Martine McCutcheon

A new comedy by Andy Lynch with an astonishingly starry cast: Clive Anderson, Ricky Tomlinson, Martine McCutcheon, Andy Parsons and Emily Head (from TV's The Inbetweeners). And now the plot. Who is this hairy old Scouser who accosts a career-minded female producer in the street? Is he just a stalker? It's directed by Dirk Maggs, the master of feelgood surround-sound.

Chat-show hosts make great fodder for writers as it's so tempting to imagine huge egos going hand in hand with those large salaries. This comedy drama by Andy Lynch finds Clive Anderson taking a wry dig at his own CV as a self-obsessed frontman who's not impressed when his careerist producer gets herself a stalker. The all-star cast includes Martine McCutcheon, Ricky Tomlinson, Andy Parsons and Emily Head, from Channel 4''s The Inbetweeners, in her first radio role.

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer first hosted their anarchic celebrity quiz show in 1993. The first of two programmes marking the show's 15th anniversary tonight is a documentary about the making of it - and, like Shooting Stars itself, the film is funny, eccentric and a little self-indulgent. Interspersed with interviews with some of the celebrities who found themselves subjected to Reeves' and Mortimer's particular kind of comedy (which veered from the surreal to the mildly offensive), the presenters themselves play various crew members reminiscing about their time working behind the scenes. This is a suitably unique way to contemplate a programme which Martine McCutcheon calls 'bizarre' and of which Larry Hagman said, "I've done some loony shows in my time but this is certainly the one."

Shooting Stars launched the career of Matt Lucas - who played scorekeeper George Dawes before he went on to global fame with David Walliams in Little Britain - and latterly also co-starred the often self-confessedly drunken comic Johnny Vegas.

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.