Katie Price has a bee in her bonnet. Actually, it’s a wasp. “It’s stung my nose,” the best-selling author, lifestyle guru and one-time Playboy Mansion resident declares as she tackles an insect infestation halfway through Katie Price’s Mucky Mansion (Channel 4, Tuesday, 10pm). “My beak is on fire: bastard.”
This is property TV with a difference: Celebrity Big Brother meets Room to Improve. Price is marooned in her 19-room pile in West Sussex, where the walls are slowly closing in. The 44-year-old’s only companion is her fiance, Carl, though she is later joined by her son, Harvey, who has Prader-Willi syndrome and autism.
But, along with being a celeb trapped in a spooky building, Price is a bit of an amateur Dermot Bannon: she wants to remodel the upper floor. The first episode of this second season follows her through the ups and downs of her adventures in home makeover.
Alas, not all property shows are created equal, and Mucky Mansion makes for rather muddy viewing. The problem is that the series is interested in the rebuild rather than in Price, whose difficult relationship with the spotlight is barely touched upon. The most interesting scene is a snippet from a future episode: Price is at a store when she spots a paparazzo trailing her. “You’re stalking me – do not film me,” she says.
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Mucky Mansion needs more of this. Sadly, instead of showing us the rough side of fame – there was a time when Price was one of the most recognisable women in Britain – it gets bogged down in the minutiae of her grand redesign. In one scene Price paints a table a lurid pink. When she lashes on the new coat it looks as if this is a DIY job that’s destined for disaster. In fact the table turns out a treat, even if it does look as if it has beamed straight from Barbie’s boudoir. But then the series makes precisely the same point about Price’s resourcefulness with a sequence in which she cuts her DVD collection in half and glues them to another table. Again, it looks as if she’s committing a DIY mortal sin, and, just like the Barbie table, the results – intended as a centrepiece of her home cinema – are dazzling. Fine, but who ordered the deja vu?
More revealing is a scene in which she ploughs through fan mail. An admirer has submitted a touching painting of Price with Harvey. It’s sweet and speaks to the Everywoman appeal of a star who, in the early 2000s, was written off as a weaponised Page Three girl.
Price also reflects on her stint at the Playboy Mansion while namechecking the surgeon who did her boob job. “There were no British girls there,” she says. “I’m one of the only British girls to have ever done the American cover of Playboy.” Hugh Hefner loved her, she adds.
Mucky Mansion should do more to explore Price’s sense of herself as a groundbreaker. Instead we’re treated to Price and Carl chucking old furniture out of a top-floor window – the logic is that it’s easier than carrying it down three flights of stairs. As property-makeover telly it’s fine. As a profile in celebrity, Katie Price’s Mucky Mansion stands on flaky foundations.
