Storming The Beach

After three weeks off the gaspers, now that the cough and cold have abated, I was surprised to discover my sense of smell had suddenly returned. This would be a gift if I was living on the coast or rolling countryside. Here, in London - not so good.

We’re still many months away from a potential stifling hot summer, where everything gets a little gamey and ripe, and so far I haven’t come across a dead guy covered in urine, but with the bursts of torrential rain, a journey on crowded public transport is suddenly like being smothered by an old dog that rolled in something on the way back from a long walk in the driving rain.

Bad as that is, nothing could compare to the noxious odours coming from the first offerings of the new television season. I haven’t been watching much of anything, certainly nothing on ITV, so I don’t know if the channel had been hyping the shit out of the double shot of Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach.


It may have looked inviting on paper – Moving Wallpaper a half-hour sitcom about the making of Echo Beach, the half-hour soap opera that follows immediately after it in the schedules. Like a lot of things, between the idea and the execution it went arse over tit. In practise, the two shows were the typical steaming pile of dog toffee from a screwed pooch.

Moving Wallpaper was supposed to be a sitcom, except it was spectacularly unfunny. Echo Beach played like a horrendously poor drama. I don’t watch soap operas, but it doesn’t mean I’m not aware of them. Foreign shows in this category may be different so perhaps there were a whole lot of references I was missing, but I don’t remember soaps having extended helicopter shots and indie music blasting on the soundtrack.


Of course, that may not be the point. Is Echo Beach supposed to be a pastiche of a soap? It certainly wasn’t a parody in the vein of Victoria Wood's Acorn Antiques, with its flubbed lines and dodgy sets. Watching the first episode, rather than grin at the references laid down by the episode of Moving Wallpaper before it, I wondered what a viewer flicking channels and unaware of the postmodern, nudge-nudge, wink-wink dual-show connection would make of it.

The biggest offender though was Moving Wallpaper, which was just fucking dreadful. Jennifer Saunder’s sitcom The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle, set behind-the-scenes of a daytime talk show, was so spectacularly atrocious that I didn’t think the depths could be plumbed any further. Moving Wallpaper may have been filled with in-joke references, but they weren’t jokes.

The out-going producer pathetically head-butting a framed photo of Michael Grade? Nope. The in-coming producer spending the design budget having a wet room installed in his office? Nope. Writing stories aimed at categories of the British Soap Awards. Nope. Susie Amy, appearing as “herself”, offering the megalomaniacal producer a blowjob to get herself a line of dialogue on the show only for him to mishear it as “snowjob”? Fucking hell no! Twenty-two minutes without one goddamn laugh has to be some kind of record for a sitcom.

It would be hopelessly unfair to compare Moving Wallpaper to the likes of 30 Rock or The Larry Sanders Show, although the storyline in episode two about the useless PA circulating copies of the show’s budget and staff salaries amongst the staff was played up better in a 1996, fifth season episode of The Larry Sanders Show. Even Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was a whole lot funnier and that was ostensibly a drama. Put it up against the BBC's Extras and Moving Wallpaper appears so woefully thin it’s virtually transparent. In fact, as shows about putting on shows go, even The Muppet Show towers head and shoulders above it.

If writers are supposed to write about they know, the opening episodes could only have been scripted by people completely new to the medium and hopelessly out of their depth.