly short-sighted decisions in recent times, cash-strapped ITV has announced that it will not be making any further episodes of monster mash Primeval.

The show, whose third season has been both a ratings and critical success, has become victim to the major budget cuts at ITV, which means that it will no longer be producing scripted drama for a pre-watershed timeslot. Granted, the show wasn’t the cheapest to produce, but a major movie tie-in is in the works thanks to Warner Bros, and we can’t have been alone in suspecting that the show’s future was looking bright. However, ITV's coffers simply couldn't finance the show any more.

As a result, according to a report at Total Sci-Fi, the plug has been pulled. The site quotes a show insider as saying, “At the point where we finished the third series, we had every reason to believe we would be doing a fourth. Had we known there was any likelihood of cancellation, clearly we wouldn't have left half the cast marooned up a tree in the distant past.”

There’s hope that the show may yet find a new home, but this is clearly a major setback. With that big budget movie still planned, there's still surely hope for Primeval, and we wonder if the BBC might do us all a favour, ditch Merlin, and snap up Primeval season four instead?

Total SciFi