Bully's Book Club: Growing Pains by Billie Piper

Ghost-written celebrity biographies! Where would we, and the publishing industry, be without 'em? Nowhere, that's where! They're not high art, but boy golly, they're as addictive as peanuts covered in peanut butter inside a larger peanut shell. Without them, where would the remainder tables of tomorrow be? But I kid the ghost-written celebrity biography. If you can suspend your disbelief over Joan Collins or Millie the Dog type-type-typing away, some of them are actually pretty entertaining. But hey, those books are for celebrities with long careers measured in dozens of dog-years. And Millie was pretty old too. (Haw!) What the heck could an autobiography by a twenty-four year old tell us?

Well, aside from the promise that maybe someday she'll be able to write another book covering years twenty-five through thirty-two, Billie Piper's Growing Pains is actually pretty entertaining. There's no great revelations here: being a teen pop star is a real rush! Going on crash diets is pretty stupid! David Tennant is dead sexy! But like Planet Earth, you can whip through this in a couple hours, set it aside or send it to the vicar's jumble sale and declare it "mostly harmless." If you're looking for an in-depth and extensive history of Billie's couple years on Doctor Who, well, you'll get a little short-shrifted: her Who career is the last quick forty pages of the book and offers no extraordinary surprises (well, maybe her bawdy pet nickname for David Tennant may cause a quick blush). The bulk of the book covers her early years, singing career and brief but dangerous decline into the fast world of drugs and drinking relatively young. Billie's guileless naiveté aside, I actually enjoyed these sections quite a bit, especially the inside story of her being groomed in the immediate post-Spice Girls world as a pop princess alongside young stars B*Witched, Take That and the ultimate gold ring: Britney Spears's popularity. I enjoy BritPop music, even the relatively fluffy and disposable bubblegum like Billie's, and it's a fairly interesting inside look at how she was shaped and guided into her career, only able to rebel and shape her own life in her late teens. I'm a big fan of the concept of "NuBritain" that rose with Tony Blair and was best exemplified by the Spice Girls (seriously, is there a more fun movie about five girls racing to their big gig in a double-decker bus than Spice World? No, there is not.) and Billie Piper was right at the middle of NuBritain. In other words: Growing Pains is no The Last Lion, but it's as fun and fast-paced an inside look at Cool Britannia as we're likely to get. At least until Rachel from S Club 7 writes commissions her autobio.

I'm a big fan of Billie Piper, and not simply for her stellar work on Doctor Who. Months before I first saw the premier of the Ninth Doctor on BBC America, that Anglophile network was running an entertaining series of updated Shakespeare plays; Billie played Hero, a role smaller than the pivotal Benedick and Beatrice roles but still absolutely vital to have a sunny and sweet actress who can also convincingly pull off an agonizingly despairing betrayal scene. She impressed me immensely, and it was only later that I put the actress and the cheerful pop singer of "Honey to the B" on my iPod together as one and the same. But really, the reason we all noticed her—and the reason she's popular enough to warrant a book contract—is the role of Rose Tyler on Doctor Who. I loved the new Who from the first night I saw it, with its quirky, action-edged Doctor, fantastic twenty-first century special effects, eloquent and entertaining dialogue, a solid script by Russell Davies that modernized the Doctor's adventures but not at the expense of its long rich legacy, and the wonderful London-centric setting. And I liked Rose Tyler, the Doctor's new companion, a lot. But it wasn't until the series's second episode where Billie Piper pulled off two scenes that, handled slightly heavier or lighter, could have been maudlin or overdone: a young girl in her late teens, looking out across space at her home planet thirty minutes before its destruction, very much missing her mom billions of years in the past, and an inquisitive and friendly girl making friends with a space station worker who's used to people ignoring her. Solid scripts, great direction, clever special effects and fantastic thrills will keep you coming back to Doctor Who week after week, but it's Billie Piper as Rose Tyler that brings heart and soul to the adventures of a 900-year-old Time Lord. No disrespect meant to the amazing Companions of the past like Sarah Jane, Tegan, Ace, Romana, and Leela, but Rose's close relationship to the Doctor is a wonder to watch: teasing, challenging, blossoming into love, at the same time she brings a depth to her layered relationships with her mother, her boyfriend, and even her dead father. I've not yet seen any episodes of the third series of Who and I'm very much looking forward to Freema Agyeman, but Billie Piper will always hold a special place in my little stuffed heart.

This is no grand high literature, folks. Billie whips through sections of her life so quickly that at times you'll be flipping back a few pages scratching your head and wondering "She's on drugs? When did that start?" There's a little too much of the rah-rah "true love will save you" sentimentality and it's somewhat shoddily and spottedly edited and proofread ("Christopher Ecclestone"?), but hey, in the end Growing Pains delivers pretty much what you want from a celebrity autobio: a breezy, fast read, a light-hearted, frothy style and an enthusiastically optimistic show business success story. You can buy it from the Amazon.com link on the right, but once again you may wind up saving a wee bit of time and money by going direct to Billie's home country and ordering it from Amazon.co.uk. It'll run you about twenty-five bucks plus five to seven dollars postage...much, much less if you can find an Amazon.co.uk Marketplace seller who's selling off their used copy. (While you're on Amazon, you could do worse than to pick up this CD too!) One person who doesn't need to order this book is Eric Gjovaag, whom I promised to lend my copy. The book's in the mail, Eric...enjoy! The rest of you...what're you waitin' for? Go put some pounds in Piper's pocket!