Belle/Hannah (Billie Piper) goes for a meeting with Stephanie (Cherie Lunghi) at a swank-looking restaurant, and notices some of the other girls are giggling at a laptop screen. Turns out Belle has been given a terrible online review by a client – a review that ends with “the word frigid comes to mind.” She laughs uncomfortably and says “Who listens to the critics anyway?” But then she nervously looks at the viewer, which seems to tell us something else. Sure enough, her business begins to suffer, which results in Stephanie sending her a rather odd client late one night.
At first Lewis (Kevin Doyle) seems fairly normal, but almost as soon as Belle closes the door, he begins acting strange. When she goes to make a usual business call to Stephanie, he becomes cold and demanding. It’s a very strange scene for this series, but realistically isn’t at all out of place. It almost looks as if things could get violent when Belle all but throws him out of her apartment. She’s left alone, shaken and confused. Who else can she turns to but buddy Ben (Iddo Goldberg)? He’s closing up the bar where he works when she shows up. He rambles on about his upcoming wedding to Vanessa and her insistence that the napkins should look like doves before even noticing that something might be wrong with Hannah. She tells him what just happened with the client and he, of course, becomes immediately overprotective. Stephanie calls and Hannah goes off on her, questioning why she would send her such a client. Turns out, he’s someone that another girl no longer wanted to deal with and she thought Belle could “handle it.” Belle accuses her of being nothing more than a pimp these days and hangs up. Then to the audience she says, “What a difference a year makes.”
Flashback to her first meeting with Stephanie. The woman asks her about her A-levels, and Hannah rattles off a list of her scholastic achievements, and Stephanie replies, “What I meant was, do you do anal?” Groan! What a godawful joke. Would anybody actually ask such a question using the phrase A-levels? Stephanie tells her, “I’m going to keep you safe. I’m going to be your best friend Hannah – a best friend who takes 40% and doesn’t tell you her real name.” Back in the here and now, Ben suggests that maybe she should take a break from her job – just for a while. In fact, he bets her that she won’t miss the job.
Apparently taking a break from being a whore means spending your days sitting on park benches watching “normal” people live their lives – as if Hannah never noticed what other people do before now. All the while some really goofy music plays in the background. Go figure. Of course, out of boredom she calls Ben for lunch – a repetitive moment that again exposes how few people Hannah has in her life on this show. Hopefully next season the show writes a few more characters into the mix. Anyway, Ben cannot meet her since he’s consumed with work and wedding planning. She decides to take the opportunity to go shopping for a wedding present and meets a clerk named Tim (Matt Smith). She takes a sort of liking to him and ends up bringing him back to her place and sleeping with him, and then he simply won’t go away. Hannah’s not used to people not going away. At one point he discovers her collection of oils and such in the bathroom, and deduces that she must be a masseuse. She awkwardly says that she doesn’t like telling people because most assume a masseuse is also a whore (a word she cannot bring herself to use…ha, ha.) Eventually Ben comes over claiming to be her fiancé and the guy quickly exits. The two friends converse and she insists that she won the bet. Being “normal” just isn’t her thing. He says that the least normal thing about her is her love for marmite(!). For the record, marmite, a yeast extract the Brits spread on toast, is actually pretty tasty.
Belle gets a call from Stephanie saying she’s once again in demand as someone wrote a sparkling review of her online. She tells the agent she’s ready to go back to work, but more or less threatens her business if she ever pulls anything like that again. (Could Belle ever really be a threat to Stephanie?) As the episode draws to a close, we see it was Ben who wrote the review for Belle, a scene that brings to the forefront the biggest problem with this episode: Why didn’t Belle just get online a write a new review (or even several) after the bad one? The answer is that we then wouldn’t have an episode, or at least we wouldn’t have this episode. Overall, this really seems to be the weakest entry thus far and it really doesn’t do much of anything other than further strengthen the friendship between Hannah and Ben, which could’ve been done dozens of other ways. The rest of it, Belle embracing her inner Hannah was really pretty weak, unless the goal was to show that there no longer is a Belle and a Hannah, but just one woman. Maybe that was the point, and maybe I missed it. (Or not, since I just mentioned it.) In any case, the tone was all over the place, going from dark and disturbing to light and airy. If someone tuned in to the show for the first time and saw this, they likely wouldn’t tune in again.
(This recap was very late. Apologies to regular readers, but the good thing about Showtime is that this series plays over and over throughout the week…and then there’s always Showtime On Demand. In fact, as I type there’s a “Call Girl” marathon going on on one of the Showtimes!)
