Dr. Who has been on my to-do list for a long time, so I started with the 2005 revival this weekend. And while I'll have lots more to say about the show once I'm further into it, I have to say it makes me feel very justified in liking Billie Piper. I first got introduced to her during a New Years in the UK, where "Something Deep Inside," along with "Rock DJ" (warning, if you haven't seen the video, the end may not be for the extremely squeamish) and "Lady, Hear Me Tonight" were in near-constant rotation.
I actually like her more as she looks in the 2005 Dr. Who episodes than she does in the "Something Deep Inside" video, where she's intensely blonde, and tanned, and almost too skinny. She's a real girl in Dr. Who, she wears jeans and cotton, she's got some really nice curves--it actually feels gratifying when she spits at the last pure human, who lives in hyper-altered state as a sheet of skin and is played by the same actress who plays Madam Hooch in the Harry Potter movies, "I'd rather die than live like you, a bitchy trampoline....You're just skin, Cassandra, lipstick and skin."She's not some stick who looks hypocritical saying it, but she doesn't have to be making some statement in praise of ugliness, either.
And there's a winsomeness to her performance, the wishes of a girl who didn't hope for something more than to work in a store and who lives with her hilariously scrounging mother (who tries, and fails, to seduce the Doctor the moment he walks through the door), and who runs after adventure not the first, but the second, time it's offered to her. There's no shame in her former state, in her dismay at some of the places she ends up in. She doesn't have to be a chav, or a redneck, she can be unsophisticated without being an object of derision. I'd be curious to see how she plays as someone with complicated morals and manners in The Secret Diary of a Call Girl.