Jade Goody reminds us how arbitrary is success and how close to death we are

The reality TV überchav remained in the public eye because of her unerring ability to court catastrophe, says Rod Liddle — and the television-friendly speed at which her grotesque rise and demise have taken place

You can still buy Jade Goody’s fragrance, Jade Goody’s Controversial!, online or indeed in your nearest department store. For £19.99 you get a bunch of perfume with ‘clean and fresh top notes of sweet red fruits’. Sweet red fruits — what they, ed? Strawberries, one supposes. Strawberries with loads of sugar on top. Anyway, it’s the great smell of Jade. Do you want to smell like Jade Goody, like Jade Goody is now? Maybe you don’t want to smell like her but you think you ought to show solidarity with the woman.

I wonder what, right now, her fragrance people are thinking, how they might dig themselves out of a hole. We smell things not through the nose but through the brain. That’s where the smells get sorted out into the good, the bad and the ugly. It was not those heralded ‘top notes’ of sweet red fruits which sold Controversial! but the connotation of Jade Goody herself, a product aimed at people who thought her admirable, who wanted to be like her. Now, though, things have changed. The connotations are different. The brain now tells us that when we are buying Controversial! we are buying the whiff of stage 4 metastatic terminal cervical cancer. Go on, why don’t you, splash it all over.

Jade Goody, if you need reminding, was introduced to us through the medium of reality TV and, by the looks of things, is now about to depart our company in exactly the same way. For a while she was revered as a sort of unapologetic überchav — coarse, fabulously ignorant, common, crushingly low of brow both physically and metaphorically, overweight, sexually incontinent, famously racist — spewed out from a home not so much broken as smashed into little pieces, a home of smackheads and crackheads.