Review: Is Katie Price - Nothing To Hide worth watching?

OUT OF ALL the relics of 20th century media, Page 3 is one of the most embarrassing. 

It’s probably hard for anyone under 30 today to believe that there was once a time where it was normal for tabloid newspapers to feature topless pictures of  ‘girls next door’. Much less that this spurred on the 1990s ‘lad mag’ era, where magazine covers bridged the gap between porn and gossip mags with semi-nude images of models.

The cultural phenomenon of the Page 3 Girl had a 44-year-run in The Sun until a campaign halted it in 2015. One of the most famous nineties Page 3 Girls was Katie Price, aka Jordan, who parlayed her appearances into an opportunity to become a tabloid regular and a controversial celebrity.

And as the new four-part documentary Katie Price: Nothing To Hide shows, Price’s career has been an absolute rollercoaster for the now 48-year-old and her family. Even in recent months her relationship with fourth husband Lee Andrews has seen her in the headlines, after she suggested in a YouTube video that he was ‘missing’ – only for him to have been detained in a Dubai prison the whole time.

With 3 million followers on Instagram, Price is still a significant cultural figure. So can this documentary series shed new light on her career choices, and what impact they have had on both her and her family?

In the headlines

The Katie Price that we know from the headlines is brash, gregarious, attention-seeking and not a little baffling. But anyone who’s followed her career knows that there’s got to be another person beneath that facade. 

For example, she gave birth at just 24 to her son Harvey. He was born with disabilities, and his father, footballer Dwight Yorke, has played little role in the child’s life according to Price. She’s been a devoted mother, and has the backing of her own family, her mother, brother and stepdad.

Price is savvy and charming, and has managed to mostly maintain control over her image over the years. She’s a person who’s always been very clever about remaining in the public eye, and rolled with the punches when her reputation has been on a low ebb.

This documentary, which comes from Louis Theroux’s Mindhouse production company, is directed by award-winning director Paddy Wivell. There’s tons of archive footage, and most crucial of all a rake of interviews with Price’s family, former boyfriends, friends, and the surgeon who did her first few breast augmentation surgeries (though could we have done without that input? I would think so). There’s even Gareth Gates, the young popstar who Price sold a story to the tabloids about – the story of how she was the first person to sleep with him.

There’s always been a grubby side to the Jordan/Katie Price story, in large part because she came up in the Page 3 world, which commodified and objectified women’s bodies while trying to underplay the fact it did these very things. And Price makes it at times very hard to like her public persona. She frequently does things that are clearly aimed at garnering attention and likes, without regard for collateral damage.

Thankfully, this documentary and its director don’t approach Price with the aim of seizing onto that grubbiness, but in figuring out who exactly Katie Price is and what motivates her. Price, for her part, is an open book. In the first episode (only one episode was available for review) she is seen saying she’s happy for the documentary-makers to interview anyone they like. 

Turbulent era

The Katie Price that emerges in the first episode is a fascinating one. She tells us that her career can be broken into three 10-year eras. The first was fun, the second it starts to get turbulent, and the third was turbulent, she says.

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Price has always felt misunderstood, and says she’s never had time to reflect. Until now, it seems, and she’s candid and honest about what she’s experienced, said and done.

The documentary moves between examples of celebrity excess and poignant or troubling moments. So there’s Price saying she knew from a young age she wanted to be famous and a pop star, followed by her talking about being abused by a stranger as a child. Then there’s a montage of clips of family members crying, as Price says in voiceover that she knows she’s ‘made mistakes’. 

The first episode looks at how Price became the Page 3 model ‘Jordan’, and her relationship with her image and sexuality. Many times she explains that she liked male attention, and that she enjoyed that as a model men could look at her, but not touch her. 

Archive footage and home video of Price as a child show a gap-toothed, curly-haired girl who was obsessed with horses. Price describes herself at this age as beautiful, but by the time that girl had turned into a young adult, Price no longer thought this about herself. Seeing her look at images and describe herself as ‘ugly’ gives us our first insight into why she has spent so much time augmenting and changing her body and face. 

While a psychologist is probably the best person to analyse all of the above, and not your average TV-watcher, these examples showcase the complexity of Price’s self-image. Unfortunately perhaps for Price, her negotation with her self-image has been played out in newspapers and on social media. We’ve all watched as she has wrestled with her idea of who she is.

A woman of contradictions

Complex is just one word for this knotty documentary. Price is a contradictory woman, someone who thrives in the public eye yet raises questions about the impact of this on her. After all, the public eye can require people to do more and more extreme things to remain in its gaze. Price cottoned on early to the fact that controversy meant more attention. For example, before she got her first breast implants, she asked readers of The Sun whether she should get them – 80% said no. Yet controversy she continues to court.

She also understood the power of the male gaze, and that being beautiful gave her value. But she knew from a young age that it meant some men might want to take advantage of her, or see her as an object. She both played into that objectification and used it as a way of keeping herself safe.

It’s only when she got into relationships that this power seemed to slide, and there’s a revealing yet sad interview with her ex Dane Bowers – of the boyband Another Level – that digs into all of this. The pair met when he was 19 and she was 21, and their relationship essentially came to an end because of Bowers’ feelings about her job.

Price began to cover up in photoshoots because of Bowers’ concerns, but when she decided to make a calendar of topless shots he put down an ultimatum. It’s one example of how the men in her life only enjoyed the Jordan persona to a certain degree. There were always limits on what her male partners would ‘allow’ her to do. 

Price’s actions after the Bowers break-up showed how deeply hurt she was, but also how difficult it could be for others to deal with this hurt. Part of her reaction was to get more cosmetic surgery, a pattern that still plays itself out across her life.

If it’s a simplistic look at Price that you’re looking for, this is not it. Instead it is a complex look at a complex woman. One can only hope that in the following three episodes there is more interrogation of the 1990s, the period when Price got into Page 3, to help viewers to understand the patronising sexism of that era, and how Page 3 was a form of soft power for some women.

Without this sort of discussion, Price’s actions can seem unconnected to societal pressures. One does not just become a Page 3 model out of thin air, and no one becomes who Katie Price is today without feeling that a large part of your value is derived solely from your sexual appeal to men. These things do not happen in a vacuum, but in a world where women’s image and sexuality can be commodified.

By the end of episode one, we understand that Price is a woman who has always looked for love, and who has either been denied it or found the men she loved couldn’t understand the terms of loving her. There is a vulnerability to her that is easy to overlook, and yet is key to understanding who she is.

It’s a multifaceted, tangled situation and I’d be wary of us viewers deciding at the end of this series that we know who the ‘real’ Katie Price is. One gets the sense that when the camera is on her, Price is well able to be herself, but that perhaps her own complexities are difficult for even her to understand.

Still, this documentary gives the closest look yet at what makes Katie Price ‘Katie Price’.  But if we’re honest, the only person who knows who Katie really is is the woman herself.

Katie Price: Nothing to Hide is streaming on Sky and NOW from Wednesday 8 June.

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