Blame it on Showtime’s delay in getting “Californication,” its raunchy hit from last summer, back on screen as soon as possible for a second season. To plug the gap, and provide a second place-setting alongside the return of “Weeds,” HBO’s rival has imported an eight-part British show with the super-subtle title “Secret Diary of a Call Girl.” Wonder what that’s about.

Billie Piper, the 25-year-old pop star (she’s charted three no. 1 singles in Britain) and actress (“The Canterbury Tales,” “Doctor Who”), plays Hannah, the pert call girl in question — though when conducting business she travels under the name “Belle.” (The series is based on a memoir, “The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl,” by Belle de Jour.) Each episode (the first airs Monday at 10:30 p.m.) is 30 minutes long, neat as a pin, and about as sexy. Lucy Prebble, the series’ creator and writer of several episodes, is a playwright with a résumé that looks impressive (National Theatre, Royal Court Theatre), and she loads her heroine’s voice-over narration, usually delivered directly to the camera, with a multitude of informational nuggets from the high-class prostitution industry. Given the recent headlines generated by Client No. 9, also known as Eliot Spitzer, the topic is undoubtedly timely and not without interest.

Hannah’s opening words set the tone: “I love London. I love its rudeness, its impatience, I even love its weather. But most of all, I love its anonymity.” Then she says, “The first thing you should know about me is I’m a whore.” So much for “anonymity.”

But this brief opening monologue may also make New Yorkers wonder what happened to London that it sounds exactly like New York, and if it has happened, why not just set the show in New York? Weren’t we celestially preordained to have first dibs on rudeness, impatience, and maybe anonymity, too? What’s going on here? Could it all be part of the “strategic alliance” between the two cities that Mayor Bloomberg has proposed to his new conservative counterpart in London, Boris Johnson?

When it comes to the sex stuff, London will always be at a distinct cinematic and visual disadvantage to its brasher cousin across the Atlantic. London’s streets look too old and quaintly gracious in their proportions for this kind of cash-driven carnality, even if plenty of it is going on, when compared with the corporate wind tunnels of Manhattan. All those beautiful old buildings give off a visual buzz, to be sure, but it’s the wrong kind.

The same might be said of Hannah’s clients. Her first john (Tom Mannion) has muttonchop whiskers, looks like a farmer, and fantasizes about taking Hannah in a stable while they’re actually getting on with things on the starched sheets of the Marriott. The second, Daniel (Tom Mison), is young, good-looking, polite, articulate, intelligent, but in the one vital sense, a flop. He does make up for it during a second meeting, but then Hannah, who takes pride in her work, is a very determined young woman who does not like to fail. The man’s inability to be aroused is regarded as a technical problem, a puzzle to be solved and fixed. It turns out he likes his girls in jeans and no makeup and that nothing kills it for him like a dress.

In her non-call-girl life, Hannah covers her tracks by pretending to be a legal secretary for a huge multinational law firm — a job so boring no one ever asks for details. She has a close friend, Ben (Iddo Goldberg), but not so close she can tell him exactly what she does. Though she prides herself on leading an independent life, Hannah is actually at the mercy of her obnoxious agent, Stephanie (Cherie Lunghi), who sets up her appointments and takes a hefty cut of the profits. “You know, I would order something,” Hannah says in one of her wittier moments while meeting Stephanie at a restaurant, “but I’m afraid you’d take 40% of my food.”

Sex-positive Hannah is full of tips for anyone who might like to follow in her stiletto footsteps. When meeting a client at a hotel, for instance, she advises that it’s best to “be fabulous but forgettable,” a beautiful woman who somehow fails to catch the eye in the lobby but makes a client melt as soon as she reaches his door. On the job, she wears men’s deodorant and forgoes perfume (“a professional never lets a client leave smelling of a woman”), and she has at least one regular client for whom she provides a “girlfriend experience,” meaning they spend the night together and he gets to pretend the relationship is not completely ruled by money. But none of this is terribly new or interesting. Her clients seem like clients, and she seems like a call girl. Psychological insight and surprises are in dangerously short supply.

Each episode has its own discrete story line. In one, for instance, Hannah is escorted to a swank sex party (cell phones are confiscated at the door) by a creepy Russian with a weird beard who wants to watch men fawn over her all night without Hannah allowing them to touch her. Then he will take her back to his hotel room and show her what a real man is made of, you see. Fortunately, Hannah manages to give him the slip, but it’s not exactly “The Great Escape”: As drama it simply fizzles out.

“Secret Diary of a Call Girl” is all titillation and packaging. London may have more beautiful architecture, the 2012 Olympics, and a wittier mayor, but when it comes to television programs such as this, New York — or the American entertainment industry — is way ahead of its trans-Atlantic cousin. Showtime should have left its new call girl to ply her trade in her native habitat.

bbernhard@nysun.com