“Everyone thinks they know everything about me,” says Katie Price, former glamour model, tabloid staple, star of 20 reality shows about her life and author(ish) of five volumes of autobiography by the age of 35. “But actually, they don’t.”
Katie Price: In Therapy (Channel 5) promised to show us the woman inside the £45m empire she has built since she first started modelling, aged 13. It would do this by distilling a month’s worth of visits to consultant psychiatric expert in women’s mental health, Dr Claudia Bernat, into an hour’s worth of blinding revelation.
As you would expect from a show built around a 20-year master of media manipulation, this did not quite come to pass. We got an exhaustive rehash of Price’s career, boob jobs, celebrity boyfriends, pregnancies, books and betrayals. And we got Dr Bernat doing her best with her magnificently unyielding client.
Why, she wondered, does Price have such difficulty trusting people? “If I was on a dating site and put down my credentials – 37, married three times, five kids – would anyone look at me? Add: ‘She’s got a big house, money, she’ll pay for everything, you won’t even have to work if you don’t want to,’ then, ‘Fuck, yeah, I’m interested in her.’” Next question?
Dr B chipped away and there were occasional, well-timed momentary softenings of barracuda stare with which Price has been looking down the lens of fortune since the mid-90s. There was almost an insight when Price pondered whether the fury and misery occasioned by the many times the media has turned on her “must go somewhere, because I feel like I need my head cut off”.
Bernat wondered if she could suggest “an idea for the future. Disclose less.” This is like telling a shark to take a break from swimming. If it stops, it dies.
It was another bravura performance from Price, who still thrums with business savvy and unbroken confidence, giving nothing away except a few tears of her own choosing. Long may she continue to slice her unerring way through the roiling media sea.
