Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

Jade Goody: built up, knocked down, built up again

by · 24th March, 2009

Yesterday morning, Jade Goody, the British reality TV “star”, died of ovarian cancer, so ending the last phase of her roller-coaster media career. Goody first appeared in the third edition of Big Brother in 2002, and was vilified for being loud-mouthed and ignorant, but managed to make some sort of career for herself as a “celebrity”, setting up a hairdressing salon (which flopped), producing a scent and “writing” an autobiography (or having one written). It all went pear-shaped after she went on Big Brother again, and her popularity crashed after she and two other females ganged up on the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty, calling her Shilpa F**kawallah among other things. In her final months, however, that incident seemed to have been forgotten, even though it appeared likely to finish her career at the time.

I must confess that I was not at all sympathetic to Jade Goody and pretty much every time I listened to the news I thought “has she died yet?”. I even hoped she’d die while everyone was crying over Natasha Richardson, who died in a skiing accident last week. Personally, I have an extreme low level of sympathy for people I perceive as bullies, and racist ones even more so. Her death was an hour or two late for the Sunday papers, although it was all over today’s tabloids. The Telegraph published this obituary, which repeats some of the vicious remarks the tabloids made about her and the ignorant remarks and Bush-like slips of the tongue.

However, I then read this in the Independent yesterday, in which Johann Hari (a columnist known for his sympathy for Goody, as demonstrated in this piece from 2004) spells out why she might have good reason not to be well-educated:

That summer, a string of images of white, working-class women presenting them as bestial imbeciles dominated our screens. Vicky Pollard – a single mum so thick she swaps her baby for a Westlife CD, played by a multimillionaire private schoolboy – was becoming a national icon. A chaotic single mum established Wife Swap as one of our favourite shows. Words of straightforward snobbish abuse – “chav” and “pikey” – were becoming acceptable again.

Go to any extremely unequal society, say, South Africa, or South America, and you will find a furiously suppressed sense of guilt. It’s hard not to ask, at the back of your mind, “Why am I here in this mansion, while they are in the slums?” This guilt is resolved one way: by convincing yourself that the poor are sub-human, and don’t have feelings like you and me. Oh, the people in the barrios and townships? They’re animals! They stink! They’re stupid! Jade and Vicky and the labelling of the poor as “chavs” filled that role for us. They know nothing! They are repulsive!

Nobody wanted to stop and ask: why doesn’t Jade know much? Here’s why. Her mother was a seriously disabled drug addict, so Jade didn’t go to school much because she stayed at home to look after her. From the age of five, she was in charge of doing the cooking and ironing and cleaning. Jade explained: “As early as I could remember, I’d spent my whole life trying to protect my mum, frantically hiding the stolen chequebooks she used to have lying around the house when the police barged in on one of their raids; desperately denying to the teachers at school that she’d hit me for fear of being sent to social services.”

Her father treated her even worse. He stashed a gun under her cot, and her first memory was of him shooting heroin in her bedroom, his eyes rolling back and his body juddering. Eventually, after periods in and out of prison, he was found dead from an overdose in the toilet of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. “He died without a single vein left in his body,” Jade said. “In the end, he’d injected every single part of it and all his veins had collapsed, even the ones in his penis.”

The first couple of paragraphs here are, in my opinion, nonsense. There are no real slums in the UK and the majority of real dirt-poor or homeless people are not chavs at all; some of them had jobs and homes until they suddenly lost their job, their house got repossessed (whether from them or their landlord), or their marriage broke up; others are refugees who have been shut out by this government. “Chav” means different things to different people, but most chavs are not really poor; middle-class people (many of whom are actually descended from working-class people and probably still think of themselves as such) just see them as ignorant, possibly stupid and definitely with poor taste - what they might have become themselves if they or their parents hadn’t got out of their old neighbourhoods in the 1960s or 70s. (In some places, chavs are delinquents, like the neds which are known of in Scotland.) The point is that middle-class people (and others) don’t despise chavs just for being poor. However, Hari makes a good point that Jade Goody had a really poor start in life and that the other two girls on Celebrity Big Brother were much more vicious, and racist, towards Shilpa Shetty than she was.

What I’ve found really distasteful about the whole Goody saga, however, was the way she was knocked down, built up, knocked down and then built up again to sell papers and magazines. The slurs issued against her during her first Big Brother appearance were appalling, although admittedly, some of the papers were equally vicious to other contestants (during the previous edition, the Daily Mirror styled itself the “Official Anti-Big Brother Paper” and slagged off most of the contestants over and over), but they then made a “celebrity” of her after her eviction, only to dismiss her as white trash after the Shetty episode — and then rehabilitate her yet again, such that she became next to untouchable after she was diagnosed with cancer (except for some who suggested that it was a publicity stunt). As the Telegraph’s obituary points out, for Goody to disappear from view after Celebrity BB would have cost a lot of people money, including Endemol, BB’s producers, who had recorded a new chat show pilot with her.

Something else I missed the first time round, but which I’ve read in the tributes and obituaries, is that her “thick” act was either being stage-managed, or was at least partly just an act. Among the mix-ups attributed to her is that the thought the word “abscess” referred to a “green French drink”, but absinthe is actually not that well-known, even among middle-class people - it’s gut-rot that was popular among a certain set in Paris about a century ago.

Goody had some admirers, but repulsed a lot of people and provided amusement to many others. One effect of her death has been a rise in cervical cancer screening, particularly among young working-class women, previously the least likely of women to seek screening; uptake of screening had been declining in the 25-35 age group. However, she had been ill for some time before her diagnosis last year (the news was broken to her on TV, in the Indian version of Big Brother, titled Bigg Boss and presided over by none other than Shilpa Shetty), so perhaps there should be some focus on the signs these kinds of cancer can present, which are not always obviously gynaecological (for example, irritable bowel syndrome as a symptom of ovarian cancer). The history of her illness presented here suggests that she was always prone to the illness; she had pre-cancerous cells removed from her womb twice when she was in her teens, so perhaps nothing short of a hysterectomy at that stage would have saved her, but it’s easy to say that now (and not knowing much about her; but there are people who have bits of themselves removed in their early 20s because of a predisposition to cancer).

The story might not yet be over, however; the man she married, Jack Tweed, is a criminal with whom she split up several times before deciding to marry him, and is not the father of either of her two sons, yet may acquire some responsibility for them now that Jade Goody has died. While she claimed that her media career helped to raise money to pay for their needs, one hopes she made a will, or else others, including him and her mother, may have a claim on it as well, and might not use it to pay for the boys’ schooling. They are the biggest losers in all of this, and if Jade Goody’s hopes that they will have a better childhood than she had are to be realised, it will take the intervention of someone other than Jack Tweed or Jackiey (sic) Budden.

Possibly Related Posts:


Share

You may also like...