Not Forgetting Jade Goody

“Jade Goody: From monster to media phenomenon”

She was the gobby girl next door who was vilified then vindicated by the media that made her.

Jade Goody died yesterday [March 22, 2009], at a pitifully young 27. There will not be a paper in this country that will not devote pages to this long-expected fact and, later, to her funeral. It will be on the one o’clock news, and the six, and the ten. It will be surprising if you do not have at least one conversation about her today. Jade Goody was one of the most famous people in this country. But when my eight-year-old daughter asked “What is Jade famous for?”, I could not find an answer. In a way, everything that has been written about her over the past seven years has been us debating just that question.
In Jade Goody’s life, there were three turning points − as if her existence was engineered by a Hollywood script doctor into the perfect three-act play. And, as if to prove this theory, every one of those turning points was broadcast, and can be found on YouTube.

Jade’s life and career were interchangeable, and were driven by her flush of fame on Big Brother, her disgraced exit from Celebrity Big Brother under allegations of racism and, finally, the phone call to the Indian Bigg Boss game show, where she discovered she had cervical cancer. Never before has someone’s life been chronicled in such broadcastable entirety and this is, ultimately, what it means to be a reality star.
Those who are prone to melancholy about modern life are apt to see this as a sinister and unhappy phenomenon: someone’s life being shaped and broadcast by a single business − the TV company Endemol. It has, at best, overtures of The Truman Show and, at worst, a light-entertainment Nineteen Eighty-Four.
But the first thing that must be understood about Jade’s life before she effectively sold it to Endemol and, latterly, OK! Magazine is that it was almost unimaginably bleak. In the lead-up to applying to take part in Big Brother 3 in 2002, Jade was in a physically abusive relationship with a drug-addicted boyfriend and was living in a flat in Bermondsey, southeast London, with her mother, Jackiey Budden, who had recently acquired a ferocious crack habit. Drugs were a familiar theme of family life – there is even a picture of Jade, at the age of 4, with a spliff in her mouth.

From the age of 5, when her mother had lost her arm in a motorcycle crash, Jade had effectively become Budden’s main carer: cooking, cleaning, bathing her, and, when told to, rolling her joints.
Jackiey worked as a thief and “clipper” – someone who pretends to book a prostitute, then runs off with clients’ wallets. Jade’s father was a heroin addict who left when Jade was 2, and eventually died at the age of 42 in the toilets of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bournemouth. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that her childhood was like Shameless − but without any of the good bits.

So while for most people the idea of entering the psychological minefield of a sensationalist, pugilistic, popularity TV show would seem bafflingly unpleasant and demeaning, to Jade Goody it was not only better than anything that had happened before, but also a potential escape route from her entire life, as it stood. The odds on winning the National Lottery are one in 14 million. The odds of winning Big Brother’s £70,000 prize were only one in 12.

“I had never felt like a child, and had that feeling of not caring about anything. Going in there felt like a holiday camp, and I was acting like a child,” Goody said later.

TURNING POINT 1
What happened to Jade on that first Big Brother is still something on which, puzzlingly, there is no convergence of opinion. The general line is that Jade went in there and initially came across as the realisation of Britain’s underclass nightmares. She was loud and gobby and prone to screaming “Oh my God!” at the slightest provocation. She got drunk during a game of strip poker and was slyly goaded into taking off her clothes by other, notably more sober, contestants. By the time she threatened to “deck” a fellow housemate, Adele, for “giving” her a verruca, the media was in agreement: the Daily Star called her “a monster”, the Daily Mirror and The Sun concurred that she was “the most hated woman in Britain”. At the weekly evictions, audience members started holding up banners reading “Kill The Pig”, despite the fact that Jade had, really, done little worse than others of her age in student union bars every Friday night.
At this point, popular wisdom has it that some manner of celebrity miracle occurred and that, having reached crisis point with her fellow contestants, Jade dug deep within herself, calmed down, then slowly won the country round with her Cockney pluck and, most crucially, her quotable, cheery ignorance. She asked if Mother Teresa was related to “Mr Heinstein”, wondered “Do chickens eat cheese?”, postulated that Saddam Hussein was a boxer, wailed “I don’t want to be used as an escape goat!” and, most infamously, commented “Where’s East Angular − is that abroad?”

The press started to write about her as a classic British eccentric, a loudmouthed but essentially well-meaning ditz. Where once she had been a monster − a “slapper with a face like a pig”, as the Star columnist Dominik Diamond put it − she was now a blonde Frank Spencer. By the time she was evicted from the Big Brother house, she emerged to wildly cheering crowds, triumphal tabloid headlines and offers of management and PR representation. A whole new future had come about in just seven weeks.

Personally, I always had a suspicion that it was a more complicated victory than either Jade, or most of the public, thought, and that both Endemol and the tabloids had been forced into championing Jade. After all, it seemed odd how the tone of coverage in the programme itself and in the press seemed to switch 180 degrees overnight − the day after the “Kill The Pig” placards arrived outside the studio gates. I thought that, quite simply, Endemol and the tabloids had realised that things were getting out of hand and that they were setting up a quite normal, outspoken 20-year-old girl to be lynched. They had, quite rightly, panicked and instigated an instant and rigorous editorial makeover, to cover their arses.

Five years later, in The Independent, this view seemed to find support in an interview with the psychologist Cynthia McVey. She revealed that, at the height of the anti-Jade press hysteria, she had had a conversation with the producers of Big Brother, voicing her concern that Goody had been wholly dehumanised in those first weeks of the show. “Every bit of [Jade’s] character [had] been attacked. She was [portrayed as] ugly, nasty and stupid. I have a theory,” McVey said, “that after I said that, some people felt that they had gone too far, and they turned around and supported her.”

