Katie Price reveals her biggest mistake and why she feels her career is "starting again now"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

It’s 10 September 2005, and there isn’t a dry eye in the house as Peter Andre and Katie Price pledge their troth. Every blink, blush and eternal vow is captured on film for their reality TV show, and also for an exclusive magazine deal.

The eclectic guest list at Highclere Castle includes Jennie Bond (former celebrity jungle-mate), Vanessa Feltz (don’t know why) and Gazza (the mind boggles). In their speeches, Peter thanks Katie for showing him how to love her and her amazing son Harvey. Katie thanks OK! Magazine for boosting her bank balance.

Minutes before the ceremony, her doting stepdad has asked her, “Are you 100 per cent sure?” “It’s too late now,” she jokes. “It’s never too late,” he replies. The pair of them are in a pink pumpkin-like Cinderella carriage, pulled by horses who choose that moment to take fright from overhead paparazzi helicopters and send their blancmange on wheels crashing into a hedge.

There, in a nutshell, is the story of Katie Price, a woman of child-like desires made real by her own hard-earned money, playing to an audience equally as thrilled when she indulges herself as when she comes unstuck, with everything caught on cameras for the best part of 30 years.

It’s a story that merits revisiting in Sky’s four-part documentary series, charting how a young wannabe model called Katie became a paparazzi-seeking missile called Jordan, who married a pop star she met in the celebrity jungle, became Katie again, made nine series about their life together before divorcing, had children, got married again (and again etc). Price’s story tells us as much about the world of Page Three, the lad-magazine culture that made her millions and 21st-century celebrity as it does about one person.

Along the way, there’s been the creation of an empire: selling everything from calendars to CBD oils, and publishing eight memoirs and 12 novels, including those she has written, or read, herself. She has made and lost several fortunes. Her book sales help keep the lights on for her various publishers so they can publish more respected, less popular fare.

From the start, she made clear, if other people were making big money from her photographs, why shouldn’t she? As she told Piers Morgan once, “I don’t work in an office. My job is me.”

If this sounds like the mission statement of every modern-day influencer, Price’s predates them all and remains bigger and more complicated. At the launch of her new show she told me, “I was 17 and doing nothing different to anybody else my age. The press created a caricature of me.” Which is all true, but it’s one she collaborated with, and as we’ve seen time and time again in such alliances, there is only ever one winner.

Her seven driving bans, four marriages and dramatic physical transformation tell their own story. What does she consider her biggest mistake? “Men,” she replied. Off the discussion menu this week, either on screen or in person, is the latest debacle: a fourth husband she wed a few weeks after meeting, only to spend the next month fundraising his freedom from a Dubai jail, or something. Meanwhile, she told me, “Pricey’s going nowhere. I feel like my career is starting again now.”

And so it goes on, 30 years of striving, succeeding and making spectacularly bad decisions. Who am I to tell her what to do? I can only repeat her devoted stepdad’s words she ignored that day in the carriage and say loudly here: are you 100 per cent sure? It’s never too late.

Katie Price: Nothing to Hide airs 9pm on Wednesday 15 July on Sky Documentaries. You can sign up to Sky TV from £15 a month.

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