Getting hooked on Showtime's appealing 'Call Girl'

There's something really telegenic about split lives - and I mean messy split lives, not the neat bifurcations of famous superheroes who are ordinary by day and brave by night. Especially at Showtime, TV writers are more eager than ever to milk the comic fallout and moral haziness of characters who do something rather unusual on the down low. Mild-mannered Miami police expert Dexter is in fact a vigilante killer, for example, while Nancy on "Weeds" is a kooky suburban mom secretly doing business as a pot dealer.And, beginning tonight at 10:30 on Showtime's appealingly light "Secret Diary of a Call Girl," Hannah passes as a legal secretary, but she actually makes her living as a high-class London hooker named Belle. She has an "agent" - a polite version of a pimp - and she sees her wealthy Johns (and, in one episode, a Jane) in deluxe hotels and at her own apartment. But her best buddy, an ex-boyfriend named Ben, as well as her parents, have no idea she's earning over 100,000 pounds a year turning tricks. She's in the closet to them, right beside the sexy lingerie and that black-leather teddy.
"Secret Diary of a Call Girl" is based on an infamous blog - and a resulting book - by the pseudonymous London escort Belle de Jour (named after the Catherine Deneuve movie). The eight-episode first season has already aired in Britain, where, of course, it was controversial for having fun with a profession generally considered sexist and exploitive. And it will doubtless trigger ire here, since Hannah and "Call Girl" creator Lucy Prebble aren't interested in issues of victimization. This is the unapologetic story of one woman, not the story of an industry. In one of her comments to us, spoken through the fourth wall to the camera, Hannah strongly assures us that she does not fit the stereotype, that she's neither an addict nor an abuse survivor. About her career motives, she simply says, "I love sex," and "I love money."