James Walton

A convincing and hair-raising depiction of showbiz at its most luridly weird: I Hate Suzie reviewed

Plus: a documentary about Carl Beech will leave future generations bewildered by how unhinged British society must once have been

Billie Piper as Suzie Pickles in I Hate Suzie. Credit: Ollie Upton/Sky 
issue 29 August 2020

Fifteen minutes into the first episode of I Hate Suzie, main character Suzie Pickles was doing a photoshoot in her country cottage for Esquire magazine. ‘We don’t know what we’re looking for right now,’ the photographer told her. ‘We’re just going to cycle through some feelings and see where we are.’ What he didn’t know, but we did, was quite how many feelings Suzie (Billie Piper) had already had to cycle through by then.

The programme began with her thrilled to hear that she’d bagged a Disney film role and cracking open the champagne. A few minutes later, she learned that some sex photos of her had been hacked and were about to be posted online (at which point the appearance of her son’s rabbit in her eyeline symbolically confirmed that a rabbit hole awaited). It was then that the Esquire team arrived in a blizzard of media jargon to take her furniture into the garden and replace it with something more suitable for their impenetrably expressed needs.

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