If this is true − and the Daily Mirror’s frankly laughable claim at the time that its initial, virulently anti-Jade coverage was “a brilliantly conceived clandestine campaign to drum up sympathy for the divine Ms Goody” suggests that it is − then it greatly informs the second turning point of Jade’s life. For while it turned out to be no hardship for the press to continue supporting Jade for the next five years − Goody supplied them with a useful stream of pregnancies, births, failed relationships, successful business ventures and disingenuous quotes − we must remember that the tabloid press is apt to bear a grudge and does not like to abandon a good story.

TURNING POINT 2
Within minutes of Jade entering the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2007 it was clear that she had made a massive mistake. Goody had accumulated her estimated £8million fortune by hauling herself up by her bootstraps. The Jade that had left Big Brother in 2002 was a blowsy, overweight bottle-blonde dental nurse celebrated for her failed-GCSE malapropisms. The Jade that took part in Celebrity Big Brother in 2007, on the other hand, was slim and sleek, with a shiny brunette bob, owner of a successful beauty salon, and the name behind Shh... , the third-bestselling celebrity perfume at Superdrug, after Kylie’s and Britney’s. She had left behind her underclass upbringing and turned into a successful working-class businesswoman.

But the format of Celebrity Big Brother was such that Jade had to bring her past − her mother, former heroin addict Jackiey − with her. While Jade had had five years to get used to celebrity and the media, Jackiey had had no such experience and, coupled with her extremely truculent and disruptive personality, she effectively made Jade regress. In a house filled with “proper” celebrities − one of the Jackson Five, one of The A-Team, Leo Sayer − Jackiey and Jade seemed insecure and out of place. And their most obvious insecurity was triggered by Shilpa Shetty − a luminously beautiful, gracious Bollywood star, whose name Jackiey steadfastly refused to pronounce. Jackiey preferred to refer to her as “the Indian” instead.

Of course, we all know how this situation ended − with effigies of Jade being burnt on the streets of India, Gordon Brown having to make comments on the affair at press conferences, and tabloids and broadsheet columnists alike wading in to condemn Jade for her “racist comments” towards Shetty.

I don’t want to be contrary, but it rarely seemed as if those who were commenting on Jade’s behaviour had actually watched the show. They had simply “heard” that she’d said something “racist”, then written a trite column about how much they hated racism. As someone who watched the show every day, what I saw was an insecure girl with gigantic class issues trying to wound someone whom she, ultimately, perceived as being innately superior to her. What was Goody’s biggest racist slur towards Shilpa Shetty? Calling her “Shilpa Poppadum”. While it’s clearly not behaviour that’s going to win any medals from Nelson Mandela, it’s scarcely the Final Solution. It’s just a chippy girl who has always had a problem with articulacy, lashing out in the heat of a long-rumbling personality clash.

But from a media point of view, of course, Jade had been allowed to be famous in the first place only as a fluke, an act of grace. Now she had made a mistake, no one held back. A week after she left the Celebrity Big Brother house in disgrace, her perfume was withdrawn from sale and her next TV show cancelled. She was effectively made to begin her career all over again.

TURNING POINT 3
This is also Goody’s final turning point, for it is when cancer was diagnosed in August 2008. The moment that she found out can also be seen on YouTube − as, when she received the phone call from her doctor, she was on Bigg Boss in India, co-starring with Shilpa Shetty. She was there, I would say rather courageously, paying penance for what happened on Celebrity Big Brother the year before.

As with Jade’s other two turning points, her cancer was both public and controversial. Jade refused to retire from her job − which was, essentially, being Jade Goody − and announced her intention to sell stories about her cancer to magazines, newspapers and TV companies, in the same way that she had sold all other aspects of her life since 2002.

This caused immediate contention, with many believing that death, if nothing else, should be a private affair. Others − myself included − pointed out that there may possibly be a class issue here. When the Times journalist John Diamond wrote columns about his cancer, he was not condemned in pub conversations across the country. And besides, Goody was about to leave two small sons behind. Who, really, could blame her for wanting to leave them as much money as she could? But still the arguments rumbled on, with increasing invective on either side. When I mentioned on Facebook that I was writing this piece, comments on Goody ranged from “She is a true inspiration” to “She is a renowned racist media whore”.
Both, I think, were wrong. You see, the point about Jade Goody is that she was a perfectly ordinary girl. She wasn’t particularly brilliant or talented, but then neither was she unkind, truculent or lazy. She had a cheery charm and an inarticulate but nonetheless effective knack of being perfectly emotionally open, and communicating the ups and downs of her life.

In her audition tape for Big Brother, she had sold herself as “Basically like Bianca on EastEnders − a real-life Cockney girl selling you bananas down the market”, and that is exactly what she was − through all her disgraces, the birth of her two children, the ebbs and flows of her career and, eventually, her illness and death.

The reason we have spent the past seven years trying to answer the question “Why is Jade Goody famous?” is because hers is a new kind of fame, one that has come in the wake of Heat and OK! and dozens of cable channels offering reality TV shows. It is the same manner of fame shared by Kerry Katona, Katie Price and any dozen former Big Brother contestants. Those onlookers who were instinctively, persistently vexed, even angered, by Goody’s ubiquity were those with a rather old-fashioned belief: that fame is, in itself, a precious commodity, that should be given only to those who are, ultimately, deserving.

But these days, fame is rather like cancer. It makes no character judgments. And in the end − also like cancer − it can happen to anyone.