Moving Wallpaper

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.