Don't worry if you missed the 2007 pilot for this series. There's a brief explanation at the start of the first episode. Basically, Rob (Daniel Mays) was dumped by Laura (Spooks' Miranda Raison), and later gleaned from a celeb mag that she was dating Duncan From Blue (played by the man himself). Not only that, they were going to marry. And Rob's been invited to the wedding.

Hacked off that he's been replaced by 'that skating b*****d', Rob is convinced Duncan From Blue (that's his full name in this, not Duncan James) is out to get him. So he decides to prove he's better than DFB and have revenge on his ex by turning up at her wedding with the sexiest woman he can con into being his girlfriend.

It's a simple yet effective idea - for now anyway - and Rob is an entertaining central character - a younger, less grouchy version of Jack Dee's Rick Spleen.

The comedy isn't perfect, and with coarse language it won't be everybody's cup of tea. But if you still miss Teachers, the young, ballsy characters in this should raise a smile.

And there's always the eye candy to enjoy - as well as Duncan James, the show stars former EastEnders heartthrob Nigel Harman. And for the fellas, for this week only, is guest star Susie Amy, who will fulfil many a redblooded man's fantasy by donning a school uniform.

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.

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.