The Life and Times and Death of Jade Goody

Sunday, 22nd March 2009

At some time in the future, historians will view the Jade Goody Affair with the same kind of bewilderment and revulsion that we reserve for the excesses of Victorian Britain. But of course Goody's celebrity - absurd and mawkish and repellent as it was - demonstrates how little human nature changes and reminds us that we're much closer to the past than we sometimes like to think. And that, of course, is just another way of observing that the sky is always falling.

To wit, here's the Telegraph's (lengthy) obituary, which also serves as a commentary on the marvellous monstrosity that is the British tabloid press:

The first time she was mentioned in the press, in May 2002, Jade Goody was described as a "pretty dental nurse, 20, from London". But 24 hours later, as she began her gobby, ignorant trajectory in the Big Brother house, The People went on the attack under the headline: "Why we must lob the gob". Before long it was open season. The Sun called her a hippo, then a baboon, before launching its campaign to "vote out the pig". The Sunday Mirror rejected porcine comparisons on the ground that it was "insulting – to pigs".
Inside the "BB" house, Jade Goody found herself in bed with her male housemate, PJ, who ran away, shrieking. Her drunken striptease in a drinking game rigged by the male contestants ("Me kebab is showing!") forced even Channel 4 to blank the screen. "Here she is: fat-rolled, Michelin girl Jade in all her preposterous lack of glory," thundered the Daily Mirror the next day. "Naked as the day Dr Frankenstein made her." Jade's then boyfriend chipped in: "She's a sex-crazed, lying, two-timing drunken tart, and I hope I never see her again."
Jade Goody's main function, as she put it herself, was to be an "escape goat". She was the modern equivalent of Barnum and Bailey's "bearded lady" – a pressure valve for the vindictive rage of the mob and their tribunes in the Red Tops. Polls suggested that she was more unpopular even than Saddam Hussein (a boxer, said Jade). Such was the public venom it was feared that things might get dangerously out of hand. Some people actually travelled across England to the BB house, where they waved placards and greeted her emergence, spilling out of a pink dress several sizes too small, with chants of "burn the pig". Channel 4 was even reported to be considering smuggling her out of the country for her own safety.
But, no sooner had she hit rock bottom then she bounced back up again. The tabloid campaign had developed into such an orgy of hate that it inspired a retaliation in her defence. Viewers, it seemed, warmed to her malapropisms, guilelessness and obvious vulnerability.
Told by their readers that they had gone too far, journalists began backpedalling furiously. The Mirror congratulated itself on "a brilliantly conceived clandestine campaign to drum up the sympathy vote for the divine Ms Jade Goody". Not to be outdone, the Sun sought to rehabilitate the "princess of Bermondsey". Both papers started the bidding for her "story" at £100,000 – a figure that quickly escalated.

Filed under: Britain (313 more articles) , Celebrity (27 more articles) , Newspapers (208 more articles) , O Tempora, O Mores (149 more articles)

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Fergus Pickering

March 22nd, 2009 4:14pm Report this comment

It doesn't seem it was ever anything to do with us. It was Jade and you lot. Ah well, papers have to be filled with something and it's better than the financial news. In the fifties we had Lady Docker and the Duchess of Argyll. I'm not at all sure that Jade Goody is a come down from them. In fact, given her start in life, to become a dental nurse and then a celebrity was a good effort. I liked her better than Mrs Beckham, that's for sure.

GutClean

March 22nd, 2009 7:20pm Report this comment

Deeper than this Alex I fancy.

I see it a popular revolt against what I myself dub the cult of 'intellism', primarily a perversion of capitalism which seeks to replace capital by intellect and the free market by something variously called the information highway or the knowledge culture etc. and one of whose symptoms is that the commodification and packaging of knowlededge and its mere possession is regarded as the same thing as acquiring learning, as if having Hawking's 'A Short History of Time' lying around on your cofee table is the same thing as reading and studying it.

And in the hands of our elite educated in schools which have become nothing more than mere temples raised to this idol it has resulted in the financial catastrophe that has engulfed us and the world.

I suspect future historiams will have much to say of the sort on the phenomenon that was Jade Goody.

Nicholas Storey

March 23rd, 2009 12:07am Report this comment

First, she has probably not even yet been given a funeral and, secondly, she represented the level of entertainment that a huge number of people seem to enjoy.

ndm

March 23rd, 2009 9:16am Report this comment

-- At some time in the future, historians will view the Jade Goody Affair with the same kind of bewilderment and revulsion that we reserve for the excesses of Victorian Britain.

Personally, having read her latest screed about the blood libels of Haaretz and "Uncle Tom Israelbasher" I think you could safely swap Melanie Phillips for Jade Goody in that sentence. "Bewilderment and revulsion" would be a measured response to her rantings. And who the hell is this Uncle Tom Israelbasher" anyway?

C Powell

March 23rd, 2009 9:44am Report this comment

The only thing to be said is that there are two little boys who have lost their mother. The rest is for the birds....

Beer Moth

March 23rd, 2009 6:29pm Report this comment

A young woman dies and ndm uses this as a chance to have a go at another woman. What a big man.

Jade, may you rest in peace.

ndm

March 23rd, 2009 7:48pm Report this comment

Beer Moth berates me for using the death of Jade Goody as "a chance to have a go at another woman."

Actually, I was alluding to the hypocrisy of a press that has no qualms in describing Goody as a "hippo," a "baboon" or a "pig" while it lauds Phillips with prime spots at the Daily Mail and The Spectator even as she gloats over the fate of the Palestinian people.

Personally, I thought the Telegraph obituary a bit nasty - and I read a lot of them, the obituary column being one of the few parts of the Guardian I read each and every day.

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