A fate worse than death: is Jade Goody the new candle in the wind?
What kind of news values are these, dare we ask? What will it take to move her off? Nuclear war? Some other celebrity falling gravely ill?
Those that still ran with Jade on Tuesday following the Craigavon murder will claim the news came in after they went to press. How convenient. They know their readers, one assumes.
Back in 2005, it was Pope John Paul II on celebrity deathwatch and, closer to home, George Best. He prefigured Jade Goody by being photographed drawing almost his last breath in his hospital bed. In both cases, everywhere you turned, it was almost impossible to avoid bulletins about their frail and fading conditions.
This month, it’s Jade’s turn. There’s the ecstasy and the agony.
Her wedding to the electronically-tagged Jack Tweed was conducted with all the fanfare of a world-class media event. Harrods’ owner Mohammed al-Fayed donated the €4,000 dress and the British prime minister even sent his best wishes for the day.
His justice minister even intervened to ensure the hapless groom would not have to observe his 7pm curfew, a condition of his early release from prison where he is serving a sentence for assault.
It was a marriage in haste, but there would be no opportunity to repent at leisure, overshadowed as it was by the bride’s impending funeral. Even today, most of us deal with the reality of cancer by carefully avoiding the subject. We shy away from misfortune as if it were somehow contagious.
Not our Jade. One of her unique charms is that she doesn’t do subtlety. She thinks something — and out of her mouth it comes. It’s a reflexive action.
Call her what you like, though, no one could accuse her of shying away from the doctors’ grim prognosis: “I’ve lived in front of cameras and maybe I’ll die in front of them.”
Not literally, her publicist rushed to assure us, but if there was enough money in it, who knows? And wouldn’t it be kind of fitting anyway, just so long as there isn’t something more important happening in the world that day?
Actually, though, Jade’s desperate effort to do almost anything to earn enough to secure her boys a comfortable future after she has gone is one of her more appealing characteristics. Who can really blame “the pig”, as the red-tops branded her during her first Big Brother appearance just five years ago?
The poignancy in her concern for her sons’ wellbeing is that no one ever seemed to care about hers very much. Her father was a compulsive thief and drug addict; her mother, the same. Wherever this parental feeling came from, it doesn’t appear to have been inherited.
When she first entered the public consciousness half her adult lifetime ago, Jade generated a heated debate about the innately cruel nature of reality TV and the Big Brother format, in particular. Her malapropisms have become legendary: she thought the Mona Lisa was painted by “Pistachio” and that “East Angular” was a faraway land. She made us feel good about ourselves, superior.
Second time around, it was even worse. When she uttered the now infamous phrase “Shilpa Poppadom” in reference to the Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty after a row over a stock cube, she was held up as the ugly face of British underclass racism. Riots ensued on the sub-continent.
Jade wasn’t deflected: she had sown her oats and carried on, launching perfume and offering apologies along the way. And giving interviews, always endless interviews.
It was a particularly 21st-century form of penance, but then every aspect of her too-short life has been lived behind glass walls. She even visited India, agreeing to appear on the show Bigg Boss, during which she received news of her cancer live on air. Was it another stunt? We’ll probably never know.
The watching world has been sharply divided into those who argue that the media circus around Jade’s illness is tasteless and ghoulish and those who argue she is merely communicating her version of the “cancer memoir”, providing catharsis for the sufferer and the public alike. Jade is merely doing the same thing in her own inimitable unstylish way, her defenders say.
Some of the coverage is still resolutely harsh. It’s hard not to conclude, for instance, that she is being pilloried for having the wrong kind of cancer. Breast cancer and prostate cancer are for the middle classes.
But poor Jade has cervical cancer, a sure sign of an early sexual start, so-called experts were on hand to explain. How dare the poor enjoy themselves behind the bike sheds, let alone breed, the snobbier end of the press wails?
Mostly, though, they just lick their lips at the thought of the 20-page spread the minute she does indeed finally go to her maker. Will she be anointed the “new Princess Diana” when she finally succumbs to her cancer? It seems, of course, a bizarre comparison. Jade and Diana are not only from different sides of the track but opposite poles of the social universe. But are they really so different? Hasn’t advertising one’s deficiencies, even defining oneself by a sickness or disease, become the order of the day?
Wasn’t Princess Diana at least as famous for having been bulimic as she was for any of her good works? And is it such a bad thing anyway if it draws attention to previously unmentionable illnesses or conditions? The personal is the political and the private is the public, right?
AS WITH everything, though, you can have too much of a good thing. There is a sick game on the web called deathlist.com where you make lists of famous people and see which dies first. Socialite Dai Llewellyn and actress Wendy Richard already have skulls and crossbones next to their names. It really doesn’t get much lower.
How long before we see the launch of Goodbye! magazine, featuring exclusive pics of celebrity funerals? Maybe it already exists somewhere on the worldwide web.
But everything has its level. Yes, at first, it felt gruesome and voyeuristic to watch Jade gradually slipping away in the same way she arrived, on the flat screen. While watching, though, it became clear that being filmed has given her some kind of purpose, perhaps even some inner peace. She says she’s “ready to go to heaven”.
That’s not something most of us would want to have imagined saying when we were just 27 years old. Rituals help to contain the loss and the fears of the living and Jade is undergoing her own particular rite of passage.
By dying Jade has found the bad girl’s ultimate route to redemption. In so doing, she has done something to correct our self-deceiving denial of death.
Watching the spectacularly ill-educated one-time dental nurse from south London slowly move from this world to the next, a tiny voice inside all of us asks: “What, God forbid, if it were me? How would I have played it?”
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