Cracked ITV1, 10.40pm Secret Diary of a Call Girl ITV2, 10pm
A deft and tender homemade drama series about mental health, Cracked constituted an unexpected pleasure, despite one or two uncertainly-pitched performances which made you think you'd stumbled across an episode of Still Game in which the sitcom had forsaken The Clansman bar for a residential psychotherapy unit.
Following the established rules of TV medical drama, Cracked's cast of therapists, counsellors and ancilliary care-staff are every bit as vulnerable to breakage as the random assembly of obsessive-compulsives, depressives and hyper-manics in their charge.
A senior nurse thus welcomed a total stranger into her bed on a first date. Joy and fear mingled in the liaison's aftermath. A therapist felt deserted by all her professional skills when told her three-year-old daughter was autistic. Irrational grief and black despair ensued.
Cracked: it breaks down and quivers with genuine emotion.
The same could never be said of the glossy and universally panned first series of Secret Diary of a Call Girl. As one damning review put it: "It's effectively a recruitment ad for a new generation of silly girls whose career' paths might have gone no further than a stint as a lapdancer followed by a Big Brother audition, but who just might now book a Brazilian wax at the prospect of such apparently easy money."
Another critic added: "It aspires to be a candid, incisive look at the oldest profession, but mostly it stares at it lasciviously, with all the seamier bits - STDs, repulsive clients, police records, drug habits - airbrushed out."
Hearteningly, all this censure seems to have had some redeeming effect on the show's second series, which again stars Billie Piper as Belle, an unusually self-possessed high-class London prostitute.
In what seemed like a taunting address to the show's critics, Belle began by wondering whether every one of us slaves of capitalism isn't metaphorically "going through the motions for money - aren't we all whoring ourselves for The Man?"
Smiling seductively, Belle then answered her own question by asserting that she was uniquely empowered by her knowledge that she was literally a prostitute.
This illogical claim will doubtless fail to resonate with real-life prostitutes, and thankfully Secret Diary of a Call Girl swiftly dropped this line of reasoning, instead opting to confront Belle with - cue thunderclap! - an Unmistakable Moral Dilemma about her work's ongoing validity.
For not long after an accidental meeting with a handsome, wholesome stranger, Belle was in church at her nephew's christening, acting as his godmother. This religious duty entailed Belle being asked by the presiding vicar to renounce the Devil, the deceit and corruption of evil, and the sins which separate her from God. Belle looked disconcerted - Unmistakable Moral Dilemma!
The vicar then sprinkled holy water on the nephew's infant brow - an act which naturally reminded Belle of what she'd not long previously been sprinkling on the naked body of her last client, a pervy LibDem leader (although it wasn't holy or water, strictly speaking, that she'd been sprinkling on the chap as she hoicked up her saucy maid's outfit) - Unmistakable Moral Dilemma!
As you'll perhaps guess, the wholesome handsome stranger then reappeared, undeniably in love with Belle. Unmistakable Moral Dilemma! As to whether or not you should watch Secret Diary of a Call Girl, I can only say it's not as shameful an activity as once it was.
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