Kevin Lygo

Is it curtains for scripted comedy?

Comedians flocked to Edinburgh in their droves this month - but speakers at the TV Festival painted a bleak picture of scripted comedy's future.

ITV boss promises more comedy after viewer backlash

ITV boss Kevin Lygo is promising more comedy after a viewer backlash. But audiences will also have to tune in to Corrie for laughs.

Why ITV were wrong to cancel their scripted comedies

I think the issue lies with the man at the top, Kevin Lygo. When I attended the Edinburgh TV Festival in 2017, he described the future of scripted comedy on ITV as "quite bleak". Hardly a ringing endorsement for the genre is it? And not exactly an invitation for new writers to bring the channel their best ideas.

Walter: a comedy-drama that's neither comic or dramatic

ITV boss Kevin Lygo wrote this aimless, unfunny cop drama under a pseudonym. Don't give up the day job, Kevin.

ITV Studios boss Kevin Lygo writes under pseudonym

ITV Studios boss Kevin Lygo has emerged as the author of forthcoming BBC1 police drama Walter.

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.