I love Katie Price. I think she’s funny and fascinating and incredibly smart and makes really bloody stupid decisions, like all the best celebrities. As I watched a new four-part documentary series about her, I spoke with a friend about when she first entered our shared consciousness. Neither of us had an answer: she was always just there, a soap opera with one cast member, whose scandals, sagas, and tumultuous marriages had orbited our lives without beginning or end.
Price’s story is driven by its contradictions. She is both a machiavellian genius and a fragile ex-addict; a heroic template for self-actualisation and a victim of deep-set body dysmorphia and self-loathing; a publicity-hungry former kiss-and-tell girl and a woman deeply traumatised by a litany of terrible men. She is an unquestionably devoted mother to her 24-year-old son Harvey, who was born with blindness and severe disabilities and whose father, the footballer Dwight Yorke, has pointedly not been involved in his life. Her relationship with her other children is more complicated. Junior, 21, and Princess, 19, who she had with Peter Andre, appear in the new documentary in tears, traumatised by witnessing the worst of their mum’s cocaine use and associated psychological breakdown.
