Is that it? Is that all it took? We’re prepared to let Jason Donovan back into our lives – no, more than that: we are warmed by his return – after one quick stint on I’m a Celebrity...? He eats a couple of kangaroo knackers and gets the lead role in Echo Beach – fully professionally rehabilitated, and the king of the big talking-point show of 2008.

Well God, if we knew all along that we loved old lovely Jason lovely Donovan – as surely we do – couldn’t we have let him come back a little earlier? Did we have to make Jason SUFFER years in Rocky Horror? Do you know where he’s been living for the past ten years? Barnet. Barnet! (I once got in an account-cab after him, and saw his address.) I can’t believe we let it get to that point. Zone 4, with the normals, for the former Mr Kylie – when, really, we loved him all along. If only we’d examined our feelings earlier! Like, 1998!

Any road up, here’s Jason in Echo Beach, and Echo Beach is an extraordinary programme. At this point, I would literally like to stand on my chair, braving the potentially fatal wobbliness, and applaud the absolute screaming genius that is Tony Jordan, the creator of Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach. Jordan was a market-stall trader who only started to work as a scriptwriter at the age of 32, on EastEnders. It was Jordan who came up with “Sharongate”, the Slater family, Kat being Zoe’s mother, and the Kat and Alfie amazingness. He then went on to co-create Life on Mars – a drama rivalled only by Doctor Who in terms of balls-out creativity and flair. And now, Echo Beach/Moving Wallpaper– Siamese-twin TV shows that have required such a kinetic, leaping sideways motion in their conception that Jordan must have been in danger of putting his mental back out halfway through the first episode.

In a nutshell, Moving Wallpaper is a straight-down-the-line, yet superior, sitcom, starring Ben Miller of Armstrong and Miller as a dandy, hateful TV executive in charge of creating a new soap. There are various, knowing characters – put-upon, stalwart script editor, head of drama with a grudge. Susie Amy from Footballers Wives turns up, playing herself, desperate for a role, and dispensing career-enhancing blow jobs almost literally willy-nilly. It’s all very postExtras– gags about celebrities being needy, whole sub-plot at the expense of Ross Kemp’s baldness, swearing.

Immediately after Moving Wallpaper, we then have the Cornish surfing soap Echo Beach – starring Jason Donovan as a hunky exile returning to his adolescent home town, and Martine McCutcheon as a hotel manager with a dark secret; which, let’s face it, is probably about Jason, what are the chances, etc.

If you saw Echo Beach on its own you would consider it to be a perfectly straight, glossy, Home & Away/Hollyoaks piece of soap: albeit one with one of the slickest first episodes extant. Donovan and McCutcheon emote and brood, while around them, a cast of impossibly hot teen offspring and their friends take drugs, shag one another and try to solve the long-buried mysteries of their parents. It’s generally standard soap stuff, albeit shot somewhere lovely, and with the Donovan/ McCutcheon bonus.

If you’ve watched it in conjunction with Moving Wallpaper, however, it becomes a different proposition entirely. You know that the weeping child extra is weeping particularly passionately because, in Moving Wallpaper, Ben Miller “motivated” her crying scene by telling her that her parents were dead. You know that hunky Brae (Christian Cook) is wearing a shirt on the beach because, in the rushes, his nipples were adjudged to be “off-puttingly feminine”. And that Susie Amy’s character gets a sudden, huge storyline in episode three on the back of, well, getting on her back.

Simply writing what the idea of the two shows is gives me a full-on visceral thrill that we live in such times. I mean, look at the sparking insanity of the concept! Two shows, in two wildly differing genres – soap and sitcom – with two entirely different casts, to be viewed either alone, or in tandem with each other! Conjuncted sibling shows with a meta-text! You’ve got to love that. There is an almost mystic cast to the idea – an epic ambition. It’s like runes that read differently by moonlight, or the alchemy that occurs between food and fine wines. And you know what? It’s on prime-time ITV1! [keels over, faints].

Jason Donovan interview, page 34; Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach, Thur, ITV1, 9pm/9.30pm

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