I didn’t think I’d be there very long. It was just another job, instead of pots and pans or toys, I was selling scripts. So I was sitting at a table with people doing what I perceived to be really weird things. They would be talking about stories and characters, trying to work out “Should he shag her? Shall we shoot him?” and I just wanted to laugh all the time. I thought it was really funny that they were taking it so incredibly seriously. So I started to take notes down of all of the things I found hilarious and that’s where the whole thing started.
“I then thought ‘how great would it be to create a whole new soap’. I couldn’t do a sitcom behind the scenes of EastEnders because they would never let me – likewise with Coronation Street - so I knew I would have to create the soap to make the idea work. And the more I thought about it and the way they could cross over, it just got funnier and funnier.
“The idea was always to do the shows on two channels, and the only place we could do that 12 years ago was on BBC1 and BBC2 as they were the only multi-channel organisation. But back then I think it was just too dangerous or too scary to get made – because one was a drama and the other was a comedy, it had to be commissioned separately, which completely missed the point. Over the years, people have tried to make me do it as one show but that’s not what it’s about. The joy is the fact that they are two separate shows, and I always believed they should be. So I put it in a drawer and refused to do anything with it. Until now. We are now 12 years down the line, and the landscape has changed. The two shows now work perfectly back to back on one channel, because the industry has moved on enough to buy into them as two separate shows but one package.
“Actually, what it forced me to do, which I had never done before, was to think rationally about soap. Why does it work, and why doesn’t it? And the first thing I realised was that soaps are almost like brands. Coronation Street taps into that kind of postcard Northern idea - cobbled streets, ‘ey up chuck’, headscarves and curlers. EastEnders capitalises on our perception of the blitz spirit, a kind of ‘cor blimey’, pearly kings and queens, good old London town. Then we have Emmerdale, which taps into that idea of rolling hills and green and pleasant land and little country pubs. And there’s Hollyoaks, which taps into the youth market. So all those things have been done before, and brilliantly too.
“And so we thought: what is the one thing in the country’s psyche that has never been tapped into? And the first thing we could think of was Cornwall – rugged coastline, wrecking, that whole romanticism of Cornwall, as well as the cool factor of Newquay and handsome surfers. There was a time when we all went to Cornwall as kids for our holidays so most people have a warm glow about it. And so that was our ‘brand’.
“The hardest part was the title, so we went to Cornwall and set ourselves the challenge over dinner to think of one. Echo Beach just popped out - I think it was because Jane Featherstone loved the song. Now when people ask me why it’s called Echo Beach I can’t tell them the truth because I’m trying to appear as some sort of intellectual writer so I say, “it’s because Moving Wallpaper echoes the soap and the soap is about echoes of the past.” That impresses them. The title Moving Wallpaper came out from the walls on soap sets, because they actually move. If you go to stage one of Elstree where EastEnders is shot, there is a big tunnel and all these trolleys stacked up with labels on them like ‘Ian’s front room’ and ‘The Vic - upstairs’. They are basically moving wallpaper.
“I only had one dream for this idea - and it is also my biggest fear – and it’s that you could watch either show individually and they still work. And, even if you watched both, you can still watch Echo Beach and invest in the characters. And I think we’ve really pulled that off. I watch Echo Beach and I fill up at those scenes between Abi and Jimmy, despite all the comic conversations behind the scenes in Moving Wallpaper. I guess it’s the same as reading an exposé about a soap actor in the Sunday papers: you can still invest in the character on a Monday. Similarly with Moving Wallpaper, I absolutely deny the fact that it’s an industry in-joke or that it’s an incestuous look behind the scenes of television, because that office genuinely could be making anything. If the writers were salesmen and Jonathan was the ridiculous sales manager, it would still work because the dynamic works.
