Commemorating the 10 year anniversary since her death, Jade Goody's legacy lives on in the hearts of those who she saved
IT is ten years today since Jade Goody died of cervical cancer at the shockingly young age of 27.
It feels odd writing that, because we’re used to commemorating the alleged Great And The Good, rather than the humble and the humiliated, as Jade was for a great deal of her short life.
Four years after her death she was honoured with an entry in the Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography, which also includes Boudicca and Queen Victoria, herself sandwiched (and can’t you just hear her sweet, smutty laugh at that) between the 18th century physician Edmund Goodwyn and 17th century Puritan reformer Hugh Goodyear.
She would be the subject of study for both physicians and Puritans for much of her short life; even her conflicting name, “Jade” meaning “a disreputable woman” and Goody “a good or favoured person” seemed to mark her for some sort of paradoxical destiny.
I met her only once, in 2005, when I was making a documentary about reality TV, and found her absolutely charming — and I’ve met a lot of professionally charming people during my long career, most of them who’ve benefited from a private education and public relations.
We were expecting a temperamental brat; we got a bright, lively trouper.
She turned up ten minutes early for the shoot in Manze’s pie and mash shop in South London, toting her angelic baby in a carrycot; apologising for bringing him, she explained that she didn’t have help with childcare and that he wouldn’t be any trouble. (He wasn’t.)
Even though she was a girl in her early twenties and I was a grown woman in my late forties, she proceeded to teach me a thing or two about being professional.
I developed very quickly a preposterous diva attitude that wouldn’t have disgraced Mariah Carey.
When I threw a hissy fit at being asked to walk along the Old Kent Road for the third time, Jade linked her arm through mine and said with a laugh: “Come on, love — one more time — it’s not what you could call hard labour, is it!” She was a joy to be around.
Born in 1981, she entered a world of Dickensian deprivation and dead-end drama, her father a Bill Sikes without the swagger and her mother a Nancy without the self-sacrificing decency. And what did that make Jade?
A cross between Oliver, looking for love, and the Artful Dodger, ducking and diving for survival.
Her doting dad was a petty criminal and drug addict who would eventually die from a heroin overdose in the lavatories of a KFC; “one of the classiest exits in history” Jade remarked with a dry wit her detractors would have denied her.
Her mother Jackiey Budden — whose sole moment of effort in her whole life obviously went into the unusual spelling of her Christian name — was a “clipper”, a woman who pretends to be a prostitute before de-camping with the mark’s money.
She found it amusing to photograph Jade with a cannabis joint in her mouth when she was five years old.
This was the year in which Budden lost the use of her left arm in a motorcycle accident, forcing her tiny daughter to take on the role of carer.
Jade was just one of Britain’s unsung legion of 700,000 child carers who live as modern-day domestic serfs and pay for it with disastrous results in their level of school attendance.
In the light of this, the subsequent mass mocking of her for her lack of general knowledge seems mean-minded, to say the least — but more of that later.
So she dutifully did the housework and cooking for an ill-tempered woman who rewarded this devotion by beating her: “She once hit me because I hadn’t fixed my Wendy house properly. I had to go to school that day and I was having trouble sitting down, so the teachers knew things weren’t right.”
And at an age when other children’s greatest worry is whether to use bow-tie or tube pasta on their collages, Jade saved her mother’s life by dragging her drugged body from their burning flat, lit by candles as the electricity had been cut off again.
“I was just a kid, not even ten, and I had to use all my strength. It wasn’t her fault — you can’t blame her. She was in a bad way.”
When Jade was 13, things appeared to be looking up when Budden won £13,000 on the Lottery.
Imagine the lovely things you might feel moved to buy the daughter who had been your carer since she was tiny! But of course, Budden blew it all on drugs.
Just the simple act of getting a job as a dental nurse, rather than slump into the slow-mo, dead-end quicksand of drugs as those closest to her had, showed what Jade was made of.
Still, staring into people’s mouths for a living for a pretty girl of 20, up to her ears in debt, surely there was more to life? It came along in 2002, in the shape of Big Brother, the ground-breaking reality TV show which was in its third year.
In the halcyon hinterland of Big Brother, humility and honesty were rewarded by housemates and voting public alike and snobbishness and sneakiness were punished.
