The death of Jade Goody has had no impact on my life, nor would I expect it to have any on yours, unless you happen to be a friend or a member of the Goody family. It’s tragic to see any young mother die before she reaches her thirties, of course, and her loved ones have my sympathy. But I didn’t know Jade, we’d never met; what little relationship we had ended the night she was evicted from the Big Brother house, when – like all the contestants on the show – she ceased to be of any use to me. And while I didn’t keep up to speed with her post-BB life, it was impossible to ignore her recent, Max Clifford-publicised death.
The scenes of thousands of mourners attending her funeral on the news were intriguing: was I missing something by not having Jade in my life? The final decision to investigate came when I read Sir Michael Parkinson’s horrific comments in The Radio Times. I was appalled to read that the amiable, down-to-earth former chat show host lovably known to British TV viewers as “Parky” considered her to “represent all that’s paltry and wretched about Britain today” because “she was brought up on a sink estate, as a child came to know drugs and crime” and was “barely educated.”
Parkinson, the son of a Yorkshire coal miner, clearly feels he has transcended his working-class roots, i.e. the very background he employed to promote his affinity with the British proletariat. And as for education, if his online biography is correct then he has even less formal qualifications than I do, and I was expelled from school at the age of seventeen! His arrogant, pompous, offensive comments really angered me, so I decided to find out more about Jade, which wasn’t difficult – the Living TV channel seemed dedicated to little else this weekend.
So I’ve just watched Jade: With Love, and I’m not ashamed to say that I found it quite emotional. Some of you will no doubt be very aware of her story, and some of you may have just watched the same two-hour televisual wake that I have, but convention recommends that I now use a bit of space to give the reader a quick recap, so feel free to skip the following paragraph if you know this already.
Jade was brought up by her violent single mother, Jackiey, because her heroin addict father was usually somewhere else, either shooting up or doing time. Following an accident, her mum lost the use of her right arm, leaving five-year-old Jade to attend to the household duties. Then her mother became a junkie too, and naturally Jade’s burden became greater and education became less of a priority. She left school to work as a dental nurse, and in 2002 appeared on Channel 4’s Big Brother in the UK.
She was popular with the nation, not least because her admission of being a bit thick was rather endearing and often hilarious. She made it to the final but didn’t win, then walked out into a life of celebrity: she opened her own, doomed beauty salon, created her own perfume, etc. etc. She also managed to fit the birth of two sons in somewhere and then split up with their father, while her own estranged dad died of an overdose in a KFC toilet. Then she agreed to appear on Celebrity Big Brother (again on Channel 4), where she was accused of racism towards Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. She apologised profusely for this in any newspaper and TV show willing to allow her a platform, and I personally don’t believe she was racist. Stupid and easily led, yes, but not quite racist. Anyway, Jade – whose father was half West Indian, by the way – then agreed to go on India’s version of Big Brother to help atone for the incident. The show was introduced by none other than – you’ve guessed it – Shilpa Shetty! After only a couple of days in the house, in a foreign country with no friends or family to offer support, she received the news that she was dying of cervical cancer and was sent home. She agreed to have her final days of deterioration filmed, both as a warning to young female viewers who may need encouragement to attend smear tests, and also to leave a healthy inheritance for her two young sons. She also married her boyfriend, Jack Tweed, who seems like a shifty little shit to me. He was allowed to break his 7pm curfew – a condition of his early release from a sentence of eighteen months for assault – to marry Jade almost exactly one month before her death, which occurred on Mothering Sunday this year, a few months before her twenty-eighth birthday. Her funeral was shown live on the LivingTV channel.
Remarking on Jade’s intellectual failings is pointless. As she quite beautifully put it herself, she could try to rack her brains but she “ain’t got much to rack.” She was extremely self-aware and remained constantly inquisitive – after all, you’re never going to learn if you don’t ask questions. Her lack of knowledge was a charming source of amusement for both her friends and herself, not to mention the millions of people who enjoyed her TV shows: it was the very reason a lot of people loved her. I found myself laughing out loud many times during her documentary, and I almost wish I had kept up to speed with her career trajectory after her Big Brother eviction after all. As for her ‘sink estate’ background, I think she deserves to be applauded for her emotional strength; she will forever be a good role model for any young person born into in a similar situation of seemingly hopeless deprivation. What this recently deceased mother-of-two does not deserve is to be insulted by a miner’s son who grew up to become a Commander of the British Empire, and who seemed to gather all his information from the Daily Telegraph’s hateful obituary.
When your parents are heroin addicts and your dad hides guns under your bed, you can’t be expected to result to anything spectacular. Through no fault of her own, Jade suffered some horrific struggles all of her life until an appearance on a reality TV show gave her the chance to better herself and her family in ways she’d never dared to dream of before, and while she certainly had no discernible talent (although perhaps her singing could have been nurtured to a professional level, she was really quite impressive) what she did have was personality. And, crucially, unlike the rest of the fame-hungry, Big Brother media-whore starlets, she seemed honest and genuine. She wasn’t born anywhere near a silver-spoon and could never have earned a doctorate, but as she said herself: “I’m not the sharpest tool in the box but I’m a good friend and a good mother.” Watching her prepare her living room with Santa’s footprints in talcum snow on Christmas Eve as her boys sleep, that is impossible to deny. If that was a perfect example of ‘all that’s wretched and paltry about Britain today’, then I think we’ll all be fine.
So fuck you, Parky. May she rest in peace.
AIDAN MOFFAT
Reader Comments
April 20th, 2009
this blog gets weirder by the day.
April 20th, 2009
I have absolutely no sympathy for Jade’s kids, their mum dies on mothers day and they dont bother getting their money back for the gifts! Idiots.
April 20th, 2009
Fishsticks - I don’t care about Jade but I think your a cunt. Cunt. Wjat an immature and pathetic thign to write.
Your an idiot
April 20th, 2009
Aww sorry sweet cheeks did I upset your guardian-reading sensibilities?
April 20th, 2009
Nobody is mentioning the fucked up paradox!
After the BB race fiasco the British nation vilified her, claiming, ‘Well what can you expect from some thick slag from a council estate?’
A year later she is cast as a saint because she had cancer and died.
The British media is a mess…Charlie Brooker sums it up perfectly…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWqvWFUj51k
April 20th, 2009
What pisses me off is that the media attempted to browbeat us into all giving a shit about someone who they months before were berating for being a racist. I have as much sympathy for her and her kids as I do any stranger in a similar situation to theirs, but i strongly resent the insistence that she was somehow a special case and consequently uniquely deserving of extra attention.
The grotesque and sensationalised spectacle that her death was turned into by Max Clifford and his ilk was bound to cause a backlash and infuriate people, particularly as it was so violently pervasive. The media showed that they were willing to use a mother’s death to sell magazines, newspapers or gain viewing figures. That’s what is sickening about this not Jade herself, who despite any casual dislike I harboured toward her did not deserve what happened to her.
It just pisses me off that we are all supposed to buy into her suffering in some sort of perverse rubber-necking mourning process. Considering all the people who suffer in this country, let alone the horrific genocides, wars and famines facing the rest of the world the media’s sensationalised and singular focus on one mother’s battle with cancer seems like a disturbing masturbatorial act, in which we are told to revel in her death.
April 20th, 2009
Yes, it is impossible to deny that she was a good mother and friend.
(because we saw her do some stuff on camera)
April 20th, 2009
regardless of the fact that michael parkinson was a total cunt, jade goody is a worthless attention whore.
saying you have to be nice about dead people suggests that you shouldn’t be nice about the living. which is unfair.
i disrespected her in life, and will continue to do so in death.
April 20th, 2009
also, Victoria, next time you’re trying to call somebody an idiot… learn the difference between your and you’re.
just a suggestion.
