Dollops of sex, but without the mystery, Belle’s no fun any more
Tuesday November 17 2009
A good mystery has to have a decent dollop of sex in it and Belle de Jour, the former e300-an-hour sex worker whose anonymous blog inspired the UTV series Secret Diary of a Call Girl starring Billie Piper, has more than a wee dollop of S-E-X.
The unique selling point of this story was our total ignorance about who the author was.
A blog made into a TV series starring a well-known name -- yet no one had a rashers who Belle was -- this was total marketing genius, designed to intrigue even the least gossipy person on the planet.
But over the weekend Dr Brooke Magnanti, a researcher at Bristol University, outed herself as Belle, citing "paranoia" that a former boyfriend was about to reveal her identity as her reason for speaking up.
First of all that's a crappy ass excuse for unravelling one of the greatest questions of our times (well, the greatest mystery of the past five years).
Belle should have at least had the manners to only reveal all when this generation are toast. She's taken all the fun out of the blog, the books and the TV series.
The very idea that she then said that the real reason for her sudden candidness was that she wanted to be able to attend her own book launches is even more bonkers.
You'd have to live a fairly sheltered existence to think that a shot at 'out-in-the-open, face-recognisable fame' is not the primary motivation for the good doctor's decision to ID herself.
The only consoling aspect of this anti-climax is that Belle is a cracking looking woman -- although as a male colleague pointed out "at e300 an hour, she'd kinda want to be".
- Dee O'Keeffe
