An excess of positions: The adaptation of Secret Diary of a Call Girl from blog to box

This article focuses on the television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl as an adaptation of popular, but explicit and problematic, material for the avowedly mainstream television channel that commissioned and screened it, ITV2. Adapted from Belle du Jour’s blog and print memoirs about life as a high-class sex worker, the texts’ sexual content and erotic appeal necessarily varied when adapted from one media platform to another, but also proved a landmark success for ITV2 in shaping a distinctive channel identity. The article examines Secret Diary of a Call Girl’s strategy of operating in both comic and erotic modes to offer recognizable satisfactions to different audience groups, and explored the way in which its exploration of feminine sexuality as performance is augmented by this comedic structuring of the narrative. The article also attends in particular to two particular aspects of the adaptation: its visual strategies in shots and positioning of its protagonist, and its institutional and generic context, using Tony Bennett’s research on television viewing and cultural capital to explore the role of the series as reputation enhancing for ITV2 in being positioned as ‘original drama’ whilst also drawing viewer interest by offering multiple spectator positions to audiences in order to make available varied viewing pleasures for a heterogeneous range of viewers.