I appreciate that it's a flawed concept and whoever described it as innovative must have missed The Office, Extras and Drop the Dead Donkey but I have been laughing out loud at ITV's Moving Wallpaper.

The key here is to ignore the fact that it bears virtually no resemblance at all to the reality of making a soap and just sit back and enjoy the general silliness, the lazy but still funny TV “in jokes” and the central clown performance of Ben Miller, whose character is about as believable as the scenario but still makes me chuckle.

The spoof on Casualty was spot on to the extent that here at Hogan Towers we found ourselves laughing at it all over again while watching the Holby drama on Saturday night.

The point is that this daft spoof of a soap opera production team shouldn't really work at all but they've managed to pull it of somehow. What doesn't work is companion show Echo Beach.

If the idea was to make a terrible soap to tie in with the comedy then it's just not bad enough to be funny. If the idea was to produce something good they've failed there too. Perhaps the problem is that no one has told the cast what it's actually supposed to be.

Jason Donovan appears to be playing it straight and tragically he seems to be the best thing in it, which speaks volumes. Johnny Briggs has a Cornish accent that he seems to have picked up from watching creaky old black and white pirate movies, while a similarly bad accent comes from the pub landlady – Bridget the midget from early Grange Hill.

Hugo Speer is such a panto villain that we get the urge to boo every time he appears on screen, while Martine McCutcheon has been woefully miscast as a middle-aged mum of teenage nippers. We can only hope for the sake of her reputation that the Sunset Beach style of acting she seems to have adopted is intentional.

The younger members of the cast, those are supposed to fool us into thinking we're watching The O.C., are all incredibly wooden and herein lies the problem. Have they intentionally made this soap as crap as possible and if so, how can they possibly expect us to watch it? The only fun to be had here is in spotting the references from the comedy show but beyond that there is very little point at all. This is so sub-standard, I wouldn't inflict it on a daytime audience.

Not so Happy

Al Murray's Happy Hour returned and was so formulaic that you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a repeat. Perhaps it's time Al realised that he's milked the Pub Landlord character to death now and came up with a different concept.

For the moment though we face a show with the same catchphrases and jokes every week and guests who are merely there as props from the delivery of some rather weak puns and cheap laughs. It's a format that is a bit of strait jacket really. Cerys Matthews looked clearly uncomfortable at being on the end of some the crude gags but I suppose the host had no option but to plough on with them. Worse was to come though when she had to sing a Queen song at the end and gave a performance so shockingly bad she wouldn't have got through the first round of The X Factor with it.

Getting the studio audience to shout “Phwoar” at Barbara Windsor is never inventive, clever or funny and it was left to James Blunt to provide any sort of entertainment, putting Al on the back foot as he had done Clarkson a few weeks back on Top Gear by showing that he was far better at taking the mickey out of himself than Al was. The added bonus was that he didn't sing.

Nothing on offer here then to trouble Friday Night with Jonathan Ross where typewriter-collecting Tom Hanks came across as a typically ill-informed American tourist. We were taking bets about whether there would be a Dick Van Dyke reference, so shockingly bad were Hanks's attempts at British accents. Sure enough we got one.

Ross seemed entirely uncomfortable interviewing Hanks, which made it compelling television.