Moving Wallpaper ITV1

Echo Beach ITV1

At ITV, the furniture has been moved. The result of this not-very-exciting heaving and shoving is that News at Ten is back, and that Sunday-night episodes of Coronation Street and Emmerdale are to be shifted to Tuesdays and Fridays. If this all feels a bit back to the future, fear not: ITV's executives have also dashed out and bought a couple of trendy new modular sofas in the form of Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach (Thursdays/Fridays, 9pm and 9.30pm). The first is a comedy set behind the scenes of a soap; the second is the soap itself, which is set in Cornwall and stars Jason Donovan, Martine McCutcheon and a VW camper van (of these, the van is by far the best performer).

I settled down to watch this strange double bill with an awfully smug look on my face. Although they have a decent(ish) pedigree - the series were conceived by Tony Jordan, long of EastEnders, who also had a hand in the birth of Life on Mars - ITV is hardly the natural home of satire. As for the idea of the soap, if it was going to be written straight (ie, if they turned out a version of Emmerdale with waves and boats - which would be, er, Howards' Way), it would bring nothing new to a network now so crammed with soap that addicts must find it hard to follow storylines and hold down a job at the same time. But if they played it for laughs, with trembling lips to match trembling sets, it would soon become exceedingly tiresome. I mean, doesn't anyone remember what happened to Eldorado?

In fact, the satire part is good. OK, so we've been here before, pace Larry Sanders, but Moving Wallpaper is slick and funny and the acting is great. I have a thing for Ben Miller, who plays the oafish and egomaniacal producer of Echo Beach, Jonathan Pope, so if the series revolves around him, that's fine by me. No one loves the media like the media, so the jokes are deeply self-referential, but they're also mostly aimed at ITV itself, which is oddly endearing. Pope believes he's working in the "post-Simon Cowell world" and has a photo of the X Factor baddie in his office; when his boss, Nancy Weeks, a fictional head of continuing drama at ITV, tells him he'll have to have an Asian actor in his soap, she says: "We've got Dev in Coronation Street, but not much else."

No, it's when we get to Echo Beach that it all gets confusing - and not only because Jason Donovan and his co-star Hugo Speer look so much alike that we can only be grateful for the fact that Donovan can't do an English accent to save his life. (If this man, Daniel Marrack, is from Cornwall, I'm Dame Edna Everage and I claim my £10.) Is it a spoof? Obviously not, given that there are no gags and it's stuffed with Hollyoaks-style totty (totty and humour do not mix, except in the films of the Farrelly brothers, and even then the cocktail is somewhat sulphurous).

But if it is to be taken seriously, how to account for its many weirdnesses? Donovan is not the only one with an accent problem. Martine McCutcheon's character is "old Cornwall", but she still sounds like Tiffany from EastEnders to me, while her teenage children and all the other hotties on the beach sound as if they went to public school. Most mysterious of all, however, is the fact that Mrs McClusky from Grange Hill - yes, it's Bridget the Midget! - sounds like one of the Wurzels. Ditto Mike Baldwin from Coronation Street. Do they really think they can just shove Johnny Briggs in a fisherman's cap and overalls and we'll believe that he is Fin Morgan, owner of the Polnarren caravan park? Not while he's mugging a voice like that, we won't. The problem here is one of what Jonathan Pope would call "demographics". Those who watch Moving Wallpaper and like it are unlikely to fall for Echo Beach, and vice versa. Not many people own a box set of both Larry Sanders and Howards' Way - though now I think of it, I would quite like to. Oh dear. The shame. Perhaps I will tune in next week, after all.

Pick of the week

Lark Rise to Candleford
13 January, 7.40pm, BBC1
Bucolic Oxfordshire, but it won’t stop you missing Cranford.

Louis Theroux Behind Bars
13 January, 9pm, BBC2
The sly presenter talks to inmates of San Quentin Prison, California.

The Palace
14 January, 9pm, ITV1
Loony drama about a fictional and very naughty royal family.