Failing to fetch product collection for a given category

Question

I've written a method that I'm calling from my list.phtml file. The logic should simply output the number of products in the currently viewed category and the highest and lowest prices. Pretty straight forward really.

For reasons beyond my understanding it's always returning that the current category contains no products, and I can't figure out why but I presume it's because I'm not fetching the product collection correctly.

Here's the code for my method.

    public function writeCatInfo(){
       if(Mage::registry('current_category')){
            $_productCollection=$this->getLoadedProductCollection;
            $catname = Mage::registry('current_category')->getName();
            $priceArray = array();
            foreach ($_productCollection as $_product){
                $priceArray[] = $_product->getSpecialPrice();
            }
            $numItems = count($_productCollection);
            $highPrice = number_format(max($priceArray),2);
            $lowPrice = number_format(min($priceArray),2);
            $infostring =  ucwords($catname)." contains ".$numItems." products with prices ranging from £".$lowPrice." to £".$highPrice;
            echo $infostring;
        }   
    }

Answer 1

Turns out my helper was extending the wrong class - Mage_Core_Helper_Abtract instead of Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List. Changing this fixed the problem.