Review Moving Paper/ Echo Beach

Kudos television, with their productions of Life on Mars and Spooks, have managed to produce some of the most compelling and kinetically exciting drama, and with their duo of Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach, they may have come up with one of their best concepts yet; Echo Beach being a Hollyoaks/O.C. style soap set in Cornwall and Moving Wallpaper being a 'fly on the wall documentary" set around the making of the same soap. Some people have criticised the idea for being an example of 'television eating itself', however I looked forward to the potential satirising of the tv industry and the idea of getting a priviliged insider glimpse into the making of tv (I'm fascinated by the minutae of tv and film making, one of my favourite films being Tim Burton's Ed Wood).

Unfortunately, on the basis of the first two episdoes; the potential of the set up is totally wasted. Take, for example Echo Beach. What is it meant to be? Pastiche, parody or actual genuine soap? If the former, then it is quite simply just not broad enough to show; there are no 'Acorn Antiques' style wobbly cameras or continuity fluffs to make its parody nature clear. If it is, god forbid, meant to be a real soap then this has some of the worst acting ever since the infamous El Dorado with Martine McCutcheon and Jason Donovan particularly shocking specimens of the 'smell the fart' school of acting. And the idea of young beautiful people having australian style beach parties on a Cornish beach seems ludicrous (and looks ludicrous on screen). Unless this is part of the joke.

Moving Wallpaper does nothing to clarify the spoof/real soap dilemma, partly because the whole programme is so clunking itself. Ben Miller as producer Jonathan Pope overracts terribly, partly because a) everyone else in the programme is so relentlessly dull and b) if you're giving the part of a tv producer who gives out parts to actresses in return for sexual favours and spends all the show budget on a chauffeur limousine then there's very little point of giving a subtle performance in the first place. The show attempts to build up Pope as a David Brent style villain, complete with self-incriminating bluster and border-line racism, but the whole set up is so forced that the genuine embarrasment factor that characterises Ricky Gervaise's work at its best is lost and becomes merely tedious. A lame blowjob/snow job joke is deconstructed here but for me, the far more embarrasing 'joke' was in the second episode when the production team managed to all get hold of copies of the payroll and were able to compare their wages. For god's sake, why not use a source of tension rising naturally from the production instead of relying on the far-fetched idea that even the dimmest PA would somehow photocopy the payroll and give it out to the crew.

In the end, Moving Wallpaper fails from a lack of nerve, what could have been a genuinely interesting and funny send up of the making of tv programmes (why are there no scenes of the shooting of the soap itself; imagine the jokes that could result from trying to film steamy love scenes between two actors who hate each other) falls short because the producers did not seem to think we could cope without broad comedy and instead falls for a sort of poor photocopy of Extras.

I take back everything I said about Ricky Gervais.
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