Even before transmission, moral compasses have been sent spinning by ITV2’s The
Secret Diary of a Call Girl, a dramatisation of Belle de Jour’s naughty
diaries. But my theory is that the storm has been caused not by the gravity
of the serial’s subject matter but by the magnetism of its star. At 25,
Billie Piper is Joanna Lumley’s successor, Britain’s youngest national
treasure, beloved by anyone who loves Doctor Who, admired for
surviving teenage stardom as a pop singer, and worried over – unnecessarily,
she’d say – for her brief and unlikely marriage to Chris Evans. Seeing her
as Belle will be like watching the Doctor’s Rose Tyler turning tricks. It’ll
make prostitution look not only glamorous (which it could hardly fail to
given Piper’s looks) but excusable. And that can’t be right, can it?
She is sitting a little tensely in a hired hall in London, readying herself
for a bash to launch ITV2’s new season. “It’s a bit scary, this one, because
it’s such controversial subject matter. You just want it to be handled well
and, you know, it’s a very different story to the story that we’re used to
hearing, about prostitution.
“It isn’t always dark, seedy and tragic. Belle is a woman who chose to do this
for a living and she enjoys it. She enjoys the sex and she enjoys the cash.”
Billie says that deciding to go for the parts of the wife in the BBC’s
updating of Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale and then Rose
Tyler were easy decisions. This was not. “It was quite hard because you’ve
got to work out what you’re trying to say, if you’re trying to say anything.
With a piece like this, it’s like you’ve got to think about the message a
lot more. This will be the first time people will have seen me in this
light, and I suppose it feels like you have a responsibility, you know, that
you’re not advocating prostitution and you’re not trying to make it look
desirable and say, ‘Oh by the way, it’s OK’.”
Although the former hooker’s identity has never been established for sure,
Billie believes she met Belle. She was driven to the country for the
rendezvous: all very “Secret Squirrel”. Belle was “this really funny, smart
– incredibly smart – woman”, in her mid-thirties. They got on.
So what is the case against? Is it immoral to earn a living hiring yourself
out for sex? “It’s a tough question and it’s one I’m going to be asked loads
so I should really think and learn my answer.” She giggles. “I think the
thing to remember in all of this, before I get upset thinking I’m not being
a responsible grown up, is that I’m just telling this girl’s story and, you
know, it’s been a book, a successful book. Her tale is very different to
others. She very much enjoys this life but, as we all know, it can be a
dicey existence and it can be really horrendous.”
Actually, I tell her, what worried me about the first episode was not Belle’s
morality but Billie’s health. In the bedroom scenes, her bottom looks
absolutely tiny. Having read her disturbing memoirs, Growing Pains,
I feared that her anorexia was back. “No. No. I was just very aware of the
fact that I was going to be naked a lot of the time and I didn’t want to
have to think about that as well as the fact that I was doing endless sex
scenes. So I did quite a bit of running.”
And eating? “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love steak.” She says that she wears size 10
or 12 these days (those wide-shoulders) and although I do not inspect the
label on the teeny black dress she is almost wearing, and for which she has
just spent £30 at American Apparel, I believe her. Her bronzed arms may not
flap with bingo wings but they are not pipe cleaners either.
“Any of those kind of things they’re addictions really, aren’t they? Come and
go. Sometimes we relapse. It’s such cliché. I hate it and it’s boring for
everyone, but these things are always standing in shadows, lurking. I don’t
think that they ever completely go away, and other people that have been
prone to anorexia will say the same thing. But I do feel really happy, so
you just have to focus on that.”
So she should be happy. Later this year she will marry Laurence Fox, who plays
the inspector’s sidekick in Lewis but whom she met in a
theatrical revival of Christopher Hampton’s Treats at the end
of last year. Initially she is wary of talking about him and is certainly
not going to confirm the rumours that they have set a wedding date for
Christmas Eve. This is an area of her life over which she is in command.
“Control”, I notice, is a word that she uses frequently. She admires, for
example, the way that Belle controls her list of clients, but knows such a
double life would turn her, into a “control freak”. Anorexia is about
control. “When I feel that my life is out of control I start clutching at
straws and those straws all relate to my weight or my health.”
