Calvin Trillin observes that it's unfair to say Brits have neither a cuisine nor a sense of humor -- their food is a joke in itself. You might say the same about their taste in sex onscreen. Want to watch some Benny Hill, anyone? Anyone? But everyone thinks Showtime's got a surefire hit in their Brit import Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

Nobody hopes for a new Showtime hit more than me (except Showtime). And other pundits argue that Secret Diary is the new Sex and the City. I doubt it. Granted, it's got a magnetic child star who grew up to play a plucky material girl parading her eye-candy glad rags in a photogenic capitalist capital, with plenty of wide-eyed monologues addressed directly to the camera, and mattresses as well and truly stress-tested as trampolines.

Showtime's call girl Billie Piper -- who started out on a kids' TV show, became Britain's forerunner to Britney Spears with her teenage pop-star debut, and won respect on the deathless cult hit Doctor Who -- is almost as winsome as Sarah Jessica Parker, but she's a more limited actress. Killer grin, fetching when she hides from a john behind floppy forelocks or bites a naughty thumbnail, even affecting when she's too shyly ashamed to mention her line of work to her doting daddy. But compared to Parker, Piper's a spokesmodel of whorewear.

Sex and the City skates on thin ice, plotwise, so deftly that it never falls through. Piper's show has less plot than a real porn film. Its sex scenes flash the odd breast and a great many bare bottoms -- how veddy British! -- yet seldom approach the steam quotient of HBO's Tell Me You Love Me, which moved the line in naughty-bits programming. Secret Diary is even more boring than that show, at times almost as boring as Showtime's notorious Red Shoe Diaries, which move so slow they make Samuel Beckett look like Doug Liman.

When Belle quips, "One orgasm down, ten hours to go," one wants to reply, "I can't go on. I'll go on."

Okay, I'll admit Belle's show is funny in spurts. It's amusing when she's stuck with a client who has a positively Tantric capacity to delay orgasm (awkward, since she's got another guy waiting in another room at the hotel). Her digital derriere technique to accelerate his process is as clever as MacGyver's emergency improvisations. I loved it when Belle sicced an Al Gore bore on her date, also a Gore bore, so they could talk eco-apocalypse while she snuck off with the guy at the orgy she really wanted to shag, a famous writer. You have to grant that Belle's got good taste: she reads Philip Roth's The Human Stain (having been responsible for countless stains herself).

Alas, Belle has no stain on her soul, and hence she's not human. I'm not offended by her breezy denial that she had any childhood abuse, adolescent trauma, or drug problems -- that she simply loves money and sex. I don't believe that many actual prostitutes echo her sentiment ("I get paid to do the things I've always wanted to"), but I'm not offended.

I'm just fighting off yawns, because I can't see that she has any motives at all, and her adventures are narratively inert. If she had a character, it would have no arc (at least not in the early episodes). The infinitely less explicit sex scenes in, say, Mad Men are sexier, because they connect characters, and they're connected to an ongoing drama. Belle's show is static. Each moment sits by itself, preening, winking, inviting you to adore it. Perhaps I'm not shallow enough, but I can't.

The real porn achievement on Secret Diary is the voluptuous depiction of London, all bedizened in nighttime lights. The lustrous thrust of the Millennium Bridge! Domes looming like great copper bras! Rows of reflected red lights glowing on the water like the aroused nipples of a she-wolf!

Samuel Johnson said if you're tired of London, you're tired of life. After three episodes, I'm tired of Belle's life.

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