Matt Smith--The Biography by Emily Herbert

Author:Emily Herbert [Emily Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843584957
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2012-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THAT FACE

It was Doctor Who that was shortly to catapult Matt into the stratosphere, but if truth be told, he was doing pretty well anyway. More and more juicy roles were coming his way, including another one with Billie Piper, which got the critics even more worked up than they had been before once it was announced that he was going to be the new Doctor. This wasn’t just any old role: it was a part in the infamous series Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Now here really was a turn up for the books: the Doctor making free with a previous assistant. It was all very rambunctious stuff.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl had become something of a succès de scandale. It had had started as first a blog and then a book by a high-class lady of the night, known only (until she was unmasked as the scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti) as Belle de Jour, after the famous 1960s film of the same name starring Catherine Deneuve and directed by Luis Buñuel. When it was adapted for television, starring Billie Piper as Hannah Baxter, a seemingly normal woman who in fact works as a prostitute, there was a certain amount of shock, not least because Billie seemed extremely clean cut. After her early years as a pop singer, she had become best known first for her marriage to Chris Evans, and then for her role as Rose Tyler. She certainly wasn’t the sort of person you’d expect to go around posing as a lady of the night.

The series was never exactly mainstream; it was shown on ITV2. But it garnered a fair bit of interest. Like Sex and the City, to which it was sometimes compared, Secret Diary of a Call Girl frequently treated sex as more of a laugh than anything else. Billie/Hannah/Belle was the narrator of the series, and would frequently address the camera directly as she came to terms with the fact that she was having a career break. ‘Now that I’m not working I’ll have to find something else to occupy my time,’ she mused, before addressing the viewer with her next conundrum. ‘More importantly, I’ll have to start giving it away.’ Although the show was obviously very different indeed from the one that was to make him famous, it also gave Matt the chance to display his flair for comedy and lightness of touch.

Billie herself was very much a fan of Matt, and was enthusiastic when it was announced that he was to be the Eleventh Doctor. ‘I’ve worked with him three times, including Secret Diary of a Call Girl where he was a punter,’ she said. ‘I love Matt Smith. I think he’s amazing and he’s a great choice for the new Doctor Who.’

Matt’s appearance in Secret Diary was brief, but memorable. His character had carnal relations with Billie’s Belle de Jour, of course, but unusually, it was not as a paying client, or punter, as Billie had termed him.

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