There is something slightly sweet about the new ITV2 show The Princess Diaries. It is a reality series about a girl nearing 18, trying to figure out what she wants her life to look like. Which is perfectly relatable. The girl is awkward and self-conscious, doing her best to navigate a world more complicated than she expected.
Except the subject of The Princess Diaries is Princess Andre, AKA Princess Tiaamii Crystal Esther Andre, AKA the daughter of Peter Andre and Katie Price. This immediately makes things less relatable, because Princess has grown up under the spotlight, with the tabloid furore that her parents delight in whipping up on a daily basis. Would you be that well adjusted if newspapers flew drones over your bankrupt mother’s mansion to show the world how unkempt her garden was? Or if your dad found himself in the middle of a cultural appropriation storm after wearing a dreadlock wig for a film called Jafaican? Or if one of your middle names was Tiaamii?
This is the bind The Princess Diaries finds itself in. On the one hand, Princess desperately wants to appear as a regular teenage girl. But on the other, there is a distinct possibility that the show was made to capitalise on all the rubberneckers who want to see what sort of trouble Price has got herself into now.
If you are one of those hoping for news of Price’s exploits, you are going to come away disappointed. Because the main takeaway of The Princess Diaries is how relentlessly boring Princess’s life is. She is a 17-year-old girl whose job involves being an influencer. This means that her entire life is spent on her phone. She has “content days”, when she roams about, attempting to look carefree, in enough outfits to eke out a month’s worth of Instagram posts. She makes vague plans to launch her own beauty line, which at this stage means looking at pictures of other people’s beauty lines. She intermittently screws up her nose because a middle-aged man has DMd her a grotty message about her feet. It is excruciatingly monotonous.
Princess lives with Peter Andre and his second wife. Andre and Price do not get along. So while we do get glimpses of Price, they are via video chats (of which we get only the audio, not least because Price is undressed in some of them) and descriptions (such as when Princess reveals that Price got the date of her birthday wrong).
There is an undercurrent of impenetrable sadness. A little like the recent Alec Baldwin reality show, in which the scrappily chaotic idealism of his home life kept dropping away in segments where he addressed the accident when he shot and killed his cinematographer, there is a deep vein of melancholy to The Princess Diaries. For every film premiere and Ibiza fashion show, there is an introspective cutaway where Princess tells everyone how unhappy her childhood was, how she was picked on at school, and the feelings of self-hatred she experienced. But as soon as these bubble up, they are brushed away, because, look, a dog has just dribbled sausage grease on her new Louis Vuitton flip-flops! Everything’s fine again, promise!
It was inevitable that Princess Andre would get her own show. After all, as she points out, reality TV is all she has known since she was born. She has been sucked along in the undercurrent of her parents’ careers – she has either appeared in or been adjacent to Katie & Peter: The Baby Diaries, Katie & Peter: Unleashed, Katie & Peter: Down Under, Katie & Peter: Stateside, Peter Andre: Going It Alone, Peter Andre: The Next Chapter, Katie Price’s Mucky Mansion, Peter Andre: My Life and Katie Price: My Crazy Life.
However, on the basis of this series, it might have been worth waiting until Princess got her own gig. She is clearly smart and self-aware, and far better adjusted than you might expect. One day, when she has managed to clear the orbit of her ridiculous childhood, Princess Andre will be able to look back and put everything she has experienced into perspective. That day has yet to come. Instead, we have four hours of a 17-year-old girl looking at a phone. Surely that is too much reality for anyone.