Simon Cowell

Back for a new series, Moving Wallpaper is joyously and uproariously funny. Its companion piece, the soap opera Echo Beach, has been axed because the fictional head of ITV drama (played by Raquel Cassidy) said: "It was shit and no one watched it." Faced with the prospect of unemployment, the unhinged producer (Ben Miller) turns to the writer for inspiration.

Having lectured him on the realities of the marketplace ("It's the Simon Cowell era! You either hitch up those trousers and get on board or you ship on out!") he proceeds to kill him, stuff him in the lavatory and steal his idea. At ITV, this creative process is known as banging heads against a wall, blue-sky thinking, running things up flagpoles and shaking dramatic trees. And the idea for the pilot, which will star Kelly Brook, is about zombies. Rarely are viewers given such a privileged insight into the workings of television.

Geraldine: The Winner's Story

Simon Cowell is facing a further ribbing - Peter Kay's X Factor spoof star Geraldine McQueen is making a telly comeback.

It crammed in so many songs, they were never all going to be funny whilst the second hour-long results show confirmed what a seriously indulgent exercise it all was.

It's one thing getting Pete Waterman, Nikki Chapman and Neil Fox to send themselves up but having a parody of The Pop Factor without a Simon Cowell figure was a major cop out by Kay.

Having said that, Marc Pickering's performance as Leon, I mean, R Wayne, was brilliant - particularly his version of Ebony and Ivory with his ventriloquist's dummy of Stevie Wonder. The cameos by Rick Astley, the Cheeky Girls, and Macca doing the themes from Blankety Blank and Home and Away were better than most of Extras.

The one moment of comedy genius was Michelle McMammoth look-a-like cum-transsexual Geraldine's medley merging seamlessly from Born To Run to Born Free to Free Nelson Mandela and Umbrella.

In Channel 4's British Comedy Award-winning Star Stories, Kevin Bishop was a revelation. Each week his schoolboy-cheeky caricatures of everyone from Tom Cruise to Alex Ferguson stole the show. So Channel 4 gave him his own sketch show.

The pilot earlier this year was, not to put too fine a point on it, poor. All the more reason to rejoice that this first episode of the series proper is in a different league, with a string of impishly silly, very funny ideas, mostly film or TV spoofs.

It doesn't hurt that the pace is ridiculously fast: if you don't like one skit, don't worry, another will be along in seconds.

There's the Daily Mail DVD giveaway that includes Bruce Forsyth's try-out for The Shining; there's Pimp My Ride with Stephen Hawking; there's Sophie's Choice - The Musical; and a visit to Simon Cowell's brother Brian, who runs a convenience store in Rotherham. Best of all there's a running joke about Jonathan Ross that makes it safe to assume Bishop won't be invited on the former's chat show any time soon.

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.