For Whom The Belle Tolls

This from www.itv.com – “Watch the hot preview of tonight’s second episode of the raunchy drama starring Billie Piper on itv.com”

It’s funny, but despite the fact that I found last week’s Billie Piper Fest (Secret Diary of a Call Girl) to be unrelentingly awful I know I’ll be watching it again tonight. The reason is obvious, there’s a perverse streak in me that loves awful TV.

You see awful TV is not bad TV. Awful TV can be the sort of TV where one or more of the elements are great, but combined as a whole it simply doesn’t work. In the case of the Belle De Jour derivative, Billie is super, but the rest of the production is cringe-making.

“A-ha!”, I hear you cry, “Give the show a chance, it was setting the scene last week. Once it gets into its stride it’ll be great TV”.

No it will not. Take the quote from the ITV site above “hot preview”, “raunchy drama”. It’s tabloid headline material.

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I wrote the above earlier this evening. I’ve now watched the programme and I wasn’t wrong. Watching the show is good for a laugh but it makes me sad that a piece of television about a profession that is not sugar coated and sweet-smelling can gloss over the issues inherent in the profession of “escort”.

I thought pretty woman was bad enough. You know, become a prostitute and meet a handsome millionaire – Sorry girl’s it isn’t going to happen like that. Maybe it’s because Secret Diary has pretensions to “dealing with” the issues surrounding the profession that I dislike this program so much. With Pretty woman you can regard the whole film as a piece of Hollywood fluff from beginning to end. Maybe Secret Diary of a Call Girl is not so far removed from reality and therefore is not abrogated from social responsibility. Pity the TV company hasn’t realised that.

Sex isn’t a crime, but this sort of TV ought to be. If you want to hear the Eurythmics track on YouTube, click here (The embed is diabled). I did want to link to “I did it just the same”, fans of the novel 1984 will understand why, but despite me recalling a video for that track I can’t find it anywhere.

Don’t worry, I don’t intend to post about Secret Diary again, I intend this to be my last rant on the programme.

Tags: Belle De Jour, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Prostitution, Pretty Woman, Social Repsonsibility