The format is simple enough, and familiar to fans of the increasing “An Evening With…” market, which is booming in 2025. Each night, the two women sit on a sofa opposite a DJ from Barnsley Radio, spin an on-screen roulette wheel and wait for it to settle on a topic – relationships, money, addiction, the media, those sorts of things – before explaining, with often bewildering detail and candour, how those issues have almost ruined their lives.

A bit of heckling is welcomed. The whole lot is bookended with singing. Think of it as The Errors Tour. Tickets are £30, meet and greet is another £20. Add a glass of sparkling wine for £9. But let’s be honest, you’ll need a bottle. Roll up, roll up.

Price is late to Stockport. It’s 6pm, T-90 from showtime and the meet and greet was supposed to start half an hour ago. A throng of Price/Katona ultras has massed outside the Plaza, a beautiful art deco theatre beside the River Mersey, but they show few signs of impatience.

As I look at my watch, a thirtysomething local man with a combover sidles up. “I saw on Snapchat that she was in Brighton getting her hair done five hours ago,” he says, in the guv-you’re-gonna-wanna-see-this tone of an ambitious young detective. Hmm, I say, narrowing my eyes, how long is the drive? “This time of night? Could be six hours. Could be longer. But it’s Katie. If she wasn’t late I’d be a bit gutted.”

We wait a while longer, long enough for me to browse the other acts playing the Plaza this autumn. The Ladyboys of Bangkok were on a fortnight ago. There’s a Jerry Marsden tribute booked tomorrow. Jimmy Carr’s in town next month…

An elderly man in black tie steps out of the theatre. He’s the lead usher. “No news at the moment, folks,” he announces, helpfully. Some girls are drinking cans of cocktails in the queue. “Oh, and listen up – you can’t bring alcohol through the doors.” Alarmed, somebody asks if there will be alcohol available inside. The usher’s eyes widen. “I bloody hope so.”

Ah, here she is. Price arrives just in time, having driven herself, one of Katona’s daughters, a small lapdog, and her 23-year-old profoundly disabled son, Harvey, all the way from the south coast. “KATIE, KATIE, KAAAAAATIE,” come the yells from all directions. A passing van slows while the driver bellows something incomprehensible 4ft from Price’s face.

Once out of the car, a blizzard of paparazzi bulbs set off. Tiny and swamped in a tracksuit, she pleads that they give Harvey some space and dignity as she walks him in. Everyone wants a piece of her, and nobody seems to ask her permission first. It is a grim spectacle. Later, Price will relay this moment on stage, as evidence of why she detests the media. Seeing it happen up close, you can’t blame her. I decide I’ll perhaps keep my job to myself tonight.

And what a fine decision that turns out to be. On stage later, the first topic on the roulette wheel is “The Press” – the very mention of which is met with jeers from the 800 or so paying acolytes, most of whom are millennial women with zero qualms about getting tremendously drunk on a Monday. “I say this sincerely from the bottom of my heart,” Katona begins, addressing the hall, “if there are any journalists in here… F— YOU.”

They say this last part in unison, to raucous agreement. “They’re hardly going to stick their hands up, are they?” Price mutters. “But we smell a rat in here tonight…” They scan the room melodramatically, peering into the dark.

Silently, I congratulate myself for electing to leave my fedora with my white press card stuck in the hatband back at the Holiday Inn, and try to recall the learnings from a one-day hostile environment training course I took nine years ago. I’m pretty sure there was something about always sitting diagonally from a cab driver? Try to use ATMs only in the morning? I should have taken notes.

Price and Katona are nothing if not savagely self-aware. Their own on-stage introductions mock their multiple failures with men, numerous surgeries, financial ineptitude and career mistakes. Katona, once of Atomic Kitten (“but she left before their biggest hit […] so let’s hope her timing’s better tonight,” runs the intro) is the brash show-woman, at ease on stage and gifted with crowd patter as she bounces out first, in a dark trouser-suit and vertiginous heels.