April 20th, 2009
If i see another picture of Jade on a magazine I’m gonna slap a cockney
April 20th, 2009
Never speak ill of Parky
April 20th, 2009
Willis, that was funny. Parky is a rich wanker and Jade seemed like a nice person, just very unlucky to have lived and died in front of Max Clifford’s and Piers Morgan’s money-prying eyes.
April 21st, 2009
fuck you, aidan moffat. i agree 100% with parky.
April 21st, 2009
Bloody Parkinson , he may think he has transcended his Yorkshire, working class roots, but he never learned to stop mumbling umming and err-ing through his crap interviews of celebrities from around the globe… What bothers me is the others around Jade who made money from her death, who obviously have more intelligence than Jade ever would have but fuck all integrity or compassion. We all know what type of person Jade was but she was worlds apart from the satan cock sucking evil bastards of the likes of Max Clifford and Piers Morgan’s. Rest In Peace, I know I will…
April 21st, 2009
100% agree with this article, glad someone finally wrote it
April 21st, 2009
I kinda enjoyed this article, even though it wasn’t as far removed from those crap 80p magazines as it tried to be.
I have no beef with Jade Goody (although her post BB life was clearly one long gimmick), I have no beef with Michael Parkinson (although his day is done) I do however totally resent the way that the british media has allowed Jade to be held up as a role-model for council house solo mums with a bleak outlook. Thanks to BB and x-fac we have uneducated, Low IQ, futureless dregs thinking that they are going to be pop stars and icons…. but they won’t! The problem is that Goody is a role model, when to be honest, all she did was offend people and then die.
I suppose at least she had a job.
April 22nd, 2009
screw the article.. your comments are just priceless.
“she just offended people and died”..
May 21st, 2009
I’ll spare you (Aidan) and you (everyone else) of my love of Arab Strap and the post-rock genre under which it somehow fits, suffice to say that after often wonder what happened to you, I was thrilled to discover your series of articles for Viceland. I still can’t remember how I did find out about this. Anyway, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that you can write. The AS monologues, although often imperceptible (mostly down to the quantity of the amber stuff though I suspect) are the work of someone far more than your average ‘lyricist’. But, Oh how you can write!
After the frustrating and often numbing side-effects of suffering the splurge of mainstream media (with some exceptions), this is not only refreshingly honest and intelligently argued, it is a genuinely interesting and pertinent topic. No, not Jade Goody - as most of the comments seem to be blindly obsessed with, but the underlying fabric of UK society and the often surreal results of a curious system which manages to alienate so many, in the continuing paradigm of greed, selfishness, and inequity.
Of course her accent, her ignorance and her ‘lack of education’ was at times cringeworthy and sometimes I dare say repulsive. But why is that really? Was it also her fault she grew up in a ‘Sink estate’, and that she didn’t have access to decent level of schooling? You are repulsed by her because she epitomises what YOU could also easily have become, under different circumstances however slight or far from your own.
Still there has to be something in ‘Every society is judged on how it treats the least fortunate amongst them.’ I don’t think that is more idealistic than the ‘can you please just die’ attitude which seems to be increasingly acceptable.
You’re work resonates because the values you are putting out there are so innately precious.
Greatly looking forward to reading the next editions, Aidan.
Thanks,
Ryan.
June 10th, 2009
No matter what people think about Jade, in life or death, she has raised more awareness about cervical cancer than any doctor or medical pforessional ever could. And to Irena who called her a worthless attention whore, who the fuck cares ? she secured a comfortable future for her kids through her ‘attention whoring’ She took this heartbreaking situation and turned it into something that would support her family when she no longer could. I had a lot of respect for Parkinson, not any more, but what matters is that Jade was surrounded by people that loved her, real people, and to be honest, those who speak ill of her are as pathetic as they are claiming her to be. I am proud of Jade and the way she laughed in the face of cancer. R.I.P Jade, you were one of a kind !
January 11th, 2010
Ignorance is a relief. She seemed so happy not knowing much more than someone off the Banana Split Show.
Poor dead victim of thickness and shit stuff.
Her mum is scary. Made of eyelids.