Mock me all you like but leave my disabled son alone: Katie Price’s heartfelt denunciation of Frankie Boyle’s vile slur and the TV bosses who defended it
By Katie Price
Last updated at 4:07 PM on 30th June 2011
My son, Harvey, turned nine last month, and we held a little party to celebrate.
The only guests were immediate family — too much activity causes Harvey stress and his behaviour can become disruptive — but he did have a big cake decorated with a picture of a frog.
Harvey loves cakes. He always enjoys blowing out the candles, and he adores frogs. They are his latest obsession. He draws them so carefully — the bulging eyes, the long back legs — and colours them in bright green.
At the moment, every scrap of paper in the house is covered in leaping frogs.
The cake and the frog obsession explain a lot about Harvey. Most mothers of nine-year-olds might boast that their child is learning French or the violin. I’m just pleased and proud that Harvey can draw, observe and see colours.
Soon after he was born, I was told he had a serious problem with his sight. Later, I learned that he was blind. Actually, he has some residual vision, and he is brilliant at using it.
He recognises colours and shapes. He has even learned to turn them into pictures.
He draws the same things obsessively, over and over again. First it was aeroplanes, then rainbows, now it’s frogs. That’s down to his autism. Like most children with the condition, he periodically gets fixated on one subject.
He is also compulsive about routines. Nothing must disturb Harvey’s ordered world, or there is hell to pay.
The cake is another matter. Harvey eats and eats, and if I did not stop him he would do so continually. He is prone to weight-gain, but he is not greedy.
He has a clinical condition — I’ll come to that later — which means he can’t control his appetite. The hormones that control his growth are also out of kilter. So he is bigger than most kids. But to the ignorant, Harvey is just a big, fat, blind kid — and he has been called that many times.
I’ve only skimmed the surface of the problems facing my much-loved eldest child, but by now you know enough about Harvey’s disabilities to understand the hurdles he leaps each day.
So you will understand the extent of my shock and anger when I learned that Frankie Boyle, the comedian — though he barely deserves the title — had singled my son out to be the butt of a vile ‘joke’.
To convey the full impact of what Boyle said on his Channel 4 ‘comedy’ show last December, I must, I’m afraid, repeat his offensive remarks in full.
To begin with, he said my ex-husband, Peter Andre, and I had been fighting over custody of Harvey. ‘Eventually one of them will lose and have to keep him,’ Boyle said.
That is the type of cruel offence we expect disabled people to accept. If you are disabled, you are a burden, and people want rid of you.
Then Boyle made a remark so offensive it has no place in civilised society.
Read in Full: