‘Boobs,” says Katie Price, expressionlessly. “I always wanted a boob job. Always wanted them bigger.” Price, 48, places her tiny, tanned hands on the mountainous upper region of her pastel pink sweatshirt, under which lurk the latest results of this glandular restlessness. “I never wanted natural. I wanted stuck-on,” she says. “I wanted fake.” And so it came to pass. Now, 17 or so operations later, here she is, fidgeting on a beige sofa as she discusses the surgeries (“the pain!”), the insatiable ambition, the breakdowns, the flammable thongs, the still-bewildered ex-husbands and all the other stuff that has helped turn her into one of Britain’s longest-running soap operas; every bit of self-generated drama catapulting us, speechless, into the next instalment.
The new four-part series Katie Price: Nothing to Hide (Wednesday, 9pm, Sky Documentaries) promises several cliffhangers of its own. Here, it bugles, is a “revealing portrait” that will “go beyond the headlines”. Oh God, we think, as Price’s eyebrows disappear behind yet another nimbus of synthetic fog (the woman vapes like a furnace). Not again. We have read the unreadable memoirs, endured myriad “tell-all” documentaries and suffered any number of hand-wringing tabloid “exclusives”. Could there really be anything left to know about the woman who has, we are told, “sold every aspect of her life”? The answer is yes, actually, and it is, remarkably, as fascinating and exhausting as its subject.
Produced by Louis Theroux’s Mindhouse, the first part of Katie Price: Nothing to Hide (the only episode available to preview, alas) is a sensitive and rigorous account of the former glamour model’s first 23 or so years. Contributors include long-suffering mum Amy, sweet-natured stepdad Paul and eminently sensible brother Dan (“Fucking hell”). There is much puffing out of cheeks and the air is overwhelmingly one of exasperated if tender resignation, as if they’d all spent the morning trapped with a grizzling toddler in a face-painting tent because they’d ignored the weather forecast. Our fault, really. Should have seen it coming. It is what it is. “I feel somewhere inside her there’s a sweet little girl,” sighs Amy. “I wish she’d come out every now and again.”
Price, naturally, welcomes all of this. It is, after all, attention, and attention is her lifeblood, her raison d’être, her bread and butter.
“I know I’ve hurt people deeply,” she shouts through teeth the colour of golf balls. “But this is the thing with me. I am what I am.” She seems both startlingly aware of her flaws and utterly incapable of doing anything about them. Cue endless footage of Price as a gently shimmering agent of chaos, crashing through the last three decades of popular culture like a bronzed Mr Blobby.
Here she is on a furious horse to promote her eighth novel. Here she is with a parade of near-mute men, each with an astonishingly bulbous chest, as if someone (Price, probably) had squeezed their legs like tubes of toothpaste and all the meat had been forced up towards their pectorals. Of said hunks, only Dane “At the time I was known as a bit of a boob man” Bowers elicits more than a blank stare (“He was the love of my life!”).
The hubris is, at times, absolutely extraordinary: look on my norks, ye Mighty, and despair! And yet the directness with which Price addresses everything from Page 3 to her lifelong neediness (“I look for in men what was missing from my real dad. Which is a man’s love and cuddles”) makes you want to wrap her in a foil blanket and give her a warming mug of Ribena. That she has managed to get through the last few decades without simply sitting down one day and spontaneously combusting is, frankly, astounding.
We watch her rummage through her cluttered garage. Here a battered pile of children’s bicycles; there a cardboard box entitled “SURGERY AND EXES”. She finds a yellowing hillock of Jordan-era lads’ mags. “Ugly,” she says of her gaspingly beautiful 21-year-old self. “Absolutely ugly.” Only a photo of herself as a small child prompts tenderness. “There she is,” she says, taking in the prim blouse and unbrushed curls. “Gentle eyes. Innocent.” She sighs. “Had no idea what was coming.”
