ITV Loose Women star Katie Piper appeared on James Martin’s ITV show on Saturday morning where she spoke about her ‘life-changing’ career move
12:47, 28 Feb 2026Updated 12:48, 28 Feb 2026
Katie Piper on Loose Women with Kaye Adams, Myleene Klass and Nadia Sawalha (Image: Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock)
A Loose Women star has shared details of a TV project which she has called “life-changing”. It comes after the ITV daytime show underwent cutbacks as part of the channel’s rejig, including remoiving the live audience and fewer guests.
On February 28, Katie Piper was among the guests on James Martin‘s Saturday Morning when she spoke about her TV show, Katie Piper’s Jailhouse Mums, which is available to watch on Channel 4 and U.
Host James – who also welcomed ITV Racing’s Megan Nicholls alongside chefs Michael Caines and Lorna McNee – asked Katie about the project which sees her travelling across America visiting prisons with very different approaches to pregnancy and motherhood behind bars – a job she has now described as “life-changing”.
She said: “It’s such an interesting subject and it isn’t what you think on the face of it. I started volunteering in UK prisons, in women’s prisons, and it led me to go out and make a series out in the US. Last year I spent a month out in Louisiana and New Orleans working with women in a maximum security prison.
“I suppose we are looking at the topic of what happens when a woman turns violent and actually how does society view that in comparison to how we punish and view men who turn violent. So there are a lot of different layers to the project.”
Katie alongside Megan Nicholls on James Martin’s Saturday Morning(Image: ITV)
Turning to the team, she said: “I’m sure you’re all the same, that you have different projects, things that you work on, and some things will stay with you for the rest of your life and it was quite life-changing.”
James asked Katie what she had learned from the experience and she replied: “I think sometimes you can meet people and think you’re so far away from their life but actually we are all one decision or one bad day away from something quite life-changing happening to us.
“I really related to a lot of the women, a lot of them were mothers and I had a lot in common with them and obviously the justice system in the US is very different to the UK so women out there are facing like 100 years behind bars which can feel quite hopeless.”
James was keen to learn more about Katie’s prison project(Image: ITV)
She added: “I think people when they hear the word ‘prison’ assume they would never have any empathy for the people that are in prison and, of course, there are a section of the prison population that should be there and they perhaps can’t be rehabilitated but there’s also a large section of people with the right support and right help can be rehabilitated.”
Katie’s appearance comes a month after ITV introduced its big changes to daytime programming which has seen Good Morning Britain extended by 30 minutes to run from 6am to 9.30am daily, while Lorraine is reduced to 30 minutes from an hour. Both Lorraine and Loose Women now run for 30 weeks of the year.
Loose Women is on ITV1 weekdays at 12.30pm and James Martin’s Saturday Morning is on ITV1 on Saturdays at 9.30am
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