Jade Goody
Q: What's the difference between cancer and a cow?A: Max Clifford can't milk a cow.
As with the ‘tragic, shocking and devastating’TM death of Princess Diana, we’ve all been invited of late to fall in line with the sanctification of some inconsequential girl who’s met her maker (her maker actually being publicist Max Clifford) and then shuffled off in as garish a way possible under the glare of the dear old British media (hitherto referred to as ‘the nation’).
Jade Goody. I’ve got nothing against the poor girl. From what I can tell she was a lass who did the best she could to make something of herself, given a terrible start in life and against all the odds becoming one of those rich people who get photographed in magazines and sell their own perfume line. I have nothing against those people, as I say, but then again I’ve got no vested interest either in believing I ought to mourn them on demand when they give up the ghost.
It makes me puke, this media-deification: watching how the red-tops and the paparazzi and the silver-haired publicists have us all in their pockets, worshipping what we once were sold as rubbish. Makes me angry that I’m not allowed to come out and say that the whole thing stinks, it’s all a sham, a joke, a huge expense account payable by the British public for whatever regurgitated morality we’re all spoonfed, without coming across as heartless. And with Jade, of course, the big morality word was Cancer.
People close to me have been diagnosed with cancer. I like to think that their efforts in reaching some kind of breathing space (literally), and remission from the pain of chemo- and radiotherapy, gives them some kind of personal hero status. Not front-page tabloid headlines. Not Max Clifford on morning TV telling the world (for his £200, 000 fee) that he was “a personal friend, and very very close” (pass the sick bucket).
Cancer’s a right bastard (not the best way to describe a wholesale biological killing machine, but you know what I mean) and it’s great that Jade Goody could be highlighted as a focal point for the campaign for women to come forward for screening for cervical cancer. But let’s get this clear: Jade and her media-profiled struggle does not represent the thousands of people who are involved on a daily basis with fighting, struggling with and caring for cancer patients; and so it gets my back up that Clifford can monopolise the word ‘brave’ for a Reality Show client who’s paying him huge sums of money. And as Michael Parkinson said in a recent article – “Why buy a Jade Goody candle, when you can simply make a donation?”
I hated all the Diana crap, the instant canonisation of a deeply-flawed and ignorant rich girl who happened to get famous by marrying a twerp with a Royal lineage. But this Jade Goody stuff takes the biscuit; it’s as if the media wondered whether they could actually pull off the same scam with some utter nonentity from Essex – ordinary woman to instant sainthood in the space of a few weeks. I hear Sky TV went wall-to-wall on the funeral, too, prostitutes that they are. I wouldn’t know, I refuse to watch Murdoch’s tacky version of the news.
Death’s a funny thing. It’s sacred, sacrosanct, above ridicule. Jade Goody was always ripe for a good slag-off, a right laugh, until she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Suddenly the media stopped its sniggering and guffawing and got all pious and serious. I didn’t. I laughed all the way through the whole charade – not at Jade’s plight, obviously, but at the media’s hypocritical about-face. The media’s pathetic attempt to play the straight man. The media’s black-tie cry-baby seriousness. The media’s laughable ‘we really care’ headlines. The media’s stifled-sniggers hand-rubbing as the sensationalism of the story translated into newspaper sales.
For anyone who read Johann Hari’s piece in The Independent*, no Johann, it’s not about snobbery and class. I’m not talking about Jade Goody as a person (neither I, nor Johann Hari, nor anyone I know, nor most of the people in the media, ever met her) but as a media-construct, a clay model thumbed into life by the indescribably awful Max Clifford and his money-grubbing hangers-on; bloodsuckers who live off the lives and (more lucratively) deaths of real people.
Only one newspaper didn’t feature Jade’s funeral on its front page. (Come on, everyone, join in!) Nevertheless, catching the mood not of a nation I’ve read about in the crap papers but a nation I see and meet and talk to every day, can I suggest that we don’t waste time mourning the death of ‘Our Bermondsey Diana’ (spelled out in a wreath at the funeral), or ‘the Nation’s Brightest Star’ (OK Magazine) or indeed ‘an ordinary woman from a rubbish telly show’ (me). Let’s mourn instead the death of common sense and the passing of a sense of perspective…
*Johann Hari’s piece about Jade Goody can be read here .
11 Apr, 2009 | chumba
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