Billie Piper is unexpectedly perfect for this role. She's very engaging, and makes it a lot easier to buy her character's direct address to the camera. Her character has distinct and potentially damaging flaws, and this does more to create tension than the usual TV tricks of putting the heroine in imminent danger of violence every week. This is a wonderfully woman-centric show–the main male character is a sidekick. :-)

This show has some great insight into what it means to be adult and human and interested in sex, complete with laughs and drama. It also has something of a downward trajectory–it gets more depressing, less uplifting, as this first series progresses. Still, despite what ought to be a seedier, more hopeless setting in the world of sex for sale, Secret Diary of a Call Girl works out to be a lot more positive and cheerful, in my humble opinion, than the series it is most often compared with: Sex and the City. And where Sex and the City left me with the impression that New York City is an unfriendly place full of very strange and possibly dangerous people, Secret Diary of a Call Girl really does manage to be a love letter to London as a place teeming with life and possibility.

A word of warning: keep your remote control handy; you'll want to skip the trailers at the end of each episode. They come before the credits, and they tend to spoil things if you're watching it on DVD and not having to wait a week to see the next instalment.