British readers can't fail to have missed the hype surrounding these, ITV1's big new event TV. If you have, let me summarise: Moving Wallpaper is a comedy (I think everyone expected it to be a drama, but there's no doubt it's a comedy) about the making of a new soap for ITV1; Echo Beach is the aforementioned soap. Events on each show impact on the other. Innovative! Well, it is from the makers of Spooks, Hustle and Life On Mars... yet they were all on BBC One and this is on ITV... well, that says something straight away...
Several reviewers have wondered about the potential success of Moving Wallpaper, for two reasons. One, TV programmes about TV never fare that well. This I can agree with, and, as the lead in to Echo Beach, it could have a knock-on effect. However, the primetime scheduling, heavy advertising, innovative idea, and the fact that it is actually quite funny, might be enough to combat this. Secondly, that you need to watch Echo Beach to get it. Based on the evidence of this opening pair of episodes, that's bollocks. Yes, Moving Wallpaper references in to Echo Beach in a way that the latter show doesn't, but here's the key:
If you just watch Echo Beach, it'll seem to be a pretty shitty, derivative soap. If you watch both shows, you'll realise that Echo Beach is actually a great big spoof of the genre, where everyone's in on the joke. (I hope it is and they are anyway, cos if not...) For example, in Moving Wallpaper there's a reference to producer Jonathan Pope having spent all of the design budget on his office, so the key set of the club/diner/surf house/whatever will now have to be a derelict building... and then, in Echo Beach, it's derelict. Another example: there's a small girl they need to cry in episode one, but she won't... so Pope tells her that her parents have died -- hey presto, waterworks. She turns up in Echo Beach for no apparent reason. The soap services the the sitcom, not the other way round.
I feel a great big clue to this lies in the scheduling. They're on at 9PM, for one thing -- not a soap slot. And they're usually on Friday night, which is quite definitively Comedy Night for pretty much all stations (with the obvious exception of BBC Two and their horridly over-done Thursdays Are Funny campaign). And then, to top it off, they're paired with Al Murray's Happy Hour, which is even more obviously a comedy. And just to compound things, this Thursday-shown opener was paired with Katy Brand's Best Bits, just to remove any doubt that what you're watching is a spoof.
I'll be curious to see the reaction to these shows, though I don't tend to read things like Heat or go trawling forums so maybe I'll never know. But I rather suspect that the soap is just serious enough to fool most people, but not good enough to keep them around; and, as we've established, TV shows and TV shows never do well. It won't be the greatest loss if this flops, but it will be a shame that such a good idea has been thrown away. My greatest fear, though, is that Wallpaper will flop, Beach will be a hit, and we'll be left with another shitty soap filling our schedules...
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