In August 1776 crowds gathered outside the Edinburgh home of the philosopher
David Hume. The author of A Treatise of Human Nature was a religious sceptic
and people waited with a sense of suppressed excitement to see whether the
“great infidel” would recant as he succumbed to cancer.
Yesterday, more than 300 miles, 200 years and a world away from the Georgian
idea of celebrity, another crowd was gathered outside the doors of the Royal
Marsden hospital in southwest London. This time a phalanx of paparazzi
waited for any pictorial crumbs that might fall from the table as Jade Goody
was accepted into the Christian faith.
Before she dies — also from cancer – the 27-year-old decided she would like to
be christened alongside her two sons, Bobby, 5, and Freddy, 4. It was the
reality TV star’s wish that the boys “get to know Jesus so they can keep in
touch with me when I’m in heaven”.
Goody’s condition has deteriorated so much in the past few days that she was
too ill to leave the Marsden, so the ceremony, originally planned to take
place at a church near her home with a party for 50 to follow, was carried
out in the hospital chapel.
Although a small affair, it will be another scoop for OK! magazine, which
bought the rights to her wedding to Jack Tweed two weeks ago, part of a
package of deals which have made Goody’s lingering death worth a total of
£1.4m.
Like every other aspect of Goody’s approaching death, it is sure to give us
the sort of ghoulish frisson that must have shivered through the people who
awaited Hume’s demise – although on a much greater scale.
What these two very public deaths tell us about Britain – and how the concept
of fame has morphed from reverence for a great thinker to a girl from
Bermondsey celebrated for her ignorance – almost goes without saying.
Goody’s exposure of every detail of her treatment for cancer, from receiving
her diagnosis on live television to pictures last week of her hooked up to
an oxygen machine after an emergency operation to clear an obstruction in
her bowel, is taking us into a realm that people in Hume’s day could not
have imagined.
Goody, the daughter of a drug addict who was brought up in poverty, might seem
the product of a very British underclass culture but her story – part soap
opera, part car crash – has the world hooked. Her image has not only graced
the front page of The Sun newspaper every day since February 14 but she has
also been on the front page of the New York Times.
“Oprah Winfrey wants her on the show. Larry King wants her on the show. I’ve
got his people ringing every day to see if she’s up to doing it – and that
show goes to 200 countries,” said Max Clifford, Goody’s PR man who has been
juggling visits to the Marsden with fielding requests for interviews and
information from as far afield as Argentina.
“It’s been amazing. I had a film crew from France in the office yesterday and
Italians the day before. Simon Cowell [the pop impresario] called me from
Los Angeles and said everyone was talking about Jade. She’s the first person
on reality TV to become world famous.”
What is it that we and now the rest of the world find so compelling? And what
does it say about us?
EVER since Goody walked into the Big Brother house seven years ago we have
been both appalled and fascinated by her. The then 21-year-old dental nurse
from southeast London, who famously thought “East Angular” was abroad,
quickly became an unlikely cover girl.
Mark Frith, who was editing Heat magazine, saw her popularity as a reaction to
the “retouched photos and copy-approved interviews” that had become the
celebrity staples of the 1990s. But even he was surprised at the bidding war
that ensued when Jade came out of the Big Brother house. “Texts showed the
increasing amounts being put forward: £10,000, then £20,000, then it just
kept going,” he recalled.
Heat eventually did a deal in conjunction with the News of the World for a
six-figure sum.
“We gave her a make-over and put her on the cover, accompanied by the words
‘Jade’s amazing new look’. That issue sold over 640,000 copies, Heat’s
highest sale.”
She remains Britain’s leading cover girl for the simple reason that she is
guaranteed to sell newspapers or magazines, ahead of the pop stars Cheryl
Cole and Victoria Beckham.
Gigi Eligoloff, the senior producer of Big Brother who overruled sceptical
colleagues to get Goody on screen, says the quality that makes her so
heart-stopping now is what she spotted in the loudmouthed girl who
electrified everyone in the Big Brother audition room.
“She’s got no filter,” she said. “Most people, at least when they become
famous, have some part of themselves that they keep back, something that’s
private. Not Jade. It’s her openness that’s so compelling.”
