KEY POINTS:
Billie Piper as a hooker? That might count as casting against type if the perky Miss Piper didn't play Belle, the call girl, with her usual, yes, perkiness.
Not that she does bad perky. I liked her Hero in the BBC's modern day interpretation of Much Ado About
Nothing and I like her as Rose in the odd bit of the odd episode I've seen of Dr Who.
In Secret Diary of a Call Girl, she plays Belle, by night, when she is a hooker for a living; and Hannah by day where she is a legal secretary.
All I could think was: goodness, where does the girl get the energy?
She has a lot of bounce, does Belle. She's a nice sort of hooker, of the very select sort. So the casting isn't as odd as it might have appeared.
You really couldn't have imagined the former tweeny popster in a role which required her to be hooking on alleyways to earn a bit of cash for her P habit. I've never been addicted to anything, said Belle/Hannah in last night's first episode. Except maybe the fourth episode of West Wing. She's too squeaky clean for that sort of dirty, dangerous capering.
Belle wears nice designer suits and has nice designer knickers. The whore is the one in the designer suit and being fabulous but forgettable.
And a nice string of pearls adds a nice touch of class to your high-class hooker.
So quite why we had to see an image of a bright red stiletto is beyond me. To remind us, I suppose, that it is a show about hookers because everybody knows that only hookers wear bright red stilettos.
Belle is a hooker because she's fundamentally lazy, apparently. Which didn't quite make sense when you saw the lengths she went to to make a farmer client happy.
Said farmer was very keen on his horses so we had a bit of more-silly-than-filthy talk about doing it in the stables. This was about as rude as Lady Chatterley's Lover. Actually, no it wasn't, but it was almost as daft as the sex scenes in Lady Chatterley's Lover which might have been rude at the time of publication and now would make a horse blush, but for all the wrong reasons.
The farmer scene was very silly and the next session even sillier. Belle bought farmer a little saddle.
There was only one way to play this scene and it was with a lot of good-natured giggling. That was the only one way to watch it too.
There is a developing sub-plot with the madam, who is a right madam, so no surprises there. And we've already seen Belle/Hannah looking a bit forlorn which means moody shots of her smoking, playing with her hair, so presumably she will turn out to be longing for something lacking in her life. Could it be love? Oh, probably.
Hopefully not. It'd be much more fun if it turned out she was a cold-hearted hooker was going to make a huge amount of money and buy a big flash house of the type she and her boyfriend (in the platonic sense) trick real estate agents into showing them.
So far, so perky, but so many stereotypes too.
* Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Prime, Thursday, 9.30pm