As befits a show about a woman of the night, “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” an eight-episode blast of summer heat from Showtime that started last week, arrived with something of a reputation. The series was produced in England, and was originally shown there last year. It was based on a book called “The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl,” which was written by a high-end prostitute and was itself an outgrowth of a blog, called “Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl,” whose success then engendered a newspaper series in the Telegraph, called “Belle de Jour’s Naughty Notebook,” and led to another book, called “The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl.” The TV series is now shooting its second season over in England, and has already been renewed for a third. All this enterprise, which is almost Disneyesque in terms of the length of its chain of monetization—the only thing missing is a theme park with kinky rides that cost five hundred dollars an hour—is the product of someone whose identity is open to question. There’s been speculation in the British press that Belle, who has never revealed her real name and is now retired, is an impostor—that is, that she was never a prostitute, and may even be a he.
The authority of the diaries is something worth pondering, especially at a time when a number of high-profile memoirs have turned out to be, to some degree or in their entirety, not what they professed to be. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find them in the Ho section of my local Barnes & Noble (the subtitle of the American edition, earnest and accurate, is “Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl”), so I’ve seen only the Telegraph columns and short passages from the books. The writing I have come across seems not just fictional but false; there’s a lazy archness to the tone, a superficial intelligence, and a mere pose of thoughtfulness—all of which may be intentional, part of the joke. The diaries aren’t trying for greatness; they’re trying to make the cash register ring, and that they have done. The conceit is that Belle is a university-educated young woman who went to London in search of a job and couldn’t make ends meet, and found that being a high-priced escort created the perfect synergy between her desire to make a lot of money and her avowed love of sex. (I know what you’re thinking: I wish I’d thought of that.) Belle makes it clear that she’s not a victim in this situation. She wasn’t abused as a child; everyone in her family was too busy reading, apparently. In the Telegraph, she offers this bit of background, in which neither the style nor the content passes the smell test: “My parents fancied themselves 1970s revolutionaries so we grew up with unfettered access to the writings of Angela Davis, Germaine Greer et al. The house was stuffed with books of all kinds. Psychedelic sci-fi disguised as literature: Aldous Huxley. The usual classics: Bede, Ivanhoe. My parents claim I taught myself to read, and set about reading everything within reach. Euripides and Plato were bedside standards. Goethe and Grass were favourites.”
Issues of authenticity fade away, however, when it comes to the TV series, because it’s not at pains to sell itself as the real deal. You don’t have to believe that the story comes from a true-life prostitute, just that the character you’re watching is believable. Billie Piper, the English actress who plays Belle and whom we last saw a few months ago, on PBS, when she was Fanny in “Mansfield Park,” is in her mid-twenties and has been a celebrity in Britain for more than a decade: she was a teen-age pop star; struggled with and recovered from anorexia; married a television presenter nearly twice her age when she was eighteen; triumphed anew as the sidekick in “Doctor Who” (which is seen here on Sci Fi); made her West End début in 2007; and, on the last day of the year, got married for the second time, to a scion of the tony Fox theatrical family. Casting Piper as a prostitute is smart marketing—as an idea, it has a tabloid sizzle. But the sizzle doesn’t quite carry across the Atlantic. Here, where we don’t feel either maternally protective of Piper or hypercritical of the mistakes she’s made in her life (our hands are already full, what with Britney, Lindsay, and Paris), she just doesn’t seem substantial enough to sustain a series. She’s both too vulnerable-looking to credibly play a yuppie call girl and too limited a performer to be able to convey what the attractions and the costs of that life might be. Piper is self-absorbed and pouty, and has an off-putting signature look: her mouth hangs open almost all the time, sending mixed signals of sexuality and childlike helplessness. Her accent makes her almost as hard to understand as Prince William is: it took me five rewinds to figure out that what she was saying to a client wasn’t “Whdijha hleyiek come ihhit?” but “Would you like to come sit?”
It’s not that much fun to watch an actress who, except for the occasional times when she lets loose one of her charmingly loud second-soprano laughs, seems always to be asking more of us than she’s giving, but “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” does get better as it goes along, although it doesn’t greatly distinguish itself from most other shows you’ve seen about young single women in the big city. (The transformation of Belle’s work into a TV show was overseen by the young playwright Lucy Prebble, who, luckily for her, had a success at London’s Royal Court when she was just out of university, so she wasn’t forced to walk the streets at night in fishnet stockings and a leather miniskirt.) At the end of an episode that involves a foursome and also some personal disappointment, Belle turns to the camera and says, “Sex is really a numbers game. Group sex is complicated, but that’s mechanics. For me, the hardest numbers have always been one plus one. Can never seem to make them add up.” If that voice sounds familiar, it’s because you heard Carrie Bradshaw use it in every episode of “Sex and the City.” The show also uses London in somewhat the same way “Sex and the City” used New York—we see a lot of bright lights, fancy restaurants, and expensive apartments—though there is a sadder, more wistful quality to the photography here, as if Belle were living in a kind of London fog, which, of course, she is.
She has an unfulfilled love for her ex-boyfriend, Ben (the very appealing Iddo Goldberg), who is now her best mate but doesn’t know what she really does for a living; he and her family think she’s a legal secretary who works at night. At the beginning of the first episode, Belle strides across a bridge over the Thames, introducing herself to us. With deliberate bluntness, as if to preëmpt our disapproval, she says, “The first thing you should know about me is that I’m a whore,” adding, as she walks into the lobby of a nice hotel, that the best way for someone like her to hide in plain sight is to dress well and not stand out in any way—to be “fabulous but forgettable.” Then she says, “You should also know that this isn’t the real me.” But it is the real her; the job has become her whole life. The only aspect of that life that we can truly care about is whether things will work out with Ben. That being the case, “Secret Diary” is at heart just a Laura Ashley romance tricked out in stiletto heels.
If it’s legal hot summer sex you’re looking for, there’s only one place to turn. You guessed it—Canada. SOAPnet is showing a CBC series called “MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives,” which aired earlier this year up north. The opening credits combine funny and sexy better than any show I’ve ever seen: synched to the propulsive beat of Sloan’s 2006 hit “Who Taught You to Live Like That” is a quick succession of really closeup shots of gorgeous men getting dressed to play hockey and of gorgeous women getting dressed to go out and get those men who play hockey. The thirty-five-second sequence is as gloriously over-the-top as can be, and no show could live up to it, but “MVP” is a good beach read, so to speak, if you need a break from all that Goethe and Plato. Its template is “Footballers’ Wives,” the British soap, which was shown here on BBC America, and it also calls to mind such past treasures as “Dynasty” and almost every other nighttime soap you can think of. I had no idea that hockey had its groupies—“puck bunnies”—or that hockey players were anything but giant battery-operated throw pillows under their uniforms. I’m going to sit right down and send Canada a thank-you note. ♦