I Hate Suzie review: Billie Piper's back - and she's got bite

Piper gives a raw, soul-baring performance in her latest collaboration with friend Lucy Prebble ★★★★✩

Wearing a bloodstained fur coat and earrings as big as her head, in the first episode of I Hate Suzie, Billie Piper delivers a speech on a par with the “Choose Life” monologue in Trainspotting.

But instead of being a list of choices, her character Suzie Pickles launches into a tightly wound tirade about what she doesn’t want.

She’s reached a point in her life where she feels trapped by all her previous decisions. Her phrasing is punchy (as you’d expect from I Hate Suzie’s creator, playwright and Succession writer Lucy Prebble) and Piper’s blunt delivery is darkly comic, capturing the mood of this high-octane new drama. The chocolate-box village she’s moved to is the focus of her ire; she hates the clear night sky, she misses smog, rising crime and Pizza Express and she hates how her neighbours leave their doors unlocked.

Pickles was a child star with a glorious singing voice who is now an actress (just like Piper). Now in her thirties, she’s just been offered her dream role in a Disney film — confounding her husband who thought she was too old to play a princess and is worried about her being away from their son, who is deaf, while filming — but there the fairytale stops. Just after she opens the celebratory breakfast champagne, her phone is hacked and compromising photographs of her spread around the internet. From then on, her life is in freefall.

Billie Piper - In pictures

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I Hate Suzie is inspired by the 2014 “Celebgate” iCloud hack, which hit Jennifer Lawrence and many others. Prebble and Piper, who created the show together, wanted to know the personal cost and what happened after the media lost interest in the story. The eight episodes are named after the stages of Pickles’s reaction, from “shock” to “acceptance”.

Piper and Prebble have been friends since they worked together on the ITV series Secret Diary of a Call Girl in 2007. The writer has described Piper as her muse and the feeling is mutual — this raw, soul-bearing performance suggests she is at ease working with Prebble.

Pickles might sound unrelatable — a child star now leading a privileged life — but as she did with Succession, Prebble has created an engrossing world. Using the hack as a starting point, it comments on motherhood, marriage, friendship, careers and our relationships with our phones.

Prebble has described Piper, pictured, as her muse (Sky Atlantic / Des Willie)
Sky Atlantic

There’s a particularly resonant scene for anyone who spends hours scrolling on a screen, where Pickles has flounced out of the house in a rage only to realise she has forgotten her phone. Desperation is writ large on Piper’s tearful face as she gestures up to the window, asking for her son to throw down the device, only for it to be out of battery.

Piper’s fiery performance is offset by the gnomic Daniel Ings, who plays her understated but quietly resentful husband, while Leila Farzad (Mummy Cat in Peppa Pig) is another excellent foil for Piper’s drama, in the role of her long-suffering manager. There’s a lot of chain-smoking to deal with stress, which feels enjoyably transgressive. What we’re more used to seeing is women on the toilet, and like the main characters in I May Destroy You and Fleabag, Pickles has a lavatory moment — it seems obligatory for shows about modern women.

Gratuitous loo scenes aside, I Hate Suzie feels fresh and pacy with plenty of dry wit. My only objection is, why would you hate someone called Suzie?

All episodes available on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV from today

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