A convincing and hair-raising depiction of showbiz at its most luridly weird: I Hate Suzie reviewed

Fifteen minutes into the first episode of I Hate Suzie, main character Suzie Pickles was doing a photoshoot in her country cottage for Esquire magazine. ‘We don’t know what we’re looking for right now,’ the photographer told her. ‘We’re just going to cycle through some feelings and see where we are.’ What he didn’t know, but we did, was quite how many feelings Suzie (Billie Piper) had already had to cycle through by then.

The programme began with her thrilled to hear that she’d bagged a Disney film role and cracking open the champagne. A few minutes later, she learned that some sex photos of her had been hacked and were about to be posted online (at which point the appearance of her son’s rabbit in her eyeline symbolically confirmed that a rabbit hole awaited). It was then that the Esquire team arrived in a blizzard of media jargon to take her furniture into the garden and replace it with something more suitable for their impenetrably expressed needs. Meanwhile, her husband Cob was studying his phone with unmistakeable fury.

All this naturally required not just Suzie but the programme itself to do some serious juggling of emotional states — which it did with aplomb, as Lucy Prebble’s script blended the media satire with properly funny Fawlty Towers-style farce and a properly painful sense of lives unravelling. (Not coincidentally, Prebble also writes for Succession, which has the same ability to combine wildly disparate elements without them ever undermining each other.) Only right at the end did the episode put a foot wrong when Suzie suddenly burst into a musical number that added a note of jarring whimsy to the mix.

In the customary way of new series, episode two followed immediately, this time beginning with an understandably distracted Suzie appearing at a convention for a science-fiction series she once starred in.