As a character she set a template for the mix that makes Big Brother so
popular, which explains the interest from abroad. “People may not know her
but they know Big Brother,” said Eligoloff. “I bet every country’s got its
Jade.”
There was also something likeable about Goody, an “essential sweetness” with
which people have always sympathised. Even as a dental nurse she had already
risen above a rotten childhood: she later recalled rolling joints, aged
five, for her mother Jackiey, who was a thief and a “clipper”, someone who
pretends to organise a rendezvous with a prostitute but instead runs off
with the money. Jade was left to do most of the cooking and cleaning. Her
father, a heroin addict, had already left home.
Later there was something genuine about her tearful apologies for her racist
remarks to Shilpa Shetty, the Indian actress. She knew her lucrative career
was all but ruined. Her perfume, Shh, which had been a bestseller, was
withdrawn from the shelves. She agreed to appear on Bigg Boss, the Indian
version of Big Brother, as part of her atonement. It was while filming the
show that she discovered she had cervical cancer.
Who could have scripted this last tragic chapter? “She’s young, she’s got lots
of money, she’d got two young boys and she’s dying,” said Eligoloff. “I
wouldn’t be surprised if her story’s turned into a movie.”
The “Jade effect” that has produced increasing requests for smear tests among
young women has now extended to cancer charities and hospices. The St Clare
hospice near Harlow, Essex, where Goody stayed last weekend, had 60,000 hits
on its website in a day, as many as it would usually get in a month.
A spokesman said its teams collecting money on the streets last week had been
unusually successful: “A lot more people were coming up to talk to them and
putting a few extra quid in the tin.”
Calls to Macmillan Cancer Support helplines increased by 50% on the Monday
after Goody’s wedding.
Carolan Davidge, brand director of Cancer Research UK, said: “Jade has done a
huge amount to raise awareness of the importance of cervical screening. If
Jade’s experience motivates people to contribute to our cervical cancer
research, we hope more lives could be saved in the future.”
Although Goody has been open about the fact that she is sharing her death
throes with the world for money – to pay for her children’s education – some
believe she is also performing a public service.
“We have already broken the taboo about cancer, but this is the first time
that we’ve seen in such a public way the move from active care to palliative
care and eventually to death,” said Karol Sikora, professor of cancer
medicine at London’s Imperial College School of Medicine.
“Western society finds it very difficult to talk about death. The anxiety
people have about the Jade Goody story, their sense that it is a bit
mawkish, is really a cover for the fear they have of death and dying.”
The Goody story has certainly made the agony of dying from cervical cancer
more than clear. The rawness of some of the pictures of her in distress have
been difficult to look at. Her tender devotion to her two young boys – soon
to be without a mother – could not fail to touch.
“It’s fantastic the way she is dealing with it,” said David Praill, chief
executive of Help the Hospices. “But there’s a part of me that thinks: oh
dear, is it really good for Jade to have all those cameras following her?
Perhaps it is a way of escaping from the reality of her situation.”
GOODY’S public deterioration is a spectacle that makes many uneasy: James
Landale, BBC News’s chief political correspondent, who is suffering from
cancer himself, encapsulated the feeling last week when he said that the
“public circus” around Goody was “perilously close” to becoming a form of
entertainment.
In Landale’s eyes, those who examine Goody’s picture every day to see if she
has lost weight or speculated on how long she’s got are like spectators
“eating a picnic at a public hanging”.
When Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, wrote Therapy
Culture, his scathing analysis of a post-Diana Britain in which people were
seeing the problems of everyday life through a prism of emotion – where
phrases like “emotional damage” and “scarred for life” evoked a sense of
powerlessness – he noted that newspaper columns such as those by John
Diamond and Ruth Picardie, who both wrote about having cancer, had become a
form of entertainment for the middle class.
“This is the logical conclusion,” he said, “though Diamond and Picardie were
self-revealing rather than confessional and their writing could be seen as a
high point of journalism for very cultured people. This is a parallel
development: pornography to their erotic art.
