Jordan's Heart of Darkness
When the troubled tabloid-sacrifice uber babe Katie Price decided to re-enter the jungle, I received numerous requests to comment on TV and radio. For once I held back; I just wasn’t convinced that I had the interest or the energy to offer any opinion on another Katie Price PR move. In truth, I could not ascertain whether I thought she was obsessed by self-absorption or self-loathing.
My reluctance to comment changed when I read Jan Moir’s fantastic assassination of Katie in the Mail: “Sweet kangaroo cutlets, what have we here? Katie Price back in the jungle again? How much more of boobilicious, publicity-mad She-Chav Katie can we take?”
Jordan, the goddess of the tabloid centre spread, is seriously wounded; instead of avoiding jet lag by popping into a rehab clinic (on discounted rate for the assured media coverage) she has placed her surgically engineered torso back in the reality stocks. Is it a hapless move to rehabilitate her image in the public eye or an unrecoverable PR disaster? I am sure the audience can spot the PR conceit and are not persuaded.
Katie Price’s arrival on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is a stunt motivated by the ego drive that comes with self-expression and self-manifestation for its own ends. Price set the trend and rewrote the wannabe handbook on how to succeed in the modern celebrity “have-a-go maelstrom”. Her self-importance can’t be restrained with niceties.
This latest PR endeavour illustrates that her addiction to column inches is now her greatest enemy. Obsessed with crushing her personal Satan – estranged hubby Peter Andre, who she met in the jungle the first time round – the exercise is surely going to go the same way as Jade Goody’s second, unpleasant experience in the Big Brother house. Can we ever forget Shilpagate?
If we take a moment to reflect, it is worth noting that we are all connected to the tarnished icon that is Jordan, addicted to the guilty pleasure of watching her antics. Her latest quest to relaunch her brand is, at the core, naïve. On the one hand, constant refreshment is at the heart of everything that has made her what she is, but on the other, it’s the core of everything that is rotten. It is a putrid masterpiece of strategy, to care so desperately for the opinion of those that don’t care.
By going into the jungle, she is begging her disciples to listen to her truth. Months of battling to win the hearts and minds of the great unwashed has failed, whilst her cuckolded other half, Andre, has been swept up into the coddling arms of the public, who see him as a victim of Katie Price’s machinations.