Jade Goody

The short life of Jade Goody – I am already getting tired of the ‘tragic’ cliché – seems to me to tell us a lot about ourselves.

Reality TV may be said to have its roots in John Osborne’s ‘Look back in Anger’ of 1956. Until then, and indeed since Aristotle, drama had been about the aristocratic or at least the slightly posh. An ancient dramatist would have been amazed that the poor might want to see something about themselves – surely they got that sort of thing every day?

In a straight line through Coronation Street we seem to have demanded more and more of this stuff and Reality TV has been, so far, the latest development. You live with, and interact with, ordinary people, then go home, turn on the TV and see...ordinary people. The concept has always seemed bizarre to me.

Jade Goody, as one of the ‘star’ protagonists of this genre, seemed to me an almost extreme example of what the creators were trying to achieve. Ignorant and foul mouthed, she dumped the worst element of modern society right into our TV dinners. But, for the creators and producers of Reality TV, the ghastly people who felt we needed or deserved this, Jade Goody had a surprise. She made, as is more common with ordinary people than the bien pensant imagine, a racist remark. There were tens of thousands of complaints: ‘we paid to see ordinary people behaving in an ordinary way. How can it be that one of them said something the politically correct disapprove of? Surely she should be stupid, uneducated and like coloured people?’

Now, amongst the chattering classes who run the BBC, a racist remark puts you down at the level of Josef Fritzl. Perhaps worse: he only abused people of his own family. The calamity was so bad that the Prime Minister, holder of an office which hitherto had been regarded as deserving some respect, felt he had to meet the insulted party, an Indian actress.

So how is it that Jade Goody is now anointed with the spikenard of public sympathy? The short answer is that she employed Max Cliffiord. The even shorter answer is that she died. Max was on a no-brainer here: a consultancy with an end date.

Jade Goody decided to end her days in the spotlight and paid a consultant to make sure she did. She did it, she admitted, for money, so that whilst she was ignorant her sons would not be. Creditable, if not quite saintly. The press, the investors in this ghastly drama (one magazine brought out its Jade Goody Tribute edition while she was still alive), are now trying to make out that she was conducting some cancer awareness campaign, and that she was ‘brave’. And of course our cynical, self-serving Prime Minister was immediately back in on the act with an oleaginous statement.

‘Brave’ means understanding the risks and freely deciding to take those risks. It applies, for example, to servicemen who risk their lives for comrades. Inoperable cancer, by contrast, is a fait accompli. Facing it, for money for your children, does not make you brave.

I am sympathetic to Jade Goody. The million or two earned will comfortably achieve, if her children have the right guardian, the aim of letting them make what they can of themselves. I condemn only the press and the readership. There is talk of breaking a taboo, and I can’t help thinking that some things should remain taboo. It has been an unsightly business.

If we’re lucky, the public mawkishness which began with the death of the Princess of Wales at the beginning of the boom over a decade ago, will end with this and the recession.