Porn with knickers on

I once knew a young woman who worked for a large public-interest organisation. She was clever and well educated, but funds were tight, and she feared she was about to lose her job. In which case, she planned to follow a university friend and become a high-class prostitute. It sounded marvellous, she said. The agency vetted the clients, she worked at home, and made hundreds of pounds a day for little work and next to no risk. Her parents thought she was a secretary; when they were in town she simply took the day off. It sounded dreadfully sad to me, and I was delighted when I heard that my acquaintance had survived the sackings.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl (ITV2, Thursday) was apparently about the life of such a young woman, based on a weblog which may or may not have been genuine. The series is porn, but because this is television, even cable television, it was porn with its knickers on. It was sex — as explicit as you can be without actually showing any organs of generation — but, like porn, lacking the element of real life. The lovely, winsome and beguiling Billie Piper, who plays ‘Belle’, the prostitute, would thrill any male whose brain had not been replaced by tofu — even fully clothed, which she rarely is. ‘I know you think I don’t like sex, but I do,’ she says to us in a defiant sort of way. ‘And I love money.’ We see her counting the crisp fifties before stashing them in her freezer compartment, completing the circle of food, sex, money and every kind of oral satisfaction.