Last night, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, the television programme based on the blog Belle de Jour, aired on ITV2 for the first time. So what better subject for my maiden voyage on the company blog than the grooming of Britain’s sauciest blogger for telly? Which has involved an in-your-face print and press campaign with the tagline “My body’s a big deal” and an invitation on the ITV website to find Belle on Facebook and “just give her a poke”. Also, as reported in yesterday’s NMA, ITV is scrambling to “sell sponsorship, pre-rolls and interstitials” around the mobile version of the programme “in a bid to meet demand from advertisers.” Heady stuff, indeed.

Belle de Jour exemplifies the contemporary casting of blogs as MySpace pages for aspiring writers, and rightly so. I’ve been an avid reader of Belle’s since she first started serialising on the interwebs and was disappointed when her book deal prevented her writing as often on her own blog (conflict of interest? wha?). The book deals led to a TV deal and suddenly we’re privy to Billie Piper frolicking in not-your-bog-standard-M&S knickers.

So, what’s been lost in translation? Well, the C-bomb, apparently, about which Belle herself has this to say:

They’re just words. No need to get your knickers in a twist. If words offend people so much, I struggle to imagine what they must think of the real insults in this world. Widespread poverty even in the world’s wealthiest economies, inequality based on nothing so much as background or sex, and that fact that in this day and age there are still places where women have their hands cut off for wearing nail polish come to mind. But no, someone is going to say C**T. On a minor television channel late at night. Whilst playing a call girl. Imagine that.

Also sacrificed are the sharpest edges of Belle’s native wit, which seem to have been mistaken for dirty bathwater. The Belle I know from her blog (a woman, bearing in mind, who has taken her nom de pixel from a Bunuel title) would certainly never have to ask the definition of “palindrome”, particularly as the name of her character is one. It’s even more a slap in the face as it comes fast on the heels of Amanda Peet’s character on Studio 60 waxing savant about the selfsame over on More 4 in the preceding time slot.

Thus I find the blog a much more satisfying serving of entertainment, and I look forward to reading its metacommentary on the TV programme. To my mind, though, the jettisoning of the stronger points of Belle’s story - independence and intelligence - works as a synecdoche for the entire relationship between the web and the tellybox, begging the question: which exactly is the poor cousin here?

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