“I think people have always been interested in what goes on behind the scenes of a popular soap. I know that because of how many Sunday newspapers they sell every week. If you want to sell an extra million copies of the News of the World, just put Jessie Wallace on the front. The audience has always thrived on leaks - “Oh, have you heard who shot Phil?” - that appetite has always been there, but we’ve found a way to feed it now with reality TV shows and celebrity magazines. If you had put this show on ten years ago, it may well have kicked off the reality boom in television. For me, it’s less about audience appetite and more about broadcasters, it’s more about the fact that we now love shows like Larry Sanders, Entourage, Extras. It was always a taboo – ‘we don’t show ourselves in public’ - but I think off the back of the success of those kinds of shows, there’s a willingness to bare more of the television industry. When it comes to stripping celebrities bare, I think everybody wants to find a flaw. I hate the fact that Robbie Williams is incredibly talented, good looking, rich and can play football. So if I can pick up the Sunday Mirror and find out that somebody slept with him and he’s not that well-endowed, I think, “Yes!” What Moving Wallpaper does is to bare those flaws in a heightened way.
“The main concern with Moving Wallpaper was always “where am I going to find my Jonathan Pope”? Because he is an amalgamation of different producers I’ve worked with, I was worried we wouldn’t find someone to play all those producers rolled into one larger than life character. Ben Miller just is Jonathan Pope, he has just done such a fantastic job. I’ve worked with ‘Jonathan Pope’ – he’s out there. The world is full of Jonathan Popes. The trick with Jonathan was to create someone so obnoxious yet loveable at the same time. It’s a great trick, to have someone so hideous but that you love and still root for, a bit like Basil Fawlty. You absolutely would not want to stay in that hotel – it’s a nightmare, he’s rude to you, he’s terrible – but you kind of like him and revel in his obnoxiousness. And Jonathan is like that. In fact, the producer he is most like, Ben has never met, which is kind of weird.
“Moving Wallpaper has elements of industry truths within it. When one of the characters says “They’re writers, they hate everybody”, there are certainly elements of truth in that. When I started in the industry, I found the production people would always be “give us a script and bugger off”, and you’d say, “can I watch a bit of filming?” and they’d roll their eyes and say “oh, for God’s sake, alright.” You’re standing there with a plastic cup of tea and people are pushing you out of the way and tutting and saying things like “mate, there are cables there”. You feel like saying “sorry, don’t mind me, I’ll just stand here. I only wrote the bloody thing. Oh look, there’s the director, go and love him” I remember watching the first episode of Eldorado, which I wrote, being filmed in Spain and I was, I swear to you, behind a donkey’s arse trying to see a monitor. Everyone else was crowded around the screen and there was me, looking through the legs of a donkey. That’s a writer’s life, which is why we hate everybody.
Carl has a line in the show which is “they’re actors – you’re talking about them as if they are human!”, which kind of sums up how production people feel about actors too! Of course you get different kinds of actors. EastEnders is a really good example. Barbara Windsor is a consummate professional – she’s never late and she always knows her lines. Now we love those. The other end of the scale is that some kid comes in and they’re a nightmare. I’m up until two o’clock in the morning writing a script and I’m on my third divorce and verging on being an alcoholic and they’re demanding Perrier water or moaning about the wrong kind of carpet. And a lot of them can treat scripts like a guide. There’s nothing worse than someone saying “yeah, I’ve got the general gist: now watch as I bring my genius to it”.
My dream was always to have Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon. They were written before we’d even sold the show because, to me, that was the dream soap – Jason and Martine. When we started casting, we said why don’t we give it a go and thought “yeah right, like we’ll get them.” But you know what, we did. And I wrote that into Moving Wallpaper too. The cast have been incredible. To get someone like Hugo Speer to come in and to do a very credible performance as Mark Penwarden, which of course he’s going to do because he’s Hugo Speer, and then say to him “actually, can you now step over and do a scene in Moving Wallpaper where you threaten to beat the shit out of the producer because he’s going to sack you?” - that’s fantastic.
I am as proud of Echo Beach as I am of anything I ever did on EastEnders. I’ve been writing soap for 20 years and I know what works – this is a proper grown-up soap and it works. My dream is to see Ben Miller as Jonathan Pope go up to collect an award at the British Soap Awards. Ben can already reel that speech off – it’s both of our dreams.”
Image and text © ITV
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