Price’s entrance, which Katona hypes by acting as if Godzilla’s en route, is a musical one. Shuffling on, looking brittle and slight, like a blackbird in bodycon, she treads out singing I Got U, her 2017 dance pop single that mysteriously topped the singles sales charts earlier this summer. The congregation reaches a state of ecstasy at only the first notes.

“Oh my f—!” a man screams behind me. It’s Beatlemania for Blossom Hill-fuelled ITV2 viewers, and it might be the sparkling wine, plus the beers I felt were medically required before setting off this evening, but it’s fantastic: like seeing a figure from British folklore in the flesh. In the morning I will watch the moment back on a video I for some reason took. It is not, in fact, quite as fantastic as I remember it. But there are worse things.

When the rapture ends, Price stands in the middle of the stage and waves at a crowd that adores her. “I’ve been so ill over the weekend,” she starts, taking a seat next to Katona on a set designed to look like a living room. The sofas are available to buy after the tour, Katona told the meet-and-greet queue earlier. “There’s p–s on them, farts, the lot!” This is often the dynamic, and it’s a winning one: Price offers vulnerability, Katona offers bawdiness. Occasionally they swap.

Though mostly Turkish-built these days, Price remains the most British of creations. On social media, a question is periodically posed about who the most famous British person is that nobody outside the country has heard of. Robbie Williams and Ant and Dec normally win the vote. But Price, who has been ever-present in the papers for almost 25 years, is surely in the conversation.

You may feel as if you already know far too much about that quarter of a century, a professional and personal life which is matched in its misfortunes by Katona’s, but I assure you, you don’t. Regrettably, though, if I repeated more than just a few words at a time from Price and Katona’s evening, The Telegraph’s lawyers would send me Anthrax in the internal mail.

The first half of the show – broadly themed around how journalists are scum, which I increasingly felt is fair enough – is largely a laugh. We hear about how Katona was allegedly offered £1m to marry Peter Andre after Price split with him, on the basis of the front page stories it would deliver. One journalist is claimed to have spread a video of Katona doing drugs in response to her criticising him.

We learn about Price’s latest bedroom preferences, which I cannot begin to describe even in the cloudiest euphemistic terms here without a disciplinary, but suffice to say it forced Katona to pretend to crawl off the stage in disgust and Price to vape in humiliation behind a cushion. (She did this a lot, accepting the theatre will likely fine her “like, a grand”).

By the second half, opened by Price covering Jermaine Stewart’s We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off, the tone of the evening turns darker. Price has been raped several times, she says. The first was when she was just seven. Another was at the hands of a national celebrity, who she named, to gasps, plus one crowd heckle of “w—–”. Then, in some detail, she talked through a suicide attempt.

Katona clutched Price’s hand through this, but had plenty of her own traumas. The younger woman was partly raised in a refuge, married a man she said was her mother’s drug dealer (“I thought I’d get a discount”), became a cocaine addict, suffered the indignity of marrying a member of Westlife, had her riches mismanaged by an accountant she later beat up, and lost another abusive former husband, the father of one of her children, to suicide.

By the end, when Katona got up and sang Atomic Kitten’s biggest hit, Whole Again, with enthusiastic backing from a now gloriously pickled audience, it was impossible not to feel great sympathy and affection for them both. Their lives are like Charles Dickens novels, if the great man had read slightly fewer picaresque texts and a bit more Heat magazine.

Now, at a time when both women are sober and stable, they are finally able to laugh about most of it, and stand as monuments to a rankly misogynist celebrity culture that is (mostly) happily dead and buried. They’ve been chewed up, spat out, now make most of their money selling videos of themselves on OnlyFans. But they’re still here.

Eventually, once they left the stage, the woman next to me was quietly emotional. “They’re just survivors, really, aren’t they?”

Whatever they are, they’re definitely that.