What does the life and death of Jade Goody say about the society that made her a celebrity?If there’s one rule British society holds sacred, it’s ‘know your place.’
That’s why we’ve had such a bi-polar relationship with Jade Goody, a celebrity we unwittingly created in our own image.
When Jade first burst onto British television in '02, shedding clothes and ‘flashing her kebab,’ she was vilified for being fat, common, classless and ignorant – and Britain loved her for it.
Here was a barely literate, council estate brat who thought that ‘East Angular’ was a foreign country. She was the perfect reality TV celebrity – one that almost everybody in the country could feel superior to.
Poor old Jade represented the very worst of British society - and that enabled all of us to feel secure and smug enough to ‘grant’ Jade celebrity status – the only Big Brother contestant to have done so in the decade-long history of the show.And for a woman with no discernible talents, Jade Goody certainly made a go of being famous.
Between Big Brothers, she was rarely out of the pages of OK! and heat magazine. At 24, she released her bestselling autobiography. A year later, her branded perfume ‘Shh…’ was outsold only by those of Victoria Beckham and Kylie Minogue.
Jade Goody’s celebrity status earned her an estimated £8 million and a place in heat magazine’s list of the 25 Most Influential People in the World. Not bad for a woman who couldn’t even pronounce ‘influential.’
But it’s at that point that things turned ugly.
Five years after her debut in the top-rated program, Jade Goody returned to the ‘celebrity’ edition of Big Brother with her mother and boyfriend – and in the words of publicist Max Clifford, ‘ruined a very lucrative career.’
Teaming up with fellow featherweight celebrities Jo O’Meara and Danielle Lloyd, Jade Goody launched a single-minded crusade of cruelty towards a fellow contestant; Bollywood beauty Shilpa Shetty.
“She makes my skin crawl,” Goody sneered, forgetting that she was being watched by millions of viewers. “I’ve seen how she goes in and out of people’s arseholes, that Shilpa fuckawiller, Shilpa Poppadom, whatever the fuck her name is…”
It wasn’t the implied racism that made Goody’s behavior so disgusting to us (although that was the excuse most politically correct tabloids hid behind.) It was the fact that Jade demonstrated the same sort of snobbery that had inspired us to elevate her to stardom in the first place.After A-Team alumni Dirk Benedict, Shilpa Shetty was perhaps the only ‘true’ celebrity on so-called ‘Celebrity’ Big Brother. Effortlessly beautiful, genuinely talented and with a real career to call her own, Shilpa Shetty manifested everything that manufactured celebrities like Jade Goody and Danielle Lloyd found threatening – and, like any good Brit, they conspired to cut that threat down to size.
I was one of millions of viewers who saw her behavior and squirmed in my seat, remembering my own experiences being ‘picked on’ – as long ago as at school, and as recently as in the workplace.
But I also squirmed because Jade’s insecurity was a reflection of Britain’s insecurity. The way she acted on screen was an uncomfortable reminder of how British society tends to treat anybody who dares to ignore their ‘place’ in the pecking order.
If Jade represented the worst of British society, that ‘worst’ included a propensity for bullying, bigotry, insecurity and meanness. The fact that we’d made Jade Goody a celebrity in the first place now reflected very badly on us.
To Jade’s credit, she was utterly remorseful when she was evicted from the Big Brother house, admitting that she was ‘disgusted with herself’ when watching footage from the show. But could she ever find a way to make amends to us?
Judging from magazine polls, you’d think that she couldn’t. Goody was practically a pariah. They were even burning effigies of her in south Asia – an honor normally reserved exclusively for politicians and presidents.
But now Jade’s suddenly back in the spotlight; her cancer diagnosis is a tragic twist of fate that seems to have turned her career around. Ironically, ever since Jade heard the news, I’m sure that ‘career’ has been the last thing on her mind. As far as she’s concerned, she’s just a mum looking at a death sentence – coming to the realization that she’ll never see her two little boys grow up.
But as far as Britain’s concerned, Jade’s tragic circumstances have cut the upstart bully back down to size. Now we can feel secure enough to embrace her once again; and we have done, wholeheartedly.
The papers that originally created Jade’s celebrity status, before vilifying her for it, are running stories about her dignity and bravery. OK! magazine even paid six figures for exclusive pictures of her wedding to boyfriend Jack Tweed.
That Jade’s back in the spotlight during her tragic, final months says more about British society than it ever will about her.
