Echo Beach and Moving Wallpaper

Echo Beach is a new soap here on ITV in the UK, following the lives of the glamorous people who live in Polnarren, Cornwall, with its ‘rugged coastline, endless beaches and handsome surfers’. Nothing too different there from many soaps, except for British TV not really doing glam soaps, especially not at 9.30 in the evening.

The hook is in the programme that shows immediately before Echo Beach, something called Moving Wallpaper that takes places in the production offices of a TV soap, called Echo Beach. It’s like Studio 60 but the behind the scenes and the featured programme are in two separate transmissions. The premise is intriguing and has definitely got the press buzzing, with most saying it’s either going to be brilliant or absolutely crap! The real producers promise to carry stories across the 2 programmes, with discussions about what to put into the scripts actually playing out on the soap part of it. They’ve had the stars Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon doing heavy promotion round the news and talk shows, so it looks like they think a lot of it.

I’m disappointed about the lack of digital assets included though, given how it could have played on all the meta story and the third layer which is the actual production behind the pretend production behind the soap. There’s glossy character bios and actor bios, space for episode overviews and one small ecard, where you can Star in a Soap, where you can load up your picture and get criticised by the producer. There’s so much fun that could have been had; hopefully if it’s a success we’ll get more to to it.