It was November 2001 when Katie Price made an appearance on The Frank Skinner Show. She was 23 years old and still going by the moniker “Jordan”, given to her by a photographer on an early Page 3 shoot in her teens. She’d spent three weeks earlier that year in the Playboy mansion and had run as an independent candidate in Stretford and Urmston in Greater Manchester, promising no parking tickets, free plastic surgery for all and tax cuts for people who slept with foreign footballers – “For a Bigger and Betta Future” was the campaign slogan. This was to be one of her first proper interviews. “The nice thing about having your own chat show is you can pack it with crumpet,” her host said, by way of introduction.
Skinner wasn’t expecting what was to come. Price, four months pregnant, in a skirt so short Skinner joked he could tell the sex of the baby, was a revelation. With her big, beautiful, open face, she was quick-witted, raw and completely unfiltered. On the baby: “It was a shock actually, because it come at the wrong time, but then nothing’s ever planned is it?” On footballer Dwight Yorke’s denial that he was the father: “All I can say is that if my sex toys produce sperm, that’s a miracle.” On whether he would be involved: “Well, he was spotted with another woman last week… But I’m an independent girl and if I have to bring it up on my own then I will.” She did.
She cackled describing her many surgeries and spoke with maturity and resignation about the public perception of her as a “freak of nature”, “thick”, “someone who puts it about all the time”, “goes to the opening of a fridge door”. Whether she used condoms, whether she could remain “the most fancied woman in Britain” once she had the baggage of a child, why she made men wait for sex so they respected her – “ha, I don’t know why I’m saying that because none of them seem to” – nothing was off limits. Really, nothing: “I’m always gagging for it.”
Watching it now, it is a staggering display of self-awareness and composure, out of the ordinary back then for a celebrity and rarer even now, as they swing between practised, relatable “authenticity” or detached, media-trained sterility. Price was neither – she was just honest. Skinner’s slightly sexist line of questioning gave way to real concern, as she told him, “At this moment I am the most unhappiest person ever, so I’m trying to be brave”.
It is 25 years, four husbands, five children and about 15 boob jobs later now. Price is 48, so physically transformed from her toes to her teeth that she is unrecognisable from even that surgically enhanced young woman, and her life has only grown more publicly, alarmingly, exhaustingly, messy. The latest saga – amplified by her favourite tools, the tabloids and social media – concerned her “missing” Dubai financier husband Lee Andrews (let’s not go there but it involves AI, CBD gummies and a hair transplant).
From her son Harvey and his additional needs to I’m a Celeb, her marriage to Peter Andre, bankruptcies, the “mucky mansion” and all those awful men, her ubiquity endures, even as the public’s patience has worn thin.
Katie Price at her first test photoshoot in July 1996 (Photo: Stephen Mark Perry/Getty)
Price, her chaotic life and her many traumas are the subject of a new four-part Sky documentary, Katie Price: Nothing to Hide, from Louis Theroux’s production company Mindhouse. It chronicles how a horse-obsessed child from Brighton who would sing to herself while riding along a bridleway ended up Britain’s top glamour model by the age of 17 and then became the most divisive British celebrity of the 21st century.
Price, along with her loved ones, ex-boyfriends including Gareth Gates and Dane Bowers, and even past plastic surgeons, examine her life: the child sex abuse, Page 3, body dysmorphia, her absent father, the kidnap threats, motherhood, mental illness, disability advocacy, PTSD, rape, addiction… It is an account of survival, as much as anything else.
Or would be, if Price saw herself as a victim. But she doesn’t – which is precisely what has made her so uniquely endearing all these years. Price’s bracing frankness and refusal to indulge in self-pity takes you aback. Why did she overdose after a breakup? “Attention. It was a revenge thing.” Why does she seek the validation of men? “I look for from men what was missing from my real dad, the hugs, a man’s love and cuddles.” Why did she pose topless with her infant son, even though her mother didn’t want her to? “I’ve monetised my life since I was 17, everything I do is monetised, so why would it change just cos I’ve had Harvey?”
Is it shocking? Revealing? There’s not much we don’t already know about Price and her life story – I get a celebrity newsletter every day at 5pm that almost always delivers some gruesome update on her fresh turmoil. But the more you watch, the more you are forced to consider why she matters.
There is an awful lot I object to when it comes to Katie Price. Page 3, for a start, and all that objectification. The modification of her body to the point of disfigurement and self-injury. The overexposure she has courted – and especially the decision to put her children on reality TV (which, judging by her daughter Princess’s own misguided ITV reality show last year, has left them with considerable insecurities and neuroses).
Her many missteps are interrogated in the documentary, most unedifying among them her decision to sell the story about taking a teenage Gareth Gates’s virginity to a newspaper. I wish, for her own health and so her story does not end in tragedy, she would take a break from public life and achieve some peace. I fear for her – in the documentary she displays the same childlike fragility Skinner observed, still sees herself as “ugly, ugly, ugly”, and still just wants to be loved.
But I also can’t find her anything except likeable, and admire her ability to be honest and unembarrassed about what everyone else keeps hidden. Price has always come across sharp, funny, endearing and strikingly articulate (an awful word, only really used about a woman you expect to be unintelligent and who proves herself not to be) when explaining herself. Which is most times she opens her mouth, given how often she is on trial. She is vulnerable, she is resilient, she is needy, she is foolish – she knows it, and cannot conceal it.
Katie Price and Peter Andre in 2005 (Photo: Ferdaus Shamim/WireImage)
Many people hate Katie Price. They find her crass and mercenary and even, in images or in her unusual openness, indecent. They say she brought it on herself, which in some cases is true. But the pattern of her life and its struggles is of a woman who has been desperate to wrest control in a world that never granted it to her.
Her innocence was taken when she was assaulted in a park aged seven, her career as a model driven by her need to feel power over men and to weaponise the male gaze for her own gain. Her body and her image became something she could dictate (she did encourage a vote from Sun readers on whether she should get her first boob job, and did it anyway when they voted no).
As a young, single mother with a disabled child, she used the resources available to her to make her career and finances work. As a victim of the tabloids at their most toxic in the 2000s, and in the 2010s as social media marked an evolution in the nature of fame, she tried to maintain control over her image again – by courting the paparazzi and the press and selling stories and photos herself (now, she uses OnlyFans).
Using reality TV, she has tried to reinvent herself, or seize the narratives already circulating. It has not always been pretty, or wise, or even responsible. But over and over again, she is trying to take control. In an attention economy, she is always seeking ways to get power over dangerous forces, before someone else profits off her or harms her first.
Price’s disregard for respectability has made her confronting in Britain, a country that once liked to imagine it was above the kind of seedy, fame-hungry brazenness she displays. But she cuts through that pretence and calls it as it is, whether that means taking all her clothes off for men or being unsettlingly forthright about the ugliness and hardships of life that everyone else has too much fear or shame to admit.
She has never changed. As a scared, single, pregnant 23-year-old on a chat show – “the unhappiest person ever” – and a hardened veteran 48-year-old survivor, she says the same thing most people don’t dare to: that all she ever wanted was to be loved.
‘Katie Price: Nothing to Hide’ is on NOW on 8 July and Sky Docs at 9pm that night