Moving Wallpaper

When they started, ITV1's Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach were universally hailed as a "brave" commission - which of course can cut both ways. (In Yes Minister, you may remember, Jim Hacker was always terrified when Sir Humphrey called any of his ideas brave.) Now, though, it also looks like a distinctly inspired one.

Moving Wallpaper is not the controversial bit. A clearly impressive sitcom set behind the scenes of a TV soap, it bristles with sharp dialogue, fine performances and wholly believable satire. Echo Beach, the soap in question, then follows immediately and is played absolutely straight. Yet, because of Moving Wallpaper, we're aware of all the compromises and cock-ups that lie behind it - from ITV's insistence on a token Asian to the scenes put in to placate the stars' egos.

The critical consensus appears to be that this leaves Echo Beach badly undermined - with the only issue being whether the undermining is deliberate or not. For my money, however, there are two other possibilities. The first is that the model here is Popstars: The Rivals, where we saw how cynically a band can be put together, but still weren't meant to be put off the band itself. The second, meanwhile, is far more intriguing - not least because it might well be true: we're not supposed to know what to think at all. And, in television terms (especially for prime time ITV1), that really is brave.

Series 2 preview interview with Tony Jordan

Moving Wallpaper creator Tony Jordan talks to Digital Spy about the second series of the show.

Interview with ITV Drama Controller

Laura Mackie on Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach: "Would I commission that again? Yes I would. Because it was Tony Jordan, it was Kudos, it was an absolute passion project for Tony. Of course we had conversations about television about television, and we knew the two shows were pointing in slightly different directions - and I think clearly Echo Beach didn't deliver in the way we hoped. But what we felt standing back from it was that elements of Echo Beach, when woven into Moving Wallpaper, actually worked very well."

One out of two ain't a bad deal after all

While Moving Wallpaper stands by itself as a show, the problem with Echo Beach, as one British critic put it, is that it's just not bad enough.

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.

Let's Hear It For The Echo

Strikingly bad acting, drearily predictable plot lines, a hopeless lack of realism... Echo Beach is just like a normal soap. But there's a difference. This one is supposed to be rubbish. Or at least I think it is.

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.

Hollywood Reporter Article

Comedies set behind the scenes at television shows have met with varying success in the past, but Tony Jordan's Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach goes one step further by combining backstage antics with the finished product.

A quantum jump in TV

When Ben Miller tells you he had trouble getting his head round the concept behind ITV1's new comedy/soap double-header Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach, don't take it lightly. Not your run of the mill empty vessel actor, Miller has a past life as a Cambridge University quantum physicist.