Life’s not a beach for Ben and Tony

Feb 27 2009 by Paddy Shennan, Liverpool Daily Post

Goodbye, Echo Beach, hello to . . . a bunch of zombies. Paddy Shennan on the return of Moving Wallpaper

IT’S a partnership made in TV heaven. Veteran Southport-born TV writer Tony Jordan and Ben Miller, the Nantwich-born comedy actor with a penchant for the farcical, have again teamed up to create comedy gold.

Last year saw the unveiling of Jordan’s ambitious TV project-with-a-twist: Moving Wallpaper, a comedy about the making of a soap, and Echo Beach – the soap itself, which featured Martine McCutcheon and Jason Donovan – run over 12 back-to-back episodes.

Only one has survived for a second series, and most critics and viewers will probably not be surprised to learn that it’s the former.

While Echo Beach could be fun to watch for the in-jokes set up in the previous half-hour of cynicism, provided by its world-weary writing team, it couldn’t, by its very nature, compete with the deliciously quick-witted Moving Wallpaper.

The daddy of the two shows is back tonight. Hapless producer Jonathan Pope (Ben Miller), a man born without a single social skill or ounce of self-awareness, tells his team Echo Beach is all washed up, before a typically slapstick chain of events leads to the writers working on Renaissance, a terrifying drama starring model-cum-TV-presenter-cum-actress Kelly Brook and New Zealand actor Alan Dale (The OC, 24, Lost – and, of course, Neighbours).

Tony Jordan, lead writer and story consultant for EastEnders, co-creator of Life On Mars and creator of Hustle, is happy MW is returning, but reckons Echo Beach could have been given more time.

He says: “I am disappointed Echo Beach didn’t work. I think it is part of the culture we know that things aren’t always given the time to just to find their feet. It was a bit of a shame. I always envisaged that Jonathan would move on and make other television shows, but the demise of Echo Beach hastened that really.”

Tony, who spent the first 10 years of his life in Heathfield Road, Ainsdale, and attended Farnborough Road Junior School, in Birkdale, adds: “It was an absolute joy working with the cast again. I think the second series is much more self-assured than the first. The thing about the first series is that I was writing blind. I had a blank sheet of paper and all these people in my head. When it is cast and you actually hand those characters over to the actors and watch what they have done with them, and how they’ve developed them, it just makes writing the second series so much easier.”

And what of the main man – Jonathan Pope, that horrendous but hilariously inept excuse for a human being?

Tony says: “Jonathan Pope is an amalgamation of different characters that you have come across in your career, but strangely enough nobody ever sees themselves in Jonathan Pope. Everybody sees somebody else. Everywhere I go, including awards ceremonies, people sidle up and say, ‘I know who Jonathan Pope is’. So far, I have had 312 suggestions. I had one person who is probably the main part of Jonathan Pope coming up and asking me who it was based on. There was no way I could tell him, obviously. It is top secret. I have worked for a Jonathan Pope and I think everyone who has worked in television has worked with a Jonathan Pope. He is a heightened reality. Jonathan Pope lives, exists and is thriving in the British television community.” The series gets under way in fine knockabout style – and, as usual, it’s Jonathan being knocked about as his fearsome boss arrives to sack him (don’t worry, our anti-hero is soon back on the books).