Katie Price: Harvey and Me review – a candid portrait of mother and son

“Half of them keep him alive,” says the woman matter-of-factly as she shakes out tablets from the array of medicine bottles before her, “and the other half are for his behaviour.” The woman is Katie Price, formerly known as the glamour model Jordan and still a tabloid draw, if not the constant feature she was in her self-created and powerfully managed heyday. The medicine is for her eldest son, Harvey. He has a rare genetic disorder called septo-optic dysplasia and a virtually unique combination of other conditions, including autism and complicated hormonal issues. He is nearly 18, and comprehends life at roughly the level of a seven-year-old. He is loving, charming, funny – sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly – but can be volatile, and is unable to cope well with change or unexpected events. There is damaged plasterwork all over their home, and Harvey’s younger siblings know to run upstairs “if he kicks off”.

Katie Price: Harvey and Me (BBC One) is the story of Price’s efforts to find suitable new care and educational arrangements for her son as he reaches his majority and must transfer out of the child and into the adult system that will have to try to meet his complex needs for the rest of his life. Made by a longtime friend of the family, it also has the inescapable feel of a pre-emptive strike against media criticism Price is likely to face for “sending her child away” (from people who have no more feeling for her as a person, as opposed to column-fodder, or any more idea of the challenges involved in caring for a disabled child than they do of quantum physics).

It’s Price’s prerogative, of course, to use the power and position that gives rise to that self-same tabloid interest to get a programme made to counter it. And that countering is well done. The bond between mother and son is strong and clear, and they evidently know each other inside out. “Don’t take too many pictures,” she warns as Harvey stands ready and waiting with his iPad on a local platform waiting for another of his beloved trains (“Hip, hip, hooray, let’s do it!”) to come in. “You’ll only run out of space and have to delete them again.” “Yes, Mummy,” he says, before being distracted by another arrival hissing to a stop. “Best train ever! It’s a crazy life, isn’t it!”

In an ideal world, perhaps, she might have used her platform to spell out in greater detail the problems that beset other people (most of whom lack her financial clout and other resources) in her and Harvey’s position. As it is, the systemic obstacles standing between exhausted and distressed parents and carers, and the loving, protective and supportive care their children need to become as happy and independent as possible are only lightly touched upon. Friends of Price, whose children’s conditions overlap with Harvey’s, talk of the pervasive anxiety about what will happen when they are no longer around to fight for them. The strain of forging new paths for anyone who deviates from the limited set of needs the underfunded, inflexible system can cope with, and the sense of life balanced on a razor’s edge of functionality, ever at the mercy of a support worker off sick or a change in council policy, or all the endless rest of it are hinted at but never fully described.

We are left to imagine, for example, the desperation (and sheer fortitude) that led Anne Kennedy, whom Price goes to for advice about the kind of residential care she should seek for Harvey, to found her own college when there was nowhere else that could give her autistic sons what they needed.

One interview goes further. Kennedy warns of the vulnerability of people with autism and learning disabilities being sectioned for their “uncontrollable” behaviour (if, for example, they are very unhappy with a placement) and the profound difficulty of throwing the machinery of the state into reverse. Price interviews Isabelle, the mother of a 15-year-old boy who was sectioned, who attests to the horrors of the experience. Her pain and remembered despair is like a dam breaking, its raging waters capable of filling an entire series of their own.

As we leave the pair, Harvey has overcome some distressing open-day visits and is learning to love the idea of starting college. He plans to follow a recipe and hopes to make spaghetti bolognese. Hip, hip, hooray – let’s do it.