Echo Beach

A crap soap made by the same people who made a quite amusing sitcom about the making of a crap soap. How did this happen? Here’s how I imagine it:

Jaded, alcoholic producer Jonathan Pope* has a moment of clarity during the wrap party for ITV’s new soap, Echo Beach:

What were we thinking? he thinks, clinking champagne glasses with Jason Donovan. It’s like Hollyoaks by the seaside, but with worse acting. Who wants to watch a bunch of pretty (dumb) young things and has-almost-beens shouting at each other over a trendy pop soundtrack? I mean it’s a soap set in Cornwall starring Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon: it’s a joke. How in God’s name are we going to persuade anyone with more than half a brain to watch it?

But some mysterious force (maybe it’s the zeitgeist, maybe it’s the universal unconscious, maybe it’s the vodka he put in his champagne) moves Pope to answer himself: I said it myself- it’s a joke. Ok, so the actors (apart from Hugo Speer, who clearly finds the whole thing hilarious) are taking it deadly seriously, but there must be some way we can persuade people it’s a spoof. Maybe we could put a laughter track on it?

The mysterious force gives him another shove. Or, even better, we could make a sitcom about the making of it! We could put humorous stories about things that are in Echo Beach in it, so the intellectuals can laugh conceitedly at the po-mo self-reflexivity of the whole thing and the morons can take it all literally!** We could even have a character called Jonathan Pope... Pope begins to laugh maniacally, drawing uneasy glances from Martine and Jason, and a conspiratorial wink from Hugo Speer.

*All characters in this post are fictitious; any resemblance to persons or characters living, dead or undead is purely coincidental, apart from the zeitgeist, which has a lot to answer for.

** A bit like the Bible.



Well, they certainly fooled me, up until about two thirds of the way through the first episode.