There’s a certain inevitability to Princess Andre starring in her own reality TV show. After all, we are talking about the daughter of Katie Price and Peter Andre, who were once the first couple of ITV2. Her parents met and fell in love in front of the nation on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. Her mum’s pregnancy was documented in Katie & Peter: The Next Chapter in 2007. Then the first six weeks of her life were broadcast in Katie & Peter: The Baby Diaries; over the next two years, she’d appear in her parents’ shows as a tiny supporting character, until their split in 2009.
At this point, then, reality TV is practically the family business. And so ITV have commissioned a four-part series, The Princess Diaries, following Princess (who was 17 at the time of recording) as she leans into her fledgling career as an influencer, planning a beauty brand, appearing in a catwalk show in Ibiza… and trying to finally pass her driving test. “I’m here to show you guys that I am my own person and following my own path,” she declares to the camera in the first episode, her blue eyes wide and earnest.
Princess, who turned 18 in June, is definitely her own person. Some viewers will undoubtedly tune in with schadenfreude on their minds, assuming that the show will confirm their suspicions that the eldest daughter of two UK tabloid fixtures will be, well, an absolute nightmare. They’ll be left disappointed: the teen comes across as very sweet and improbably well-adjusted, funny and self-possessed, with a solid relationship with both of her parents. It’s Andre and his second wife Emily MacDonagh who get the most airtime here, which is hardly a surprise given that Princess is represented by the singer-slash-presenter’s management team – this skewing has already prompted plenty of tabloid stories about “family feuds”. Price, meanwhile, crops up in voice notes and phone calls.
Yet Princess is also the product of her own unique, extraordinarily tumultuous upbringing. And that’s where this show gets weird. The Princess Diaries follows the glossy template set by influencer-centric documentaries such as Prime Video’s Molly-Mae: Behind It All. There are meetings with managers, soundbites about wanting to “become a successful businesswoman” and a handful of low-key, manufactured dramas (Princess’ fake nails ping off moments before she has to hit the red carpet! Her dad’s not happy about the grown-up dress she’s wearing for the fashion show!). It’s a familiar mix of the aspirational and the relatable – for the most part.
About 10 per cent of the show, though, is occupied by more troubling subject matter. Whenever Princess looks back on her earlier childhood, there’s a marked tonal shift, and it’s handled in such a way as to give you whiplash. One moment, she is going out for a test drive with her dad or filming a TikTok challenge with her older brother, Junior (she also has three younger siblings on her dad’s side, and another three – two younger, one older – on her mum’s). The next, she is reflecting on growing up part-time in the house the tabloids have dubbed “the Mucky Mansion”, Price’s home in West Sussex where, it seems, Princess and her brother had to contend with their mum’s turbulent personal life: Price’s split from third husband, Kieran Hayler, after he had an affair with her close friend, her struggles with drugs and alcohol abuse, and her well-documented financial problems. “I was around adult-y things that kids shouldn’t see,” Princess says in one to-camera interview, with poignant understatement, before admitting that, at the peak of one particular tabloid drama, she would end up “coming home from school and would go to bed and cry”. In a recent Guardian interview, Princess described the mansion as “a really scary house”: “I guess when you have bad experiences somewhere, you don’t like the place,” she explained, with a sad economy.
It’s a pretty heartbreaking first-hand account of exactly what it’s like to grow up under the glare of a particular kind of tabloid spotlight, where you aren’t cushioned by the greater respect that’s seemingly afforded to, say, Hollywood actors and their children. In another sad anecdote, her brother recounts what it was like to have the paparazzi follow Price’s car as she dropped them off at school, with photographers apparently camping out overnight to get a decent shot. Yet these moments that seem to start asking tricky questions about the ethics of placing kids in the media glare are truncated before they ever really get going – often by footage of, say, Peter Andre making dad jokes. Or a dog slobbering on her denim Louis Vuitton sliders. It’s a frustrating viewing experience.
One sequence that encapsulates the show’s odd stance on difficult memories appears in episode two. Princess sits down with Junior, who has accompanied her on her work trip to Ibiza, to talk about the South Africa carjacking incident that they were both caught up in as children, when Price’s vehicle was attacked and she was raped at gunpoint (the model has since said that she developed PTSD and suffered with severe depression afterwards). “I just feel so numb to it,” Princess says, alluding to the fact that she’s barely begun to grapple with the implications of such horror. But these conversations are interspersed with shots of the siblings enjoying a jolly horse riding session on the party island.
You can understand why Princess, the daughter of consummate over-sharer Price, might hesitate to speak about such difficult topics; she’s had a front row seat as her parents’ war of words played out in headlines. Plus, she’s barely an adult, and doesn’t owe us her trauma. I’m not advocating for a show filled with gratuitous misery; it’s at its best when we see sweet moments between Princess and Junior, who clearly have a watertight sibling bond, and hear the aspiring influencer chat warmly about her older brother, Harvey, who has the rare genetic condition Prader-Willi syndrome.
But you can’t help but feel as if this shiny, softball documentary is entirely the wrong medium for a story like Princess’s. And, most striking of all, it never attempts to probe exactly why, for all her painful experiences, this young woman still wants a career in the public eye at all. It might be all she knows, but watching this series, you might wonder if that’s a good enough reason.
