Katie Price’s Pony Club
TLC, Thursdays, 9pm
As I never tire of telling people, Katie Price once cooked me dinner. Well, she sort-of helped make a veggie lasagne (perhaps by stirring the béchamel sauce a bit) – but I did actually have a meal with her at her house, as part of her deeply reluctant promotional activity for some reality show or other. I only mention this now because she’s back on TV with her first new series in four years (though let’s never forget that recent, extraordinary one-off therapy session on Channel 5). This Pony Club show brings back all of my deepest, most complex and frankly contradictory feelings about the reality TV icon – let’s call it the Katie Conundrum. On the one hand, this is a woman who will do anything to be on TV, exploiting every area of her private life, including her kids. She’s also a kind of low-level tyrant, ordering her husband to dress up as a pink unicorn one minute, or insisting her friends wear wedding dresses to a posh equestrian dinner the next, for no good reason other than it amuses her.
Yet said husband, Kieran, is also clearly a lovely bloke, and her friends seem sweet and charming, too. As for those exploited kids, well, they’re a total joy to watch, with 11-year-old Junior (who Katie nicknames “Smart arse”) the stand-out star of the show, with such unforced observations as, “People expect our house to have diamonds everywhere, but basically we live a normal life.”
The “format” of Pony Club is too transparently contrived to explain in any detail, but it’s really just an excuse to see Pricey and her friends and family having a good time. With some horses. And on that level, it does actually work.