Her autobiography records how she lost control of her life early in her pop
career. Even her first song, the teeny-bop hit, Because We Want To,
released in 1998 when she was 15, was a betrayal of her musical tastes
(which leant to soul). Life became a blur of mimed concerts, television and
radio appearances and drink-soaked tours that ended with her alone in a
hotel room in Chicago suicidally eyeing a bottle of melatonin. The music
industry’s theft of her childhood was, I suggest, tantamount to child abuse.
“I know. But the thing is I was really up for it. I was really up for the
abuse. I suppose some people just took advantage but I’d be on the phone
going, ‘I think we must do this show, this show, this show. This song has to
be No 1’. I was obsessed with songs getting to No 1.”
So what does she make of The X Factor lowering the age bar for
contestants to 14? She wishes it had gone up to 18. “Your voice will be
better then anyway, be more developed. You’ll be slightly wiser and maybe
more well adjusted and ready for it. As a teenager you’re so full of teenage
angst anyway. I don’t think it’s good. I don’t think it’s a great idea. I
think it’s slightly greedy.”
It was just as her hellish singing career was in decline that Chris Evans, TV
star turned DJ turned loadsamoney, entered her life. Having met on his show,
in May 2001, Piper, still only 18, and Evans, 34, married in Las Vegas and
embarked on a two-year honeymoon that she insists reconnected her with real
life. They split up after four years, having drifted apart while Piper was
filming Doctor Who, but theirs was the most amicable divorce ever –
no money changed hands – and last month she was at the blessing in Portugal
of Evans’s third marriage to the golfer Natasha Shishmanian.
“It was really emotional, in a good way, not in a sad, longing kind of way.
Weddings make me emotional, much more emotional than funerals, because
they’re so full of hope.” She adds that he would be the only one of her exes
she’d invite to her wedding.
Would she have made it through without him? “I don’t really know. I hope so. I
can be quite a little fighter at times. But I was really low when I met him,
so I’m not entirely sure. I like to think that I would have picked myself up
but I think I needed somebody else’s help. We both needed a bit of help. We
are quite similar in many ways, Chris and I. It’s just handy that he was
quite a lot older and wiser.”
And he’ll always be her friend. “Yeah, and he’ll always be older, which I’m
now reminding him of. He’s old, he’s over 40. He’s not even ginger any more.”
She thinks her jokes may cover her own obsession with being young. She
speculates that she’ll have her midlife crisis at 30. I point out that she
has already done more living than many people twice her age. By my count she
has been engaged four times now: first to her teenage boyfriend in Swindon
(to whom she lost her virginity at the age of 14, even before she had
started her periods), then to Ritchie Neville from the group 5ive (his fans
hated her for that), then to Evans and now to Fox.
“I know I have done a lot but all my friends were engaged at 13.” But
she seems to get engaged to all her beaux, as if it is a way of exerting
control over her love life. “No, I think a few got away lightly – the ones
that got away. I don’t want to become like Ross from Friends,
who always gets married. I really want this to be the last time I walk up
the aisle.”
Yet she met Fox only ten months ago. Why rush into it? “I don’t know. It’s
just a feeling. It’s wanting to be with someone and commit yourself to
someone and make someone happy. I want to share something with someone for
the rest of my life. I think the world can be really good fun when you hold
somebody else’s hand and witness it together. And I really believe in
marriage!”
She says that she lost her faith in family for a while when she fell out with
her parents over a story they sold to the press. “So I didn’t speak to them.
We have a rocky relationship, you know. It’s just my parents are young and I
was the absent daughter a lot and I was also a nightmare when I was younger.”
Teenagers are allowed to be nightmares. “I know, but I was a nightmare and I
wasn’t there. And I must have kept them up for hours with worry and fear.
Like when I had my really low point I was like, ‘I don’t want to live any
more. This is the end. Goodbye’. And I was in Chicago.”
Yet she did not ring them to say that she was marrying Chris Evans? “I know.
