Katie Price was the Eurovision winner that got away

For Brits at Eurovision, there is a right way and a wrong way to do camp. A member of the 2007 pop calamity Scooch, dressed in a flight attendant’s ensemble and seductively asking the crowd if they’d like some “salted nuts”? Not camp. A cruise ship performer with Anthea Turner’s haircut warbling through a track called “Don’t Sing That Song Again”, as in 2000? Camp!

Teetering somewhere in the middle, though, is Katie Price, model, businesswoman and British pop culture fixture, who came very close to representing the UK at Eurovision in 2005. She is, for my money, . Dressed in a hot-pink rubber catsuit while seven months pregnant, Price competed in , a live TV showdown in which the British public voted for the performer they wanted to send to compete in the main contest in Kyiv. She went up against a surreal trio of pop sort-ofs: the brother of Steps member Lisa Scott-Lee; Javine Hylton, who’d three years earlier ; and the comeback-hungry “Ooh Aah… Just a Little Bit” singer Gina G. Oh, and there was also an operatic boy band named Tricolore, who vanished in a puff of smoke within seconds of the whole thing wrapping up.