Piper’s drama is a dizzying helter-skelter of creativity
IHate Suzie (Sky Atlantic) isn’t about Billie Piper. Yet, inescapably, it is. The former Doctor Who star’s world has never been imploded by the illegal leak of shockingly intimate photographs, as happens to the protagonist Suzie Pickles in this blistering comedy-drama, but Piper and Suzie both found fame as teenage pop stars, before starring in a huge sci-fi franchise, finding respectability in theatre, and then mid-level celebobscurity thereafter. Piper doesn’t know what it is like to have images of her performing sex acts disseminated into the public sphere, but she does know what it is like to be hounded by the press, to have her appearance, actions and love life dissected. She knows what it is to be public property, with little control over her own story.
Perhaps Suzie’s tragedy (and I Hate Suzie is a tragedy, farce and psychological helter-skelter rolled into one) is that, unlike Piper, she never met the talented writer Lucy Prebble while filming Secret Diary of a Call Girl in 2007. Piper and Prebble (Enron, Succession) have been close friends ever since and I Hate Suzie is a project carved out of years of shared anxieties, frustrations and love. The series began with a double-bill last night, but is available on demand as a box set.
We meet Suzie aged 15, wowing the judges on an X-factor-esque singing contest – “That’s the last time anyone is going ask you your name, Suzie,” says a judge, ominously foreshadowing the moment when, 20 years on, Suzie’s name is everywhere and it is mud. The modern-day Suzie lives in bucolic B-list luxury in the shires with her handsome husband, Cob (Daniel Ings), and adorable son, Frank (Matthew Jordan-caws), scooping up eggs for breakfast from her henhouse and trilling good morning to the neighbours when she learns that, against the odds, she has, aged 36, landed the role of a Disney princess. “I thought it was all villains from here on in,” she says. It’s the last time we see her truly happy.
Each episode is named after a point on the grief cycle – Denial, Bargaining, Anger – with episode one, Shock, unfolding like a living nightmare as Suzie discovers the news moments before the obnoxious crew of an enormous magazine photo shoot pours through her door (if you work in the media or the arts, you may wish to watch from behind the sofa – Piper and Prebble are settling scores). By the end of the first episode, Suzie is staggering down her rural high street, mascara running down her face, wearing a bloodstained Cruella de Vil fur coat and high heels, taking aim at everything around her – “I hate the church, I hate the pub… I hate the way people always leave their doors unlocked, it’s not normal” – before launching into song. The series delights in these tonal shifts – episode three, Fear, is shot like a horror film.
Some of the formal inventiveness is dazzling. Episode four (Shame) is the one that will get tongues wagging, thanks to its salacious content, but it is an incredible 45 minutes of television. Prudes, look away now – the entire episode is framed around Pickles attempting to fix her marriage by pleasuring herself while thinking of her husband. Her fantasies are – quite literally – invaded and trampled on by intrusive thoughts, unwanted old flames and tut-tutting friends, and Suzie must somehow reconfigure her desires and impulses to get her relationship back on track.
There are moments that revel in dark, dirty comedy, but this is more akin to Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) than Carry On. It’s as if Christopher Nolan had dedicated a film to the act of onanism. Like I May Destroy You before it, I Hate Suzie is a glorious mess of ideas, a potent, fizzing, hell-raising monument to the creativity of its makers.
Piper will steal the plaudits, and she is magnificent, the camera hugging her face, making it alternately beautiful and grotesque, as we live inside her unravelling mind. However, it is far from a one-woman show, with Ings superb as the scowling, wronged, feckless Cob and Leila Farzad stealing scenes as Suzie’s long-suffering manager. Prebble’s script is typically sharp, occasionally reaching Succession-like heights of jet-black satire, though most of the best quotes are unprintable in a family newspaper.
I Hate Suzie isn’t about Billie Piper (though it sort of is). In fact, as ever with Prebble, it’s about narrative
– who has control of it, how we can and can’t shape it in our own lives, how women in the public eye are the last to have any say over it. It is also a series of love letters between Piper and Prebble. Let’s hope they remain friends.
I Hate Suzie ★★★★★