That’s why I’m an arsehole. I was really selfish then. But I needed to do
something for myself. People are so sceptical these days. People can’t
believe that you’re marrying someone just because you love them.”
She hears some of the same static this time around. “You can feel it again a
bit. People going, ‘Oh, here’s this person that gets married all the time’.”
Have her parents said that? “No, my parents have been really supportive.
They’ve really pleasantly surprised me.”
She denies that she and Fox dumped their existing partners to be with each
other but not that they fell in love very quickly. “He made me laugh a lot,
in like five seconds. And that’s always a good sign. I love having a laugh.
And he’s incredibly funny. He’s great. I’m marrying him so he really should
be.”
And, since he is 29, it is more a marriage of equals? “I hope so, yes. You
know, the thing is when I do these interviews I just think how much should I
talk about these things? But the thing is, it’s really hard when you’re
really in love with someone not to go, ‘I love him’! You want to scream it
on the street.”
She is, I mention, marrying into one of theatre’s grandest tribes, the Foxes,
as in James and Edward and Emilia. Billie’s father Paul ran a construction
business in Swindon and her childhood was sufficiently working class for her
to feel “as common as muck” when she joined the Sylvia Young Theatre School
in London aged 11. In her book she also pointedly refers to Chris Evans as
the victim of “middle-class envy” when he was ousted from Virgin Radio. Does
she ever think the Foxes are a bit posh for the likes of her?
“Do I think that? Have I ever thought that? No, because when you sit down at
the table it’s like sitting at our table, except there’s more of them. And
it’s really nice. I like it. I like them. They’re really lovely people.”
I note that these days she sounds less like Rose Tyler than Lady Penelope. She
blames the vowel change on the Hampton play. I assure her it is a pleasant
voice.
“You like my tone?” I’d download her tone if I could. “But it does slip into
serious Swindonian at times. Especially when I’m drunk.”
Piper is an alternately brittle and flirtatious interviewee. Thanks to her
neglected education she may be uncertain of her four-times table, but there
is no concealing the edges of her sharp intelligence. By the end of our
conversation, I felt confident enough to tease her a little. She says that
despite her success on ITV’s Mansfield Park earlier this
year, she has no acting projects awaiting her. Nor does she care. She’s
begun to think about babies. “I really think I’ll have a family and relax,
but then I’d probably be, you know, a really full-on mum.”
But her big mate, I say, David Tennant, Doctor Who himself, is going to the
RSC to play Hamlet. Why not get herself cast as Ophelia? “It would scare me
far too much,” she says, suddenly panicked. “I can’t. I can’t. I think I
need to stay away from the stage for a good couple of years. The last time
was just so scary, I can’t tell you.”
She stops herself as if she has remembered something just as bad. “I mean,
this is scary too.” Shortly afterwards she is back at her dressing table
applying a final layer of make-up ready for the coming ordeal: explaining to
the world that her road to Belle was paved with good intentions.
The Secret Diary of a Call Girl begins on ITV2 tomorrow at 10pm
Belle didn't say she went into prostitution straight after graduating - she did temping, worked in a book shop and a few other things first. I think she said she was late twenties when she became a call girl
Rachel, York, UK
How lucky Ms Piper is that her ancestors in this and other western countries fought so hard for female emancipation. I wonder how the young girls in slavery prostitution today feel about this film.
helen, Norwich,
If Belle de Jour is who she says she is and her blog about becoming a high class prostitute as a recent graduate was written a couple of years ago - how can she be in her mid thirties? She would be in her twenties if she was genuine.
emma, london, england
Good luck Billie. You have lightened up our screens in more ways than one and Doctor Who was given given a new lease of life, helped in no small part by your presence. All the best for the future.
Philip Gray, Bedford , England
Good luck Ms Piper - In British popular culture Billy has succesfully grown up infront of our eyes. She has got more than one string to her bow. She has suffered no press fuelled back lash ( yet!). My wife , my 7 year old daughter and I all thing she is great and wish her every success for Belle and future undertakings.
Roger, Swansea, Wales, UK