Sky took a gamble when it commissioned a documentary series about Katie Price last year. The former glamour model appeared so frail on social media that death before broadcast seemed possible. Even if she survived, what remained to reveal? Price has lived her life in public for decades. The resulting series, Katie Price: Nothing to Hide, proves both assumptions wrong. It is as riveting as a horror story.
The documentary and its revelations
The opening scene sets the tone. Price leafs through magazine covers from her late 1990s heyday, Loaded, Maxim, Front, when she worked under the pseudonym Jordan. She dislikes what she sees. "Ugly. Absolute ugly," she says. Only childhood photos at ages five and seven soften her. "Ah, she's quite a pretty little girl. Gentle eyes. Innocent. No idea what was coming ahead of me."
Her speech is slurred and nasal. Her teeth, glaring white veneers fitted in Turkey in exchange for an Instagram post, are too large for her mouth. She has said she does not recommend fake teeth: "I can't eat a chocolate eclair now in case I pull one out." After countless cosmetic procedures, her face resembles a Bratz doll. Recent surgery removed scar tissue from migrated filler. Her breasts are enormous, almost distracting from how tiny the rest of her body has become; without implants she would likely be underweight.
Price insists this is exactly how she wants to look. As a Page 3 girl with natural breasts, The Sun ran a reader poll asking whether she should have surgery. The headline read: "MY BOOBS ARE IN YOUR HANDS." Eighty percent voted against. Price ignored them. She also ignored the Page 3 ban on implants, knowing the overtly fake, "stuck-on" look she wanted could end her career.
From Jordan to Price: a manufactured persona
In retrospect, the decision proved commercially astute. Her new body arrived just as the lad-mag market exploded. "My pictures were pornographic without being pornographic," she says in the series. The artificial extremity of her figure turned softcore poses into something closer to obscenity, while her youthful, Bardot-like face added a layer of perversity. Every title wanted her on the cover because she shifted copies. Her blend of innocence and artifice made her a provocation: men wanted to pick her up and possess her.
From her teens, Price understood how to incite male attention and relished the power it gave her. The pleasure was not sexual but lay in making men look without giving them what they wanted. She traces this impulse to an incident at age seven when a stranger molested her in a park near her home. The police investigation was itself invasive; they took away her underwear. "There's habitual abuse of men against me. Taking advantage of me from a young age for their own self-benefit," Price says. In adulthood she has disclosed being raped twice, once by a celebrity and once during a carjacking in South Africa. She lives with PTSD. A direct line runs from that childhood powerlessness to the deforming insistence on absolute bodily autonomy that shaped her.
The Faber parallel
In 2000, as Price's fame peaked, Michel Faber published Under the Skin. Its protagonist, Isserley, is an alien surgically reconstituted to pass as human, enduring constant pain. In daylight she looks freakish, but her gigantic bosom captivates men in the dark. She cannot have sex; her modified body makes her the epitome of the woman who can be lusted for but not possessed. She uses that body as bait, luring men to be processed for meat on her home planet. Whatever debased thoughts the men harbour, Isserley is the one abusing them.
Whether Faber drew directly on Price or not, her image was similarly predatory. That perception hardened when she began a relationship with Gareth Gates, a Pop Idol contestant aged 17, while she was 24. His agent warned him that association with Price meant career death. She sold the kiss-and-tell story of taking his virginity while pregnant with her first child, fathered by footballer Dwight Yorke.
In the documentary both speak with tenderness and respect. Gates does not appear scarred, yet the media coverage clearly hurt him. For Price, the outrage boosted her profile. She became a Noughties succubus: a female demon portrayed as seducing men to their destruction. Her ever-expanding chest distracted from the fact that something was not right. Occasionally someone noticed. Archive footage shows comedian Frank Skinner interviewing her in 2001 after she announced her pregnancy. With kindness that belied his lad-image persona, he told her she seemed vulnerable.
Trauma and commodification
She was vulnerable. A year earlier she had attempted suicide after a break-up. Weakness had no place in her public image. When her son Harvey was born, she commodified him as she had commodified herself, selling photos of them together. The documentary captures her logic: press interest meant someone would profit from pictures of them, so why not her?
She also cut a deal with a favoured paparazzo. She tipped him off for the killer shot of her falling out of a nightclub, more disgraceful now she was a mother, and he allegedly kicked back a share of his fee. Price exploited the system that sought to exploit her. Later she used reality TV to monetise every aspect of her life, including her marriages and her children.
Media complicity and public backlash
The strategy gave her attention and control combined, but her power was illusory. Price was being publicly broken down for mass consumption; drawing profit could not stop the harm. As the series progresses, her disintegration escalates, physically through surgical complications, emotionally through a chaotic private life lived in public, and financially through two bankruptcies.
Price wanted to be desired, yet when men desired her she was hated for it. Tabloids had their cake and ate it: first running salacious details from her account of the Gates affair, then using his denials to paint her as a liar. Footage shows her being booed at an awards ceremony when she jibed about the situation. Her provocations were calculated, but the backlash wounded her, especially when it targeted her mothering. The nadir arrived in 2010 when comedian Frankie Boyle joked on Channel 4's Tramadol Nights about Price being raped by her eight-year-old son.
Financial collapse and the social media era
Price's fortunes fell with the old media structures. Lad mags vanished; tabloids weakened. Yet her approach to fame was prescient. Total self-commodification is now the rule of social media. Adult performers Bonnie Blue and Lily Philips have followed Price's path, seeking maximum outrage, viral gangbang stunts, a "baby shower" where men urinated on a pregnant belly, in exchange for maximum attention.
Blue and Philips make the same arguments: their bodies, their choice, maximum profit. But as Price demonstrates, when you make yourself hard you become brittle. Perhaps successors will avoid her damage, better at protecting themselves while selling themselves piece by piece. Perhaps social media's direct access gives them unprecedented control.
What comes next for the attention economy
That hope looks false. Pre-internet media was rapacious, but social-media audiences are hungrier for drama and more liberal with viciousness. Incentives to flog yourself remain strong, and no editorial layers moderate the exchange. The impulse to extremity goes unchecked; competition for attention pushes everyone further. Social media has not been good for Price, consider her teeth.
For a time Price appeared to have turned objectification into a cottage industry: her degradation was the means of production, and she seized it eagerly. She was the perfect creature for Noughties sexual culture, an effigy of femininity created to be hated. She has paid and paid for wanting to be wanted.