Earnings £1.5m; perfume outsells David Beckham’s; becomes Heat magazine’s bestselling cover star ever
You would be hard pressed to find a better poster girl for the cult of modern British celebrity than the rags-to-riches figure of Jade Goody. Jade is the prole’s revenge. Catapulted into the limelight by the glittering achievement of coming fourth on Big Brother, she has democratised the idea of what fame now is.
In a post-Goody society, celebrity is no longer just for the celebrated. It is for anybody who can empathise with the man — or woman — on the Clapham omnibus. Only Jordan rivals Jade as the epitome of what fame in Britain has become. Tellingly, both were thrown into the flight path of celebrity by nudity: Jordan for the endless exposure of her enormous, augmented breasts; Jade for the accidental blip of baring her “kebab” (“Yes, it still haunts me”) on Big Brother 3. Since that moment, Jade has slotted seamlessly into the tabloid nation; she has played the game, cashed the cheque and sold the perfume.
The 25-year-old former Bermondsey dental nurse is the progeny of a one-armed lesbian mother and an abusive, heroin-addict father. Momma Goody, Jackiey, has become a celebrity on the back of her daughter’s ascent, and is currently undergoing a rigorous bout of plastic surgery on the television show Extreme Makeover (though, sadly, the budget didn’t stretch to restoring her lost arm).
Make no mistake, Jade has overcome an uncommon amount of personal hardship to reach her position in the new celebrity canon. She has become a cheery kind of Vera Lynn for Trisha’s Britain. She is the Madonna of chav, the Shakespeare of inarticulacy and the Picasso of Fake Bake. Her influence can be felt in the comic characters of Little Britain (Vicky “Yeah but no but” Pollard) and Catherine “Bovvered” Tate. She is also the new emblem of escape for the British underclass. As she says:“I think a lot of women who don’t look beautiful all the time, or have what the papers call yo-yo weight, yeah, they probably do look at me and think, ‘That could be me!’”
Sitting outside the set of her new television show, her second for Living TV (the first, Jade’s Salon, was a rare home-grown hit for the network, which treats her like showbiz royalty), Jade explains her unique position on the celebrity travolator. “I am famous for being famous. I’m famous for being a loser, really. I often get comments like that, and I totally agree with them. I’m not an amazing musician or a great writer, and a lot of people don’t get noticed for those things any more because people like me come in and sort of bombard fame. They’ve worked hard to get where they are. I haven’t got a great talent. I am just lucky.”
If there is one moment for Jade that encapsulates her rise to public prominence, it was walking into a department store and seeing her face everywhere. “There was one time in Selfridges,” she says, “when I just walked in and my book was piled high all around me, and my face was just surrounding me.” This was all the more poignant given her previous relationship with the Oxford Street retail mammoth. “I didn’t used to be allowed in. I got done for shoplifting there. And now they’re selling my book.” A moment, for sure.
Her bestselling autobiography turned out to be the cherry on the cake of her commercial triumphs. Aside from the TV shows, there are fitness videos, personal appearances, at-home-with picture deals with celebrity magazines, for whom she provides a kind of everyman lifeline, and now the ultimate benchmark of modern fame — her own aroma (£19.95 at Superdrug).
I ask her what Jade Goody smells like, and she assumes I have the wrong end of the stick. “It’s not actually a smell of me, like. It’s not my BO or my feet cheese or nothing.” When I ask if she had any kind of approval over how she would like to be bottled, she looks affronted at the suggestion that she wouldn’t. “I picked some of the rose petals myself, and sat in the factory with a little blue hat on. It wasn’t like J.Lo or Britney or nothing. I don’t know whether Victoria Beckham picked her own smell, but I can’t imagine she sat in the factory bottling it up.”
Jade isn’t sure exactly who might want to smell like her — or “buy into her lifestyle brand”, to use the marketing schtick — but she knows of at least one celebrity fan: Coleen McLoughlin. “Coleen!” she says, elated. “She uses it. She does. I met her at V Festival and she’s a lovely, lovely girl. She was with two of her down-to-earth mates, and I was with two of my down-to-earth mates, and we just got on really well. My perfume was in my mate’s bag, ’cos I wear it. And they nicked it. I had to buy a new bottle at the airport from duty-free.”
The common reading of Jade — if common is not too damning a word — is that she has become celebrated for all the wrong virtues; that her want of social grace, poor education (“I only went to school for the gossip”) and lack of any perceivable talent represents a new nadir for Heat culture. But none of that allows for her extreme shrewdness. She knows exactly what being Jade Goody involves, and is never less than perky in delivering it. Unlike other celebrities who trade off their iridescent personalities — Morrissey, say, or Stephen Fry — she has yet to slip into self-parody.
Each medium she tries lifts her up a notch. Her new show, Jade’s PA, for example, is a shameless rip-off of The Apprentice in which Jade auditions a succession of hopefuls whose ultimate goal is to work for her (“And sort out my congestion-charge fines! Eight grand, I’m not kidding”). The comparison to Sir Alan Sugar — East End council-estate kid done good — is a canny seed to plant in people’s minds. It takes a particularly deft stroke to balance the contradictions of being a little bit thick while being clever enough to run a business dedicated entirely to being yourself.
Jade gets this. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “When I first came into money, I’d never had it before, and I did go out on shopping sprees, and I did all those things that you want to do with money when you ain’t got none. But it didn’t last long. I wanted to be sensible, and I’ve invested in property and got my business. And although I do come across quite silly, and I can be quite daft, I can be quite clever.” She pauses, having posited this. “You’re looking at me like I’m barking, but I can be quite clever.” I am actually looking at her like she is telling the truth.
Maybe Jade is an idiot savant, but she genuinely understands the relationship between the famous and the non-famous. “You know what it is?” she asks. “People might think that their lives are quite dull, so you want to talk about other people who you think are more interesting than you. It’s not very nice, but it’s a true fact. The whole fascination with celebrities is wanting to be that person, because you think they’ve got the most amazing life. Victoria Beckham, for example, has got everything that a woman could want. She’s not ugly, right, but she’s got the most incredible fashion sense. She’s got a gorgeous husband and great kids and the life that every woman wants. That’s why, when reality hit the fan, and it turned out their life was just the same as everybody else’s, and David had had some flings, people were genuinely shook up. There ain’t that perfect couple out there. People were just looking for it. They needed to have a fairy tale to look up to, to think, ‘I wanna be like that!’ But you know what? There ain’t no fairy tale.” No, Jade. For you, it rattles on apace.
Jade’s PA starts on Living TV tomorrow at 10pm
