Katie Price, aka Jordan, is all over the papers at the moment, not that she ever isn’t, but I’ve seen her staring out at me from several magazine covers in the last week or so. The Guardian even did a big feature on the topless model turned TV celebrity/singer/author/product endorser/millionaire.
I don’t know what she’s pushing at the moment, possibly one of the novels that have her name on the cover, but which are ghostwritten by someone else, maybe her lingerie range, or perhaps she’s doing another TV show with her husband Peter Andre. Whatever you think about her she has become a phenomenon and money-making machine, much more so than any of her contemporaries who took their tops off in the Sun in the 1990s.
It reminded me of the time I met Katie, or Jordan or Mrs Andre or whatever she wants to be called at the moment. It was back in 2001 and I was appearing on the Lorraine Kelly show on Sky TV. This was a little watched extra programme that Lorraine did after her stint on GMTV. I had been on before to offer my comedic pearls of wisdom on whatever she was talking about that day and she’d asked me back to discuss in a similarly humorous fashion, the things that annoyed me about women. Jordan/Katie was going to be on the sofa next to me to tell the nation (or rather the few thousand people who had accidentally tuned into this station) what annoyed her about men.
The item was about to begin and I was already sitting with lovely Lorraine on the sofa, when Jordan/Katie arrived. Neither of us had met the model before, but before we could say hello she grabbed her own breasts and said, “See they’re not that big are they?”
It was an unusual introduction. Most women complain if a man can not help himself from staring at her breasts when she’s talking. Here was a woman actively encouraging me to immediately focus in on her bazookas. And to be honest, they were pretty big. Jordan/Katie had after all had her bosoms artificially enhanced in order to make them bigger.
“They are quite big,” I replied not unreasonably.
“Yes,” she acknowledged, “But they’re not as big as the media would have you believe.”
I didn’t know what she meant by this. After all, she appeared topless in the media and seemed to talk about her breasts a lot in the media and had had her breasts enlarged. Was there some paper that was reporting that her breasts were as big as zeppelins?
Jordan/Katie seemed harassed and nervy and rather sad. She was clearly slightly paranoid and was indeed going through a bit of a tough time, both in her love life and having to deal with critical media. Her face looked stressed, close up her skin seemed a little bit leathery and she sadly told us about how she regretted the liposuction that she had had on her legs, saying that she got cold very easily now. I genuinely felt very sorry for her.
The live discussion got underway. I had prepared several jokey answers about what annoyed me about the opposite sex, all of which I have now forgotten and so these comedy gems are lost to the world. They were flippant and designed mainly to mock men’s weaknesses. Then Lorraine turned to Jordan/Katie and asked her what annoyed her about men. “I hate it,” she replied rather downbeat, “When they say they will ring you, but then they don’t ring you.” There was a pause as we waited for a possible punchline, but she just stared down at her feet. “You should stop dating footballers and go out with someone who treats you nicely,” I told her. Although I didn’t know it, she was at this point in the early stages of pregnancy with Dwight Yorke’s child. But Dwight Yorke had left her. It’s no wonder she wasn’t bouncing off the walls.
At the time I thought she was desperate for fame and the vindication she thought that would bring and I suppose I wasn’t too far wrong with that. I did, however, think that her moment in the fleeting light of celebrity was coming to an end and I was concerned for her. Nothing was going right for her and she seemed destined for disappointment or much worse. I predicted to a friend that I thought she might be dead in a couple of years, or at least have a breakdown.
Looks like I was wrong. In the intervening years she has seemingly managed to overcome her insecurities and prove her detractors wrong and certainly become one of the most successful businesswomen in the country. I don’t know it that is a good thing, but I am pleased that she managed to get herself out of the hole that she was in when I met her. Some would argue that I have not been quite as successful as her in the interim.
Buoyed by my successes on the Sky version of the Lorraine Kelly show, I was invited on to GMTV proper to discuss kitsch Christmas gifts with my beloved Lorraine, but I didn’t perform as well and was a bit scurrilous, for example suggesting that a snow globe depicting a young Jesus on the shoulders of Joseph might be a good gift for any dad who was bringing up a child who wasn’t his own. I had meant to be coming in again the next week, but suddenly plans were changed. I was, essentially sacked by GMTV.
Who knows, if I hadn’t been, it might have been me who was invited into the jungle and it might have been me who had caught Peter Andre’s eye and… well, who knows where I would be now?
I wouldn’t be writing for the New Statesman website, I can tell you that for nothing. No, I’d be paying my ghostwriter to do it for me.
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