Are we here again, already? Really? Five months ago, Kerry Katona (I won't precis her biog. If you don't have at least a vague sense of who and what she is, I do not want to sully your pristine consciousness and simply wish you luck in your career as the new editor of the London Review of Books or high court judge) starred – and I use the word in its loosest, wrongest sense – in a documentary that followed her during one of the lowest of her many downtimes as a tabloid celebrity darling-cum-victim.
Now, apparently, she has Turned Her Life Around, is Being Strong for Her Kids and is ready for The Next Chapter, the last both metaphorically and literally, as it is the perhaps inevitable title of her new five-part reality series that began with a 90-minute "special" on Sunday, and doubtless every other night on ITV2 since then, entitled Kerry Katona: Coming Clean. It's a pun, because she's off drugs and still has nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, no other means of existing, other than by disgorging every violently happy and unhappy moment of her catastrophically unstable life to camera! Geddit?!
We rejoin Kerry after she has separated from her deeply unlovely husband Mark Croft and is selling her Dream Home to pay the debts her medication-induced stupefaction allegedly allowed him to run up. Where other people have non-abusive family members and friends who haven't sold endless stories on them, Kerry has a new management team who have made it a condition of their employment that she stay away from Croft and move to Surrey to be near them and her old life coaches, Nik and Eva Speakman – who are, ironically, unspeakable. But she passes her drug tests with flying colours and in Katona terms is in A Good Place.
The rest of us call it at best the calm between the storms. By the end of this latest pitiful offering, I found I hadn't been taking notes, but unconsciously drafting protective legislation for her and that small section of the celebrity population who are not sociopaths but of her damaged, desperate ilk.
