Jason Donovan

So Echo Beach is no more. But it's better, cleverer, funnier half returns with producer Jonathan Pope explaining to his team of writers exactly why it was cancelled. "It was s*** and nobody watched it."

I couldn't have put it better myself - and a big part of what makes this series so good is its callous, unrose-tinted view of TV from the inside looking out.

By a series of events too ludicrous to explain, series two sees Jonathan put at the helm of a brand new drama pilot about zombies.

His writers reckon this is a terrible idea. They point out that ITV has never made a zombie drama before - even though the success of films like Shaun Of The Dead and 28 Days Later suggest the network should really think about producing more zombie shows - not less.

In any event, as the old Echo Beach signage is quickly painted over and replaced by the new logo for Renaissance, competing writers Tom and Carl look set to live through their lead characters by naming them Tim and Kyle.

But Moving Wallpaper is still absolutely the Jonathan Pope show. Thanks to writer Tony Jordan giving him all the best lines and Ben Miller's brilliantly spiky performance, Pope is one of those appalling, self-serving characters who absolutely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as David Brent and Basil Fawlty.

His trump card tonight sees him signing up his first cast member - Kelly Brook. And to think people laughed at Jason Donovan.

TV is getting all slippery and self-conscious, putting distance between its actions and its intentions like a ship drifting from its moorings. Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach are twin programmes: a soap about the making of a soap, followed by the soap itself. Faced with this clever-clogs chimera, all you can do is trust your gut.

Mine was applauding, an anatomical mystery and also a programming one: how could something that sounded, on paper at least, so wearyingly self-referential and laborious end up so much fun? Moving Wallpaper begins when a hideously arrogant producer (played with miraculous likeability by Ben Miller) is drafted in to save a new soap set in Cornwall. The first thing he does is install an LA-style wetroom in his office. Then he sets about sexing up the soap, changing its name from Polnarren to Echo Beach, and making the focus not disenfranchised fishermen but lissom young surfers. He casts it to please the ITV demographic, recruiting Jason Donovan in to play the Cornishman returning to his roots. On set, he's thoroughly ruthless: a child actor is refusing to cry, so he strides over: "I've got some terrible news. It's about your parents..."

Moving Wallpaper concludes with its production team settling down to watch the show they've created, staring into your television like The Royle Family. And so Echo Beach begins, full of soaring aerial shots of Cornwall and trendy music. It would have been tempting to make the show very obviously creaky, a la Acorn Antiques, but they've resisted that and made something more unsettling and subversive. Echo Beach is entirely believable as a soap, but the cynical goggles you've acquired from the first half mean you see through it instantly. It's like watching Hollyoaks using the cranium of Kevin Lygo as opera glasses.

The jokes set up in the first half come nicely to fruition: the child actor is bawling her eyes out, a character renovating a house wants to put in a wetroom, and clunky scriptwriting justifies why Jason Donovan has a Cornish name but an Aussie accent. All good clean post-modern fun. Or rather, given the plotline about Susie Amy giving sexual favours for a walk-on part, all good slightly mucky post-modern fun.

I have no idea what "moving wallpaper" means. But I take it to be a slightly dismissive TV term since Moving Wallpaper is the title of a new comedy which takes a cynical look at programme-making.

Extras did this sort of thing well (at least in the first series); Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip did it brilliantly. But Moving Wallpaper is ITV1, which is far from being a safe house for irony or post-modernism.

Producer Jonathan Pope makes a lot of jokes. His performance was more like a stand-up routine. But I suppose you can get away with that sort of thing on a show-about-a-show, which doesn't have to grip us in the traditional are-Amy's-bunions-still-bothering-her? sense. And, yes, some of the jokes were good. I especially liked the one about a viewer survey which revealed that "the ITV1 audience has a slightly higher IQ than average". (What, you mean that wasn't a joke?)

Moving Wallpaper's big gimmick is that it's actually a show-about-a-show-about-a-show, and that straight after the ad break we get to see the jaded soap, Echo Beach, which Pope and his team have re-branded and injected with "actors who make women leave their husbands". No pressure, then, Jason Donovan.

Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach are an entwined pair of series from ITV, but whether it's a loving embrace or a death-grip, I'm not sure. Moving Wallpaper is a comedy set behind the scenes at a new ITV soap opera, which is supposed to be happening in Cornwall but is filmed in an industrial shed in Chertsey. As the first episode opened, the production was in crisis. Two weeks to launch, the producer was being escorted off the premises (nutting a photo of Michael Grade along the way), and major casting decisions were still untaken. The man hired to fix the mess was Jonathan Pope, who stormed in talking about making a show with "wit, class and a permanent erection", and adorned his desk with a photograph of Simon Cowell. Polnarren, which was to have been a searing drama in which sexual betrayal became a metaphor for the betrayal of Cornwall by successive governments, was swiftly converted to Echo Beach, a story of sun, sand, surf, sex and dynastic feuding, starring, because they were deemed to appeal to the core demographic, Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon. And, after the break, Echo Beach was what we saw.

This is intended to work on about six levels, but in fact only works on one of them. Jonathan is a bloated ego precariously supported by a tiny talent and an acute instinct for self-preservation; and watching Ben Miller play him is an uncomplicated pleasure. As a satire on media manners, though, it is too unrealistic to work. Apart from anything else, it's impossible to imagine anything as dreary and earnest as Polnarren being commissioned by ITV, a company whose view of Cornwall is be summed up fairly accurately by Doc Martin. I'm not at all sure, either, that Jonathan's supposedly shallow, ratings-grabbing fantasy of Cornish life - "Turn the cafe into a sort of surf-shop/diner thing... give the kids on the beach some dope to smoke" - isn't closer to social realism than what it was replacing, surf shops and dope-smoking kids being, in my experience, an integral part of the Cornish experience.

As for Echo Beach itself... There was some fun to be had from spotting, in the opening scenes, how the scenarios set up in Moving Wallpaper played out. When Jason Donovan, returning to Cornwall after years in exile, sighed over the wrecked condition of the beach cafe he'd just bought, we knew that it was because most of the scenery budget had gone on Jonathan Pope's marble-lined en-suite shower. When a customer in the pub asked for a brandy and soda, we knew that the actress had got a line to speak because she had given Jonathan a blow job, and we knew that the barmaid serving her was called Narinder because ITV needs to meet its ethnic quotas (as the head of continuing drama instructed Jonathan: "The pressure's off black, but the channel's still struggling on Asian"). But as it continued, the hard truth dawned that watching a wooden and derivative soap isn't necessarily more fun just because its intentions are satirical. It needs to be either a bit more Acorn Antiques or a bit more Dynasty.

After all the years presiding over those miserable EastEnders, former story consultant Tony Jordan is having a laugh at soap's expense. He's set this in Cornwall, a lifestyle as far from Walford as you can imagine - though it looks just as cold.

It's rare that you see something totally new on TV and this two-shows-in-one concept is a real revelation. I reckon you'll love it.

Moving Wallpaper shows the (fictional) behind-the-scenes birth of soap Polnarren - soon to be renamed and sexed up by incoming producer Jonathan Pope (Ben Miller). In Echo Beach we see the finished product, starring Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon.

The deeply cynical and very funny Moving Wallpaper is the most enjoyable. Pope rewrites the show with the sole intention of cleaning up at the National Soap Awards. Daft as it sounds, it's hard to care about the Echo Beach folk once we know they're made-up characters.

But I'll carry on watching to see if Pope makes good on his promise to blow up something funny - clinching Most Dramatic Scene and Best Comedy Performance in one stroke.

OK, I'm confused now. Having checked and then double checked the TV schedules, it appears to be true; Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach are on ITV1. Yes, ITV1. They're the people who last year washed us away on a sea of swill with Benidorm and unleashed Liza Tarbuck upon us for Bonkers, possibly the worst yet, conversely, best comedy-drama title of the year. But here we have a pair of interconnected shows with a sprightly idea at the core of their very beings. ITV haven't had that on their comedy roster since Rik Mayall transformed himself into a Thatcher-grovelling B'stard.

Echo Beach on its own is, of course, garbage. A glossy soap-style affair with Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon and Hugo Speer and Susie Amy adds up to less than zero, but in the context of Moving Wallpaper (a smart comedy about the making of Echo Beach), it grows more arms and legs than a sand-obsessed, flesh-friendly slab of small screen narcissism ought to. Little moments murmur into Echo Beach and reflect back onto sequences we have seen in Moving Wallpaper as the fictional writers try to make hay on a Cornwall-based rural soap about love and betrayal. Recently hired producer Jonathan Pope (Ben Miller, suitably inspired after his dire sketch series with old buddy Alexander Armstrong) wants to kick some arse into proceedings by ditching the uglier actors and stodgy scripts and injecting his new baby with sex and scandal. It's fruity and fun and so not ITV.