“It’s a strange phenomenon. You cannot take your eyes off it, though the idea
that she is helping people is really an affectation – it’s like publishing
pornography and arguing that it’s good because it teaches what people’s
bodies look like.”
Furedi also believes that the blow-by-blow coverage of Goody’s demise – at her
own instigation – is an extension of the urge to put personal details about
yourself on websites such as Facebook and the line between public and
private is dangerously blurred.
“Young people are increasingly socialised into a culture where they haven’t
learnt to distinguish between what you do in the privacy of your own home
with your loved ones and how you behave in a world of strangers,” Furedi
said.
GOODY has at least tried to ensure there will be no unseemly wrangle over the
fortune she has amassed. She is leaving everything – her house and money –
to her children, who will live with their father, the television presenter
Jeff Brazier. Her new husband, Tweed – who added to the drama of last week
when he was convicted of assaulting a taxi driver – will inherit nothing.
“He wants everything to go to the boys,” she has said.
Her proudest boast is that she has put in trust enough money to pay her sons’
school fees until they are 16. “I’m ignorant,” she told Clifford, “but I
don’t want them to be – I want my boys to have the chances and opportunities
I never had.”
“Many of the celebrities I’ve worked with over the years are interested in one
person at the end of the day – themselves,” said Clifford. “Jade has
genuinely done all this for her kids. She’s not academic, but in her own way
she’s very bright.
“It might seem a strange word to use about Jade Goody, but there’s something
incredibly noble about the girl.”
Nobility: now there’s a concept Hume would have understood.
‘It’s very Victorian, this obsession with death’
Martin Amis, novelist
“I met her once in a TV studio and found her very sweet, articulate and warm.
We are famously great deniers of death. Saul Bellow [the American author]
once wrote that death is the dark backing a mirror needs before anything is
clear to us and anything that makes us look more closely into that mirror
puts us on better terms with death.”
Joan Bakewell, broadcaster and writer
“Her decision, which I thought she expressed rather poignantly, implied that
the best things that had happened to her in her life had been acted out in
public, so why should she not go ahead and stay with that. I find that
terribly affecting. I mean it’s a terrible admission to make. She has a
spontaneous knack of hitting all the right media buttons. She has a gift for
it. People don’t want bureaucratic speak [about cancer] — they want it from
a real person.”
AC Grayling, philosopher
“Absolutely anything which encourages people to donate money and take better
care of their health is a very good thing. However, I have been a little
appalled by this obsessive relationship we have seen between Jade Goody, the
press and that section of the public which has an open-mouthed interest in
this story. They all feed off one another. One does really have to raise a
very big question mark over this form of avid voyeurism and reflect a little
on that.”
Rosie Boycott, writer
“We have always been rather feeble about death. Our society is so obsessed
with youth and pushing death away and not thinking about it. But with more
and more people going to Dignitas [the Swiss assisted-suicide clinic] we are
increasingly coming face to face with death, which is a good thing. Jade has
brought death very close to us. In some ways it is the ultimate twist of the
celebrity tale but she is also a human being. If I was in her shoes and
could make a million quid to leave to my sons I would think to hell with
what everybody else thinks and go for it.”
Jilly Cooper, novelist
“Half of me thinks ‘yuck’, quite frankly. John Diamond [the journalist]
described dying of cancer, but the written word made it more private. With
this it’s so very public – the hallucinations, the rows with cabbies – I
can’t bear to watch it. Of course it’s very Victorian, this obsession with
death. We are living again in a Victorian age where we are not allowed to
misbehave. We’re not allowed to smoke, drink too much or pinch people’s
bottoms in the office or do anything that’s much fun. This is a reaction to
that.”
John Humphrys, writer and broadcaster
“Death was once a part of our lives. When I was growing up it would have been
a rare month that there wasn’t drawn blinds at some house in the
neighbourhood. I’m not sure that people have really been affected by Jade
Goody’s approaching death, although the red tops have made a huge fuss about
it. If I were in her position and had the opportunity to make some money for
dependent kids, I might do the same thing, but I think what’s been going on
says far more about our celebrity culture than it does about death.”
