Harvey Price time then. In 2016, I had an ill fated stint as the Social Media Producer on Loose Women on ITV. It was a disaster, I should never have applied for the job, I certainly shouldn’t have been given it. I could do the actual job standing on my head, but the politics of the place…woof. Anyway. It was a strange show. You’re on five days a week, the editor had come from tabloids/Pick Me Up type mags and had the show plough that furrow. They would stitch up guests (Jacqueline Jossa was done when I was there), they would stitch up hosts (Coleen got fucked just after I got binned.) Side note - all the women were great. Janet St Porter is legitimately a television genius. Gloria Hunniford is hilarious and the most dreadful flirt. Coleen Nolan and Linda Robson and Kaye Adams are lovely lovely people. I quite fancied Ruth Langsford. And then there’s Katie Price. The first time I met Kate, I said “does anyone call you Jordan anymore?” She said “Jordan was the old brand, Katie is the new brand”. “What do I call you?” “You call me Kate, people I like call me that”. She would tell me incredible stories that I can’t recount because it will get me in trouble. So anyway. One day, we had a special part four lined up. Kate was coming on with Harvey, her son. If you don’t know the Harvey backstory, he is the son of Kate and former Manchester United striker Dwight Yorke. Dwight Yorke is a cunt who has basically washed his hands of Harvey. Harvey is virtually blind, and has learning difficulties. He’s a unit too, he’s about six two and big and strong. At that time, Harvey and Kate were subjected to constant online trolling, and it was obscene. I would see it every day. You get the usual ignorant stuff, the S word and the R word… but you’d also get stuff like Kate being accused of pimping out her son, and Kate being a terrible mother (I think that’s one thing you absolutely cannot accuse her of being) and then there was a racial element to the trolling as well. Really mad stuff. The usual epithets, but also weird stuff like “This is what happens when a white woman goes with a black man”. (An insult also thrown at Katie Piper when I worked there. It’s so lovely working online.) The point of the mini show within the show was to explain about the trolling and to launch a campaign that Kate was launching to stop trolling. Andrea McLean was hosting, the other panellists were Gloria, Jane Moore and Kate. Also, Piers Morgan was a guest that day and he came into this bit. They are chatting along and we get to “what would Harvey say to the horrible people?” “Hello” “What would Harvey say to the horrible people???” “Hello you cunt” The audience gasps. If you go back and watch it, she asks him twice, and it’s like that bit in The Simpsons where they go into witness protection, and the guy is stamping on Homer’s foot. “Hello Mr Thompson”. She wants the reaction. Andrea gives the apology, but her head has gone, Piers Morgan, God bless him for his, he knows what’s happening and jumps in and steers the interview for a bit whilst Andrea gets her bearings. Meanwhile, in the gallery… I look at the editor and the director and shut my computer, saying “I am coming offline for the day until I get clearance from someone on more money than me”. A PA is next to me, literally - LITERALLY - with his head in his hands and he screams for about ten seconds. He stops screaming, breathes and picks up a phone and dials a number. When someone answers, he says “Yeah, yeah, it’s a Code Red, a Code Red. The programme is Loose Women, ITV1. The time was 1:17pm, the date is (whatever it was), and the word was cunt. “The word was CUNT. The word WAS cunt. C. U. N. T. Cunt.” At that point, and I remember that so clearly, the Chubby Brown song ‘He’s A Cunt’ popper in my head. I’m laughing far too much by now, so I take my leave out of the gallery and walk to the studio door. First person out is Piers Morgan. He looks at me laughing and says “fair play to the kid, he’s managed to say to me something that half the country has wanted to say for years”. Now, I thought this was odd, because Harvey wasn’t talking to him, he was talking to hypothetical trolls. However, what I found out later on was that Harvey had been trained to say “hello you cunt” every time he saw Piers, and it had been going on all day. (A friend of mine who worked on Kate’s reality show told me that the training of Harvey had been going on for weeks and they have footage of it.) The next people out are Gloria and Jane who are holding each other up through laughing so much. Then out comes Andrea. She is WHITE. She looks at me and says “Joel. What just happened?” I gave her a hug and said “it was just a child saying ‘cunt’ live on ITV at 1:15 in the afternoon”. Then out comes Harvey and Kate. I said to her “how are you?” and she said “I’m very happy, thank you” and I thought “I fucking bet you are”. But here’s the excellent thing. The trolling of Harvey instantly ended. Just a hard stop. No more. None of this disablist, racist, anything-ist bollocks. It was gone. Not only was it gone - Harvey went from a figure of fun at the nice end and a figure of outright cruelty at the other, to a hero. I’m not kidding. A hero to the internet doyles. He was metaphorically held shoulder high by the Twitter kids because he said the word ‘cunt’ live on the telly, and he had a little cheeky giggle at the end of it. Kate engineered all that, protecting her kid and herself, and the scheme worked. My only question was, who else knew? Obviously Kate knew, she set it up. Did the bosses know? I don’t know. I have my suspicions. I know that me taking great joy in the whole shebang didn’t do me any favours. I was out of the door within a month or two after that. It was worth it. I dine out on it now. I laugh every time I think of it. And it ticks every box - a woman using a corporate giant to stick it to the idiots and protecting her kid, doing it on telly AND it was funny.