Smallscreen

Have you been watching Moving Wallpaper and its companion piece, Echo Beach? I'm not sure how many Prospect readers tune into ITV on Friday nights. If it's not your habit, let me tell you about it. Moving Wallpaper is a comedy about a dysfunctional television production team making a corny (and, as it happens, Cornish) soap opera. And half an hour later you get to see the soap itself. Yes, very postmodern, very ironic. But can ITV do ironic? Will its regular viewers wear it? The fortunes of this sitcom/soap reveal rather precisely some of the dilemmas facing the team now running ITV (though, as far as I know, they have no plans to dramatise these on screen as well).

The Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach project is the brainchild of Tony Jordan, one of the most influential television writers in Britain. He had previously come up with some of Eastenders' best characters and also co-created BBC1's Life on Mars, the most innovative prime-time drama of the past ten years. Life on Mars was turned down by several broadcasters before Jordan persuaded the BBC to take the risk. Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach had a similar provenance, but there the parallels end. For Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach has suffered a fairly steep decline in ratings over six weeks, from 5m down to 2.7m (Moving Wallpaper) and 2.3m (Echo Beach). More than one in five of all those watching prime time television were there at the beginning; only one in ten remain.

Characteristically, Jordan's idea is a bold one. The commissioners at ITV, faced by a declining channel share and a declining share price, wanted to plant a flag that said "cool, surprising, original." And you have to give them credit for that, but it's not so easy to sell to ITV's national constituency, one of the last mass audiences left in an increasingly fragmented media world. They get Coronation Street from 8.30pm to 9pm on Friday evenings. No irony, no tricks—just straight, popular drama. Let me give you a flavour from last week : "Marry him and you'll live a half life… You know she's never going to be enough for you, Liam… I just want everything to be perfect, and do you know, darling, it will be… Barry, would you just eat your casserole?" Then at 9pm they are swiftly transported into a slick deconstruction of all that. Episode one of Moving Wallpaper had this: "Sue thinks the show [Echo Beach] will bomb. You'll be the man who killed off ITV's new baby"; and "People will see it as the cynical stunt it is." This witty stuff starts by living dangerously but, in view of the recent ratings slump, ends as self-harm.

Ben Miller as the neurotic, venal and essentially insane boss of the production team is buttock-clenchingly good. This is the comedy of embarrassment (see Ricky Gervais). Miller has made the difficult transition from comedian (Armstrong and Miller) to straight actor well. And the casting of two actors from Channel 4's Teachers makes it clear what they're aiming for. But can you do Channel 4's smooth nihilism on ITV at 9pm? Even Channel 4 doesn't attempt this until 10pm. And what Moving Wallpaper has lacked as the weeks have gone by, clever confection that it is, is any characters you care for. All sitcoms need this, like any other drama. Remember the receptionist in The Office and her love affair?

Some of the jokes are good. In a later episode, the producer is told that Johnny Briggs, who plays a sort of trailer trash hobo in Echo Beach, wants a limp for his character. The response is: "He can't have one. If we give him one, they'll all want a limp." Briggs is an actor best known for his long-running part in Coronation Street, where he was allowed to keep his natural Cockney accent. Here he attempts an appalling west country burr—my tip is that he's a certainty for a Bafta this year in the "least convincing accent in a supporting role" category. But that is by no means the least convincing thing about Echo Beach, I'm afraid.

Is the programme what it purports to be—a soap opera—or a comedy? Am I meant to laugh at the characters or empathise with them? Martine McCutcheon (ex-Eastenders) is trapped in a washed-up and somewhat sinister marriage, while all the time she loves another man—Jason Donovan (ex-Neighbours—pictured, right, in Echo Beach). Do we care? The rules of the soap opera demand that I do. But once you've seen Ben Miller in Moving Wallpaper presented with two dresses for Martine, one pink and one blue, it's rather difficult: "Which one does she like?" "The blue one." "Put her in the pink!" And 20 minutes later, you duly see Martine in pink—this is clever, subversive but ultimately destructive. Perhaps the biggest mistake is to have separated these two shows rather than going for one hour of clearly signalled comedy, Echo Beach merely becoming a number of interwoven clips within it. That, of course, was the format of Seinfield, one of television's greatest ever hits.

ITV is a company in transition—between the analogue and the digital age, between the days of a captive audience and the multichannel age of viewer promiscuity, and between a Britain with a large, self-identifying working class and a rainbow nation of a thousand tribes. It has to take risks to attract younger viewers. This one didn't come off, but it should keep at it. My prediction is that ITV will be valued more highly in three years than it is now. It will still be in possession of a mass audience when such an asset will be a valuable rarity. And like all audiences, it will repay being surprised from time to time. But it has to be a pleasant surprise.

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