SEXY! Secret Diary of a Call Girl, ITV2, 10.00pm
There are many things to love about Secret Diary of a Call Girl: the glamourous locations, the attractive cast, the way the utter ridiculousness of the whole thing is jovially handwaved by the writers and the actors. But my favourite part of it has to be Belle’s coy attempts at philosophy – like in the opening of tonight’s show where she muses that we’re all whores deep down, really, because we’re all selling ourselves to the man, doing things we don’t always enjoy, in order to keep ourselves in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed. Whatever gets you through the night, babe.
Having brought in record-breaking ratings for ITV2 during her first run (later topped by Bionic Woman admittedly, but since that got axed in the States because the show kind of made no sense and nobody was watching it, let’s just pretend that never happened), Belle’s back, and this time Billie Piper gets the benefit of a body double for most of her sex scenes because she was up the spout when it was being filmed. Lucky old her.
Essentially we’re in for more of the same here – some talking to camera, some racy scenes, and Billie generally being winning in the lead role, with the added bonus of Belle taking on a protégé by the name of Bambi who, given the lack of a government-mandated training programme in this line of work, wants Belle to show her the ropes. I do have my reservations about the way the whole thing kind of comes across as an instructional video at times, but I really don’t think we’re meant to be taking any of this terribly seriously. In bad news, Belle’s cute friend Ben only merits a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance in the first episode, but hopefully he’ll get a bit more to do later in the run. In better news, Callum Blue makes his debut tonight as Belle/Hannah’s new love interest, who she mistakenly picks up in a bar thinking he’s her john for the night. See, even sexy call girls are not immune to the thrall of hilarious mix-ups…
