The Huffington Post starts off my day with an ‘hilarious’ photograph of Katie Price and Kieran Hayler (no, I’ve never heard of him either) showing off their bloated stomachs following an alleged excess of Easter Eggs. “Look at our six packs and summer bodies,” chortles Katie, before declaring her delight that her friend Jane Pountney’s “life is ruined’. And that, friends, is regarded as news.
I do not pretend to be an expert on the life and times of Ms Price, although I do know that her ‘fame’ has been founded entirely on her large breasts, acquired as a result of enhancement surgery, having regarded the ample bosom with which she was naturally blessed as insufficient. I also know that she was a popular ‘Page 3 model’, modelling her breasts and little else. Nowadays, as a result of her breasts, she is a best-selling author (stop giggling at the back) and has a range of toiletry products in her name.
Price is also a very rich woman and good luck to her with that, but isn’t she really a product of our modern society when talent and ability can count for next to nothing?
This is the X Factor/Apprentice generation, where karaoke singers and gobby wannabe businessmen and women can achieve fame simply through their fame. No one is seriously suggesting that Price is anything other than an orange-coloured freak show. She is, we are told, an astute businesswoman which surely must be true. How else could she accumulate wealth beyond our wildest dreams despite having no real ability to do anything?
The most worrying part of Price’s fame is the following she now has, not from leering middle aged men as she flaunts her ridiculous breasts, but from young girls who somehow see her as a role model. When, a few years ago, she appeared at the Mall Shopping Centre near Bristol, she attracted a crowd of many thousand people, the vast majority of whom were young girls. But we are not talking about a highly talented woman: we are talking about a highly untalented woman who knows how to exploit her image as, er, a highly untalented woman, albeit one with large breasts and a perma tan.
The fact that I am writing about her plays into her hands. Publicity – any publicity, good or bad – is Price’s oxygen. As long as she makes the tabloid press and cheap gossip magazines – and as long as people buy them – the millions will keep rolling in.
I am no more interested in Price’s bloated stomach than her pendulous unnatural breasts, but each to their own. And if she’s your cultural role model, I think you need to have a good think about your life.
