Katie Price and Kerry Katona’s tour is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen

The atmosphere at An Evening with Kerry Katona and Katie Price at the Clapham Grand felt like a cross between a bachelorette party and a trauma survivor’s support group that had somehow been double-booked into the same room — and decided to just roll with it.

The venue, draped in plastic cobwebs and haunted-house décor for Halloween, looked appropriately possessed by ghosts of the British tabloid 2000s.

The crowd’s temperament was somewhere between Vegas party bus rowdiness and churchlike reverence: shrieking laughter punctuated by long, uneasy silences whenever a punchline curdled into confession.

It was, in every sense, a séance – one where the spirits happened to still be alive and seated before us.

As an American who only recently began to grasp the uniquely British pathology of tabloid celebrity, I watched in awe as these two women – both survivors and architects of that era – sat on stage and revealed more about themselves than I know about most of my closest friends. 

When Katie recounted, with deadpan precision, how Kerry had once popped her first breast implant, I glanced around for hidden cameras.

But none of it was a joke, or perhaps it was all a joke. It wasn’t funny. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

There’s a kind of meta-theatrical brilliance to watching Katie Price and Kerry Katona,  two women the press once devoured, now selling tickets to their own autopsy. 

‘If there’s any journalists here, f*** off,’ Kerry said early on, with the casual menace of someone who’s been dissected one headline too many.

I squirmed in my seat. But of course, everyone in the room was there precisely because of those headlines, because, for better or worse, they helped build the cultural scaffolding of millennial Britain.

When Katie, reclining with the studied nonchalance of a woman who has done this before, began to describe her suicide attempt in harrowing detail –  the microphone wire, the bruised face, the moment she woke up and decided she didn’t want to die after all – the audience was dead silent. 

She explained: ‘I wanted to die. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I know this question was about love and marriage, but this is what it did to the point I just was thinking, how can I kill myself? What can I do? I feel like s***. Why do men cheat on me? Why is the media against me? Why are they saying stuff against me? It’s not true. I was suffocating’

 Then she vaped behind a pillow and got a laugh. The tonal whiplash was constant and dizzying. ‘I’ve been fined at other shows,’ she quipped. ‘But I needed it.’

Kerry, meanwhile, played high priestess of resilience, as funny as any standup comedian on tour today, regaling the audience. But then she’d say something like: ‘Walking away from drugs wasn’t the f***ing problem. It was walking away from people who I thought loved me,’ and you’d look into the crowd to see a woman in a feather boa crying in the arms of her friend. 

Later, Kerry made the audience raise their hands: ‘Put your hand up if you haven’t made a mistake.’ No one did. ‘Exactly,’ she said. She looked at Katie with the comfortable affection and wizened understanding of a pair bonded by specific trauma, saying: ‘We’re lucky we’re still here.’

It would be easy to laugh at these women, especially when Katie took the stage after intermission to sing a rendition of We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off in her sequined two-piece outfit. 

But no one in the room was doing that. They sang along with the same wild abandon with which Katie belted into the mic, her lack of polish giving them permission to sing without fear of judgment. 

The laughter was intimate, conspiratorial, and a form of communion. There was a sense that everyone present understood, on some instinctive level, that this wasn’t just camp or nostalgia but a kind of group therapy disguised as cabaret. 

The night’s strangest, most moving paradox was that An Evening with Kerry and Katie was, in its way, a feminist reclamation ritual. These are two women who were not only humiliated by the press but became symbols of humiliation itself – their breakdowns, their addictions, their surgeries, their men – and now they’re monetising that same pain, controlling its retelling, turning trauma into a live act with a merch table.

Kerry and Katie have both lived lives that sound like morality plays written by a conservative tabloid: addiction, bankruptcy, bad men, bad choices. But what they’ve really done – intentionally or not – is hold up a grotesque mirror to the culture that made them. Their candour is both defiant and deeply British: the comedy of total collapse delivered with self-deprecating cheer.

When I first moved to the UK, I wrote an article trying to understand the phenomenon of Katie Price.

I asked my colleagues why she was famous, and they gave me a chorus of half-explanations: Page 3! Eurovision! Peter Andre! Perfumes! Politics! It was like being told the plot of EastEnders by six drunk people at once. Eventually, I gave up and decided she was a national joke — Britain’s id in a push-up bra.

But the longer I’ve covered her, the more I’ve realised that Katie Price isn’t a punchline. She’s a performance artist trapped inside her own tabloid mythology.

She has lived a life of almost operatic cruelty – raped as a child, beaten by men, publicly mocked for her body and surgeries – and yet she’s managed to stay in control of the narrative by leaning into its absurdity. She feeds the media exactly what it craves – scandal, spectacle, sex – but in recent years, she’s always the one lighting the match.

In that sense, this tour feels like the final form of the Katie Price project: a radical act of self-objectification so complete it becomes transcendence.

The dynamic between Katie and Kerry is less Lennon and McCartney, more Absolutely Fabulous meets The Priory. Kerry, with her big-sister energy and Northern frankness, calls herself ‘Doctor Katona.’ Katie counters: ‘I’m not Doctor Emily — I’m Doctor Kate.’ 

They tease each other about driving bans, failed marriages, and morning affirmations. They talk about sleeping in the same bed watching true crime documentaries, and then segue seamlessly into stories of domestic abuse, gaslighting, and rehab. The room sways between laughter and empathy like a drunk in heels.

When Katie declares, ‘Every relationship I’ve had has been a narcissist, controlling, manipulative, gaslighting bastard,’ the crowd erupts in cheers that are somehow both full of righteous anger and celebration that she can reclaim her own story. 

When she alludes to her long list of famous exes, the audience hums with recognition because they’ve lived these relationships alongside her, watching her catastrophes turn into communal lore. For years, they’ve used Katie and Kerry as lens’ through which to see their lives, women who lived their worst moments in public so everyone else could privately make sense of their own.

It’s worth noting the evening was also full of juicy tidbits and celebrity gossip, with both women casually revealing anecdotes about kissing Robbie Williams or which celebrity was the rudest to them. 

But for the women in the audience, many of whom grew up watching these two be publicly destroyed, it was more like communal healing than . Everyone knows the damage wasn’t just personal but cultural, because how many of us read, at a formative age, headlines about Katy or Kerry or their contemporaries ‘gaining weight’ and started skipping meals? How many of us saw Katie condemned as a mindless sex symbol and internalised it? 

Kerry summed it up best: ‘You all know we’ve been in the gutter, and we’re still here.’ The applause was enormous.

For all its chaos, there was a strange triumph to the evening. These two women have been mocked, reviled, exploited, and discarded by a culture obsessed with punishing women for wanting to be seen,  and now they’re cashing in on the afterlife of that punishment.

They’re saints of the scandal age, martyrs of the gossip economy, prophets of trauma-as-content, and aging women who refuse to be discarded due to any culturally mandated expiration date. 

And yet, when Katie said softly, ‘Now I love myself. I’m strong. I won’t let anyone control me again,’ there was no irony left in the room.

Only the eerie hush of people realising they’d witnessed something messy and magnificent: two women who’d been turned into caricatures of femininity standing onstage as living, breathing proof of what the culture did, and how, miraculously, they survived it.

Get tickets to An Evening with Katie Price and Kerry Katona here.

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