Who is Jade Goody?
Jade Goody became known to the public in 2002 when she took part in the third series of Big Brother and became the 'gossip' what everyone had assumed would be 15 minutes. Both Jades parents were drug addicts and she soon became irresistible to the media. They denounced her for her loudness ("Lob the gob!"), for being overweight (references to "Miss Piggy" abounded) and, after a now-infamous conversation with another housemate about whether "East Angular" was abroad, for being thick. Many of the broadsheets deplored her vulgarity and the high profile she was gaining despite her lack of talent.
By 2007 she had created something from nothing so successfully, Because of this she was invited to take part in that year's Celebrity Big Brother. The show that made her, however, was almost to break her. She became embroiled in the racist bullying of fellow contestant and Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, referring to her as "Shilpa Poppadom" and "Shilpa Fuckawallah."
Her actions looked bad and it was bad. The media started tearing down the woman they had built up. Goody's gob, the absence of a filter between her mouth and her brain that had been so instrumental to her popularity, now appeared to have undone her.
Goody was diagnosed with cervical cancer in August 2008. It spread rapidly and she died at home and in her sleep. Leaving behind her two sons and a husband, Jack Tweed, whom she married four weeks before her death.Here is part of an article that is suggesting why Jade Goody was so popular with the public:
"Because despite the supposed democratisation of television, the truly uneducated, those marked by true poverty and deprivation, rarely appear in our light entertainment schedules. And suddenly, there was Jade, an unapologetic and unadorned symbol of all sorts of uncomfortable truths that we choose to face through the occasional well-chosen documentary.
What the media reaction showed was quite how far we had yet to travel down the road towards social equality. Because Jade wasn't thick. The street smarts she would show in managing her subsequent career would be proof of that. She was woefully uneducated, but damning the school system that left her unable to decide whether Rio de Janeiro was a place or a person wouldn't have made such good copy. First she was failed by her family, then by the school system and then by the collective imagination.
Then things took a turn for the better. The broadsheets got bored or gave up in weary resignation, and the red tops began to change their tune.
Partly it was because they overshot the mark and their anti-Jade tone became so strident that it started to create a backlash towards her. And partly it was because they realised that she fascinated people and that the longer she stayed in the house, the more papers she would shift.
Why did Jade exert a fascination? At one level, as she would say herself, she offered ordinary people hope that they too could become celebrities. "They look at me and think, 'If she can do it, I can do it'." The press underestimated the power of this identification.
Again, because they are so rarely seen in public life it is easy to forget that the people in this country for whom Jade was a peer, not an affront, are in the vast majority. Maybe they won't have quite her litany of childhood abuses and difficulties, but her experience was still closer to the experience of the many than the lives we usually see held up for examination in public.
On another level, it was because Jade herself was a compelling presence. She was unfailingly natural, guileless, open, funny and charismatic. It is tempting to say that she had star quality – a domestic, downmarket version of what we usually mean by that, but star quality nevertheless. Certainly it has proved impossible for others to replicate so far.
That Goody was incapable of artifice or evasion was at first her greatest strength, resulting in continued popularity and lucrative deals for magazine columns, fragrances, exercise DVDs and ghosted autobiographies that netted her an estimated £4m over the next five years or so."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/22/lucy-mangan-on-jade-goody
"Jade Goody has her own place in the history of television and, while it's significant, it's nothing to be proud of. Her death is as sad as the death of any young person, but it's not the passing of a martyr or a saint or, God help us, Princess Di," -
Sir Michael Parkinson- The Telegraph 07 Apr 2009
"When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death what we're left with is a woman who came to represent all that's paltry and wretched about Britain today. She was brought up on a sink estate, as a child came to know both drugs and crime, was barely educated, ignorant and puerile. Then she was projected to celebrity by Big Brother and from that point on became a media chattel to be manipulated and exploited till the day she died." -http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraphtv/5035803/VIDEO-EMBED-The-rise-of-Jade-Goody.html
11:48am UK, Tuesday April 07, 2009
Sir Michael Parkinson has savaged the publicity surrounding Jade Goody - saying she was no Princess Diana, and represented "all that is wretched about Britain today".
The chat show legend made his remarks just days after the reality TV star was buried at a church in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, with giant screens relaying the service to tearful crowds outside.
"I feel sorry for the poor girl. I think she was totally exploited from the moment she went on Big Brother," he told Sky News Online.
"I thought it was very poor, I thought the people who did that should be ashamed of themselves.
"I have been a journalist for 60 years and I am appalled by what's happened to my profession, she was exploited mercilessly by the media."
Jade's funeral
Thousands lined the streets and left floral tributes to pay their respects to the 27-year-old as her funeral cortege made its way from Bermondsey, south London, where she was born.
Newspaper reports said the outpouring of grief and sea of flowers had echoes of Princess Diana's funeral.
But Sir Michael said: "Jade Goody has her own place in the history of television and, while it's significant, it's nothing to be proud of.
"Her death is as sad as the death of any young person, but it's not the passing of a martyr or a saint or, God help us, Princess Di."
The 74-year-old added: "When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death what we're left with is a woman who came to represent all that's paltry and wretched about Britain today.
"She was brought up on a sink estate, as a child came to know both drugs and crime, was barely educated, ignorant and puerile.
"Then she was projected to celebrity by Big Brother and from that point on became a media chattel to be manipulated and exploited till the day she died."
He added: "What bothers me is that the media first of all recommended we hate Jade Goody - 'a slapper with a face like a pig', remember? - and shortly thereafter tried to persuade us to celebrate her."
He also pointed to role models that people should aspire to - rather than people who had just become famous through reality TV shows.
"Certain people gift you ambition," he added.
"When I saw Tom Graveney I wanted to be a professional cricketer. When I first set eyes on Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca I wanted to marry her.
"And seeing Alan Whicker on television gave me the idea that a life in telly might be fun," he said, adding: "One out of three ain't bad."
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