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.
She is such rich, knotty subject matter that I’m convinced that if you’re not interested in the trials and victories of Katie Price (her latest multi-episode story arc: her probably dodgy, occasionally missing husband Lee Andrews), you’re probably not very interested in people. Sky’s Katie Price: Nothing to Hide fully leans into this – it positions her as the successor to Princess Diana in the tabloid media landscape of the late Nineties, parachuted in to provide a litany of fresh content in the wake of Diana’s death. Her Charles being, of course, Peter Andre, their union on the fourth series of I’m a Celebrity in 2004 re-shaping her image from Page 3 provocateur to strong-willed, working-class, bad girl done good, and rescuing his image from one-hit-wonder oblivion. Then it all went a bit wrong. Years of Katie/Peter ubiquity led to a divorce, Andre winning the nation’s hearts in the court of public opinion. Then Price leapt into further doomed marriages, from the cross-dressing prize fighter Alex Reid to the plasterer and stripper Kieran Hayler. There was more plastic surgery, more mental illness, more more.
The documentary digs into all of this, and also provides a showcase for Price in all her stripes: how naturally funny she is, how comparatively normal her family is, how easily she glides between healthy emotional clarity and violent self-destruction. I keep thinking of a candid photo shown in its first episode, of Price at the start of her Page 3 career, splayed out, naked and cooking on a lounge chair on holiday, and reading a book about Fred and Rose West. Somehow it’s the finest distillation of her – a guileless portrait of humour, exhibitionism and abject darkness. And, like Price herself, so very, very British.
“Katie’s great strength is being a storyteller,” the documentary’s director Paddy Wivell tells me. “She packages stuff so playfully. She’s got such an ear for controversy – a little line here, a line that can land. She instinctively understands what sells. At the same time, she doesn’t feel inauthentic.”
But despite how long Price has been around, and how significantly she’s folded into the story of British pop culture over the last 25 plus years, she remains a figure of deep contention. She is widely loathed across social media, the subject of endless, voraciously mean threads on X and the cruel gossip forum Tattle Life, while the comment sections of her Instagram tend to be a 80/20 split of trolls to supporters. Critics of the new documentary have also complained that she’s just not novel territory anymore – that her story has been explored so often, and often by Price herself in her various autobiographies and tell-alls, that there’s quite literally nothing left to say. A colleague wondered – based upon Price’s struggles with her mental health in the past decade, up to and including a suicide attempt – whether she should even be platformed at all.
She can handle bad press or public opprobrium. Where her vulnerabilities lie are in her relationships with men and her relationship to her own self-esteem and self-image
Paddy Wivell, ‘Nothing to Hide’ director
If anything, all of this context makes me admire Price more – there’s a remarkable clear-sightedness to her in Wivell’s documentary, as if she has total understanding of where she’s gone wrong, where she’s gone right, and who she has hurt along the way. She knows she’s a mess in relationships, is drawn to bad men, and is severely damaged by the traumas she experienced as a young girl, from the early vanishing of her birth father, to a sexual assault by a stranger when she was seven, to an abusive relationship with a man 10 years her senior that began when she was just 15. It was, unsurprisingly, just her first.
She delivers these stories coldly and matter-of-factly, an effect enhanced by the augmented severity of her face. Unlike the numerous woe-is-me documentary parables from old tabloid favourites that we’re regularly inundated with today, Nothing to Hide also doesn’t attempt to paint Price as a victim of press intrusion or general News of the World-era cruelty. She gladly partook in it all – selling stories on her flings with footballer Teddy Sheringham and the Pop Idol winner Gareth Gates, opening up every facet of her love life to ITV and OK! Magazine, striking deals with favoured paparazzi photographers to split the fees for pictures.
“There’s a whole narrative you could go down as a slightly finger-wagging thing,” Wivell explains. “But it doesn’t really stand up with her, because she was in cahoots with the press! She conspired with them to create this thing.” The experiences that have truly harmed Price, then, are real. “She can handle bad press or public opprobrium,” Wivell continues. “She’s got a rhino hide. Where her vulnerabilities lie are in her relationships with men and her relationship to her own self-esteem and self-image. She’s very vulnerable around that stuff, but not at all vulnerable around things that maybe you and I would find impossible to deal with.”
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I understand why this gets people’s backs up. Price doesn’t make it easy to root for her – she’s unapologetically abrasive, often crude and vulgar, and seems incapable of learning from her own mistakes. It drives her family mad, as evidenced in Wivell’s documentary, and also makes her incredibly frustrating as a public figure. You wonder if she’d be more readily considered a national treasure if she let down her defences a little, or – if we wanted to be really cynical about the state of things now – she let herself cry on camera. But that also wouldn’t be true, and for as much as Price has been the architect of her own celebrity persona over the years, she’s never stopped being truthful about herself. Even if it gets her into worse trouble.
“What I love about her is that she will not be controlled,” Wivell says. “Despite all of these vulnerabilities that she has, she’s got this punk spirit that’s massively liberating. She will do exactly as she pleases, and there’s something quite pure about that, isn’t there?”
‘Katie Price: Nothing to Hide’ is on Sky and Now
