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British Big Brother: Jade Goody

zzzz · 2009-02-19T22:58:10+00:00

In reply to: [hr]LONDON — Before television shined its warped light on her, Jade Goody was surely destined for a life of hardship and obscurity. Crude-talking, hard-drinking, overweight, barely educated, in debt, the child of drug addicts, she appeared on the reality show “Big Brother” in 2002 as a kind of token lowlife. But something about Ms. Goody, then 21, struck a chord — even if it was a patronizing one — in a restless nation searching for ways to allay its millennial boredom. She became a bona fide media star, a working-class Paris Hilton. Britons eagerly devoured every detail of her life, no matter how banal. They worked out to her exercise videos, bought her perfume, read her autobiography and, when she made racist remarks about an Indian actress on “Celebrity Big Brother” in 2007, angrily turned against her. Now they are preparing to watch her die. Ms. Goody, who has two young sons, learned she had cervical cancer last August, on camera, as she appeared in the Indian version of “Big Brother.” The cancer has since spread to her liver, bowel and groin; on Friday, her doctors told her there was nothing more they could do. And then she told the British public. ...Now that she is dying, many of the same papers are now squirming with unease at their collusion in the endless building up, knocking down and exploitation of a woman they always counted on to increase their own sales. ...Some are arguing that Jade, as everyone calls her, should reclaim some of the dignity she sold years ago by doing her dying at home, alone. “Please, please, please demand some privacy now, for your own sake and your children’s,” Jane Ennis, former editor of the celebrity magazine Now, where Ms. Goody had a column and appeared frequently on the cover, wrote in The Daily Mail. After the racist remarks that led to the debacle on “Celebrity Big Brother,” the magazine printed an article entitled, “Jade We Hate You.” The alternative school of thought is that Ms. Goody, far from being a pawn, has seized control for the first time, cannily leveraging the only commodity she has ever had — her life — to secure her children’s future. “I know some people don’t like what I’m doing, but at this point, I don’t really care what other people think,” she told The News of the World. In reply to: [hr] The Link