This weekend I caught up with Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach, which I had recorded on Thursday and Friday.   It all sounded a bit postmodern and trendy for ITV, more like the sort of thing you would expect to find on Channel 4, and I wondered how well they had treated it.

The concept is that one of the programmes is a fairly naff soap opera ((if that’s not an oxymoron)) and the other is a programme about the making of that soap opera.  There have been TV shows about making TV shows before, but if you ever see the results it is only in short bits contained in the main show.   I can’t think of any where the output is shown separately in its entirety.

In Extras, for example, you see small clips of scenes from films or shows the extras are working on, but most of it is not in broadcast format – you are seeing the set and cameras.  In the case of the Andy Millman sitcom, you see the odd scene but can’t imagine how it could ever be spread over a whole half an hour.  The Larry Sanders show is similar, but again the on-camera stuff is interspersed with real life.
I don’t think ITV have done too badly as it turns out.  The soap opera itself, Echo Beach, is terrible, but no worse than all the others really.  It becomes bearable by looking out for little things which relate to the parent programme:  seeing Jason Donovan unpacking the kettle which had gone missing from the writers’ office or seeing the little girl crying when you know its not acting but a result of the producer lying to her about her parents dying.

Moving Wallpaper, the show about the show, is a sort of comedy satire.  It ends up a bit like Drop The Dead Donkey but for soap instead of news.  In truth, its not terrifically funny, and without being a TV insider, or even a watcher of soaps, its hard to say how much of it is accurate satire, but so far it has been sustained by the novelty of the concept.

Just try to ignore the fact that they are supposed to be based in Chertsy, but most of the actual soap appears to use actual location shots.  I can’t imagine that a real soap opera, which is intended to run and run, would do quite as much expensive location shooting unless they were based near the location.  Ignoring logic is always a good tactic with fiction- how else could you enjoy Primeval? (Also featuring Ben Miller as an obnoxious twat)