one last eviction

‘It looks like she ruined a very lucrative career.’ These are the words of celebrity publicist and all-round manipulative sleezeball, Max Clifford, following Jade Goody’s eviction from the Celebrity Big Brother house in January 2007. True enough, after receiving 82% of the public vote, it seemed that Jade’s status as lifestyle guru, perfume magnate and critically acclaimed autobiographer had come to an abrupt end. And perhaps rightly so. After all, there was the whole matter of her obscenely inappropriate and deeply ignorant conduct in calling a fellow housemate of Indian extraction a ‘Poppadom’. But not to fear, she’s got cancer. And if there’s one thing that eclipses all previous sin in the eyes of the public, it’s a terminal disease. Well played, Jade!

I am not denying that it is tremendously sad for a young wife and mother to lose her life. Indeed, only an obscenely inappropriate and deeply ignorant person would do that (ring any bells?) But what I am also not denying is this woman’s past. ‘The past is the past!’ I hear you yell. Well yes…but…fuck off! I want to rant.

First things first, what is it that she is actually famous for? I, like most of the country, had completely forgotten how the Goody-phenomena began. However a quick search on Wikipedia reminded me that she was initially brought to the public’s attention for being incredibly thick.

Now I’m no snob. I realise that not everyone knows that Cambridge is not in London, or that East Anglia is not a separate country. Or that Saddam Hussein was not a boxer. He does sound like a boxer. But you have to be pretty special in the head when you come up with the line: ‘I had my first birthday when I was one’. Seriously?! There are home-schooled four year-olds with webbed toes in the deepest recesses of South Carolina that would be able to point out the pointlessness of that sentence.

Clearly we are not averse to granting celebrity status on the unintelligent in this country, but Jade Goody is in an entirely different league to your average moronic pop singer or drooling, stripper-beating footballer. As she herself states: ‘I am intelligent, but I let myself down because I can't speak properly or spell’. Brilliant.

Following her original appearance on Big Brother, she utilised her status as a symbol of the chav-culture that was (and unfortunately still is) spreading across Britain like an ever-increasing spew of Burberry vomit, by writing in such quality publications as Heat and OK! as well as launching her own fragrance, Shh…Jade Goody. If only.

However, the tawdry call of reality TV was not far away, and in 2007, she was once again shoved in front of the public eye, like so many images of downtown Basra, only less attractive. This time around she was accompanied by two other polished turds; her mother Jackiey Budden and her boyfriend, Jack Tweed, both of whom only served to explain how a specimen like Goody could have blended into society prior to her primary public appearance. And it was here that she demonstrated the thoroughly unfunny side to being poorly cultured and dangerously thick. Who would've thought?

I’m not going to go into detail about her conduct on Celebrity Big Brother; we all know about the racism scandal and the subsequent shit-storm it caused. But it is this moment of Goody’s life, or at least her public life, that most clearly exemplifies my point. She is, to put it plainly, a nasty piece of work. The sort of person that anyone within the civilised world would look upon with nothing but utter disdain. Therefore why should we immediately feel sorry for her now that she has cancer? Would we feel sorry for Joseph Goebbels if he was diagnosed with a terminal disease? After all, he had children (a lot). He had access to a public medium (several). And he perpetuated prejudice and the supposed differences dictated by people’s race. ‘Ahh, poor old Joey G. That’s such a tragedy. Imagine what he could have done if he had another twenty years. Let’s give him a million quid.’

Admittedly, comparing Jade Goody to Joseph Goebbels is a slight stretch (although their initials are the same; coincidence? Almost certainly). Nevertheless the point remains just as valid. She displayed a belief that a person could be labelled by her racial creed and utilised this to refer to her derogatorily. It is people as ignorant and insecure as her that justify the existence of parties such as the ever-tolerant England First Party. And we all know how lovely they are.

Ironically enough it was The Sun, the paper that now uses its pages to canonise the woman, that best summed up this episode in the celebrity’s life: ‘Jade Goody went into the Big Brother house appearing to be simply a fun-loving working-class girl canny enough to have made millions from her 15 minutes of fame. It was all a meticulously manufactured lie. She has left the house with her true personality laid bare - a vile, pig-ignorant, racist bully consumed by envy of a woman of superior intelligence, beauty and class.’

And now she’s dying. And everyone’s really sad. Yep, it is truly tragic that we will never again marvel at her divine beauty on our screens. Or that we’re unlikely to ever sample her new fragrance, which was genuinely to be called Controversial (presumably making light of her ‘cheeky’ racial slurring). Or that there’ll never be a follow up to Jade: My Autobiography (though I wouldn’t put it past her). Oh, wait. I’ve just read that she did release another one in October last year: Jade: Catch a Falling Star. Jesus Christ.

As already stated, I’m not saying that it’s fair that Jade Goody should be taken from this earth at the age of 27. What I am trying to convey is that the British public’s reaction to the news is perhaps a tad over the top, especially when taking into account her previous actions. However they've disproved Clifford; her bigoted bullying would not appear to have ended her money-making one bit. Well thank Vishnu for that!

Maybe it's time to turn the cameras off? Maybe, just maybe, they should never have been turned on?

I’ll leave you with this final thought: 80% of the population of India are Hindu. Karma’s a bitch.