Every day is Prime-time for busy Andrew!

Since the first series of the ITV1 Saturday night show, which saw Wibsey-born Andrew, 27, play science geek Connor Temple recruited into a team investigating the appearance of mysterious prehistoric beasties all over the UK, the actor has become an instantly-recognisable household name.

"It's mad," he says from his home in Brighton. "I get recognised everywhere. We get loads of people coming up to us for autographs, which is fine because they're always polite and really nice about it, and we have been chased down the road by kids shouting Connor! Connor!'."

The "we" that Andrew refers to is the real-life romantic partnership he has formed with his Primeval co-star Hannah Spearritt, who plays Abby in the show and who already has a high public recognition factor thanks to her years with teen pop band S Club 7.

Love blossomed between the two on the set of the first series and they've remained an item ever since. But if any star-spotters among you are looking out for Andrew and Hannah to add to your autograph collection, then be warned: they look a little different these days. Which is something that proved quite embarrassing for Andrew recently.

As well as acting in front of the camera for Primeval, which begins its second season tonight on ITV1, Andrew also does some directing himself, and was delighted when the Primeval production team put him at the helm of a series of "making of" documentaries.

Filming on these finished recently, and they will go live on the Primeval website and be included in the DVD release of the new series.

But Andrew was recently called back to re-shoot a few of his "talking head" scenes which gave his bosses something of a problem since wrapping up production on the series and the making of documentaries, Andrew had shaved all his hair off!

"I didn't do it to avoid being recognised," protests Andrew. "After we'd finished filming I said I fancied a change, and as I had to have a different look for the new series of Ideal I decided to shave my head. Hannah decided to go for a totally different appearance, too, and she's dyed her hair brown."

But while a shaved head might be appropriate for Ideal - the BBC3 druggie comedy starring stand-up Johnnie Vegas - it proved a bit too much for Primeval producers, who were suddenly faced with the prospect of half of their documentary series presented by Andrew with luscious flowing locks, the other half with a bald head!

The solution? "I'll leave it up to viewers to decide whether they can tell the difference between me with my normal hair and me in a wig and a hat," laughs Andrew.

If you saw Jonathan Ross's chat show last night you'll already have had a sneak preview of the new-look Potts, and appearing opposite one of the country's most popular entertainers is just one more aspect of fame that Andrew is having to get used to, along with being chased by screaming children. A heavy workload to be juggled is another one of them.

He says: "We filmed Jonathan Ross on Thursday night then I had to dash off to Manchester to film some scenes for Ideal, then it was back down south. It's busy but that's the way I like it, and to be honest, that's what I'm used to."

Andrew has been acting since he was seven, appearing on junior TV fare such as Children's Ward in the late Eighties, before graduating to north country staples Heartbeat, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates and Dalziel and Pascoe. Perhaps his biggest break came when he landed a part in the Tom Hanks-directed mini series Band of Brothers, which was screened in 2001, and since then he's never been out of work, be it in the "British X-Files" series Strange, Lynda La Plante's Trial and Retribution, historical drama Boudicca (in which he played the mad Roman emperor Nero with a chilling degree of bonkersness) and the aforementioned Ideal. His film roles include Popcorn, Return to House on Haunted Hill, and two movies currently in post-production, Heart of a Dragon and the intriguingly-titled Lesbian Vampire Killers. And that's before we even get to his stage roles, which included playing a witch in a Pete Postlethwaite-led production of Macbeth when he was just 16.

But it's Primeval that has catapulted Andrew to small screen stardom, and he's so excited about the start of the new series that he can barely sit down. But before he pops, let's just have a quick recap of the first series.

Dreamed up by production company Impossible Pictures, Primeval was born from a desire to mix the incredible computer generated imagery that brought prehistoric monsters to life in factual series such as Walking with Dinosaurs with a drama to tap into the new thirst of a Saturday night audience for some audacious, entertaining TV that had been uncovered by the return of Doctor Who.

Primeval's basic plot was simple: What if dinosaurs and other strange beasties began to pop up in modern-day England through "anomalies", or rips in time? And what if a team of experts led by Douglas Henshall's Dr Nick Cutter was hastily assembled to investigate and control these incursions from the distant past?

The six episodes of season one saw the team come together and fight a range of monsters in a variety of situations, including plague-ridden Dodo on the loose and a Pteranodon terrorising a golf course.

The last episode, however, finished on a nail-biting cliff-hanger. After fighting a monster from the far future, team leader Cutter returns to the present to find things have been subtly changed. One of the team is missing, and according to the others she never even existed. Has time been changed by the actions of Cutter's team? If so, what does it all mean? And how can it be put right. Now, over to Andrewand make sure you're sitting down.

"Oh, the new series is so good. If people thought that the first series was good, then they're in for a real treat. The CGI has improved so much that it's made everything look totally different. The series has been absolutely energised, it's totally found its feet, it knows what it wants to say and knows what the audience wants. And it looks amazing. It's like Primeval Pimped'. People are not going to believe what happens."

Oh, go on then, what?

Andrew-Lee Potts pauses mid-flight. "Um. I can't tell you. I'm sworn to secrecy."

You must be able to tell us something.

"Okay, well the first episode picks up immediately where the last one ended. Cutter's walked into this total parallel universe where things are almost the same but not quite the same, for one being that Claudia Brown has disappeared and it's as though she never lived in this universe. The rest of the stuff is little intricacies, and Cutter feels like he's going mad, he's no idea what's happening. "

So what else happens? Surely you can give us a bit more?

"Okay, you've heard about the Arc, right?" he says. I haven't but a quick Google search tells me while we speak that the Arc is the Anomaly Research Centre, a new purpose-built accommodation for Cutter and his team. Andrew resumes: "It's brilliant. They've created this amazing set and the first time we walked in it was like, whoa. It took my breath away."

There's also a fledgling on-screen romance between Connor and Abby, though so far Connor hasn't been as successful as Andrew has been in real life with Abby's true alter-ego, Hannah Spearitt. There's talk of new characters and a love rival for Abby's affections, but Andrew really won't be drawn on any more. "You're just going to have to watch it," he says.

I will, and given that more than seven million tuned in for the first episode of the first series, there's a fair chance I won't be alone.

So what does the immediate future hold for Andrew-Lee Potts? The new series of Ideal we've already mentioned, and there's Andrew's "second career" as a director which will see another of his short films released via internet video-sharing site YouTube this year.

Anything else?

"There is a fairly big project I'm attached to," he says mysteriously, "but it hasn't been totally greenlit yet, so I shouldn't really talk about it."

And with that, Andrew-Lee Potts is off. Whether he got home unmolested thanks to his shaved head I don't know, but the chances are that after tonight's inaugural episode of Primeval season two, his celebrity stocks will take yet another jump. Even as you read this, Andrew-Lee Potts might be somewhere fleeing a horde of dinosaur-crazed children.