Wow, prostitution looked like a blast in Secret Diary of a Call Girl (ITV2). Fellow wage slaves, vacate your offices. Throw your legs in the air like you just don’t care. The character Belle, played by Billie Piper, is based on Belle de Jour, the prostitute who first blogged, then published a book, about selling her body. She doesn’t have to work unsocial hours, she has free time for afternoon coffee with ex-boyfriend-now-best-friend Ben (Iddo Goldberg). She has a bottomless drawer of Agent Provocateur knickers.

If you’ve got Piper’s ravishing figure, commanding attitude, super-dooper hairstylist – who made her look very tousled and Baraberella – and a stash of condoms (because she’s a good prostitute), then you too can snag a great penthouse apartment. Belle is a “very high-class prostitute”, she tells us in one of her speeches to camera. “I charge by the hour and I charge a lot.”

The sex looked a breeze. The blokes paid first. She was ruthlessly organised: her flat was divided between work and play, though work seemed very playful. In fact, her bed – piled with sumptuous cushions – was the most attractively designed workspace ever. Feminists have complained about Call Girl’s glamorisation of the sex trade and the women who work within it, but Belle said: “There are many different kinds of working girls. You can’t generalise. I wasn’t abused by a relative. I’ve never been addicted to anything.”

But Belle’s bragadaccio was not all-encompassing. Her real name was Hannah, and she felt the tug of her real identity. When she shagged quite a handsome punter, Daniel (Tom Mison), and they exchanged some personal information, she trusted him with her real name. He massaged her and they drank red wine. Suddenly it was a lost afternoon, romantic, not business. We should be hardwired to go, “Ahhh, cute”, at this but Belle was always on the job, couldn’t afford to get mushy, so never saw Daniel as a client again.

She was happiest when she never had to be herself, she said – so went back to riding, jockey-style, a man with sideburns who liked to fantasise about sex in farmyard settings. The implication of never being the person you are is quite dark, but there is no sign of Call Girl, with its artfully shot fellatio and groovy soundtrack, worrying its pretty little head over such matters. Belle swaggered about, a metropolitan missy who loved London for its rudeness and anonymity. She revelled in dressing up for the job: the false eyelashes, lip gloss, vertiginous red heels. She even had useful tips: female prostitutes should use a men’s deodorant so their married or partnered clients aren’t found out when they go home.

The business of sex was pushed aside: Cherie Lunghi played Stephanie, Belle’s pimp, and was ruthless but only in an Alexis Colbyish way. Exploitation, the selling of bodies, the possible emotional cost, the seamy side of it all – none of this has so far been raised.

The producers would argue that they were shattering that long-held stereotype of prostitute-as-victim, but they merely substituted one stereotype for another: here she was Nuts-ified, a savvy sex machine, always up for it and always in control. It’s a seductive image to sell, possibly dangerously so for any impressionable viewers, although it’s not true for many prostitutes, even Belle. But hey . . . what a well-dressed gliding pleasure this was to watch: it could have been called Selling Sex in the City.

Women’s bodies, scored out of ten and openly leered over, are also the main currency of Entourage (ITV2), the US show about a rising Hollywood star, Vince (Adrian Grenier), and his band of boy-buddies loose among the blonde glamazons of Los Angeles. It’s funny in a laddish way, and, rather as with Jack and Karen in Will & Grace, the best scenes aren’t with our lead characters but Vince’s agent Ari and his assistant Lloyd. (S&M, but in the office, in suits).

Now, Grenier: what a droopy dawg he is. In The Devil Wears Prada we were meant to think he was hot, too, but he was so wet you wanted Anne Hathaway, as his girlfriend, to get right back to the office to get more abuse from Meryl Streep. And here, as Vince, he’s the most boring element. Perhaps there’s a sophisticated in-joke on contemporary stardom being played out here. But I cannot wait for Ari to dump him. Horribly.

Out of the box

— Meet the Natives was pointless and offensive. Pointless because, why bring some remote-living, tribal Pacific Islanders to Britain? OK, they looked askance at our daily rituals, such as ironing and eating at the table and using cutlery. And that was supposed to make us scratch our chins and go, how right they are. But ironing shirts is a pain but makes our clothes look smart, and cutlery’s quite useful, too. And so it went on, including them puzzling over a vacuum cleaner. It managed to be patronising and offensive to both the islanders and their English hosts.

— Please: no more on the Big Brother relationship carcrash waiting to happen that is “Chiggy”, until they actually DO SOMETHING. More than argue on West End streets at 3am, that is.

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