It is difficult to imagine there would ever be a time when Jade Goody could be referred to as iconic without a heavy slice of irony. I can’t help but think that will change over the next few years.
As a big brother fan I can recall the point at which fate changed Jade’s life. She was up against Lynn (an irritating Scottish lady) to be evicted in the first week. The vote rested on PJ (a cunt of the highest order) deciding Lynn should go because she walked in on him while he was taking a dump.
Thus Jade was destined to live out her life, all of it, in front of us. She went from complete ridicule to a fairly stable position on the c list of celebrities. Slightly behind Jordan but way ahead of Jodie Marsh. Then came the next great epoch of her life when she returned to Big Brother.
There have been some silly scandals in recent years. The supreme dumbness of the Ross/Brand scandal has possibly dimmed the supreme hysteria of the CBB race row. Especially as it had little to do with Race and far more to do with class. But ‘class row’ does not have the same ring as ‘race row’.
So Jade was back at rock bottom and she knew it. Before she did her tearful confession to the News of the World, I remember watching her in the house where she said ‘I’ve worked hard to turn things around in the last few years and now I’ve lost it all.’
She wore the sack cloth for the next two years and slowly built up her reputation again. Now comes a genuine tragedy. She is dying. She is unlikely to see her 28th birthday and has two small children. Surely nothing elevates a person to that iconic status as much as dying young.
What is more we are going to see every day of it played out in papers. She is going to marry her scallywag boyfriend for millions in OK magazine and we will see every doctor’s appointment. That is if we don’t have the decency to turn away.
It is so easy to state but none the less true that it makes perfect sense that Jade should die on TV as she has lived almost all her adult life. I like Jade. I am not sure she is somebody that I would like to spend a great deal of time with but she is, I feel a good person.
I think that her importance to this country, culturally, cannot be under estimated. Think of the last twenty years of our country’s life and imagine who is more culturally important than Jade. Once you get past Princess Di and David Beckham I am not sure who else ranks higher.