I’ll openly state my bias here and admit I do believe that people who hate reality television hate life itself generally, and the working class in particular. In Jade, these sad-sacks found their El Dorado.
As ever, she was an innocent among villains: “It was never about trying to find fame — it was just that I could not take my life any more.
“It was nice to think, ‘I don’t have to worry about anyone’ . . . I thought it was going to be a hotel where I could be a kid. It was like a holiday camp and I was acting like a child.”
Of course, the know-alls of the media saw her as anything but — suddenly it seemed as though the witch trials were back, and the focus of them was one silly, excitable, 20-year-old girl.
Jade was a convenient hate object in an age when political correctness prevents us from insulting anyone but the white working class.
Over the years, I’ve observed that the use of the c-word — “chav” — indicates a socially insecure snob who hasn’t got half as far in life as they thought they would and who isn’t having half as much sex as they dreamed they would.
The killjoys completely overlooked the way Jade added to the gaiety of the nation with the adorable malapropisms which were, as I’ve mentioned, undeserving of contempt considering her indentured childhood.
“Where is East Angular, is it abroad?” “A ferret is a bird.” “Sherlock Holmes invented toilets.” “I’m not being tictactical.” “They were trying to use me as an escape goat.”
Yet this amiable girl was dubbed “the most hated woman in Britain”, which says more about the mental condition of the haters than the hated.
But the public took to her; she, in turn, took her chance at a better life and ran with it.
Though finishing only fourth in Big Brother, she quickly became wealthy, first from magazine interviews and then from five fitness DVDs, a best- selling autobiography and a perfume somewhat unwisely called “Shh . . . ” which became Superdrug’s third most popular fragrance after those of established fragrance floggers Kylie Minogue and Victoria Beckham. Her fortune was estimated to be around £8million.
Surviving an upbringing of Hogarthian horror and monstered by privileged no-marks as the thickest woman in Britain, success must have smelled as sweet as the bergamot, cassis, pink pepper, cinnamon, cumin, freesia, jasmine rose, iris, sandalwood, patchouli, vanilla, amber moss and musk which constituted her scent.
But someone always has to spoil it, and that person is usually oneself.
There was no need for Jade to enter the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2007, five years after her first innings; she was a woman of substance and property.
It’s likely that the tag-on presence of her mother, a parasite she was always protective of, might have had something to do with it.
But after the frightful old fraud was quickly evicted, Jade teamed up with the showbiz starlets Jo O’Meara and Danielle Lloyd and these three pretty girls were transformed into a cosmetically enhanced coven before our very eyes.
Their victim was fellow housemate and Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty.
Jade told Shilpa “you’re not a f***ing princess here” and advised her that “you need a day in the slums” and Shilpa told Jade that she would benefit from “etiquette classes”.
The controversy generated more than 300 newspaper articles in Britain; India’s junior minister for external affairs warned that his government would take “appropriate measures” while their trade minister feared a “diplomatic crisis”.
The winner, Miss Shetty, was more temperate in her acceptance speech: “Things happen, people make mistakes and we all learn from them.
“But I can say one thing for sure — Jade didn’t mean to be racist.”
Diplomatic crises were avoided, Jade apologised a lot, donating her CBB fee to charity.
But you couldn’t keep her down. Though she couldn’t spell “chutzpah”, she was soon back with a follow-up fragrance called Controversial and a beauty salon in Essex.
In 2008 she was reunited with Shilpa Shetty when she joined the Indian version of Big Brother, called Bigg Boss.
Then, on the second day, she was called to the Diary Room to be told that she had cervical cancer.
Rather than giving up, the diagnosis made her double-down on her efforts to make money; not for herself, but for her two sons, who she was determined would never know the childhood deprivation she had.
Her husband Jack Tweedy was easy on the eye and little more. But she was dying by then anyway and banked a reported £3million to be put into trust for her sons by selling the rights to her wedding day alone.
Her second and final autobiography in 2008 was Catch A Falling Star. In February 2009 she was told that her cancer was terminal. She died on March 22, 2009.
Throughout her decline she was trolled mercilessly, by professionals and by enthusiastic amateurs, by halfwits and the highly educated.
It was class loathing — newly revivified by the unacceptability of racial hatred — in its purest, vilest form, curtain-twitching middle-class outrage at this scullery-maid who had dared not to know her place.
As I wrote at the time: “Will it finally stop when Jade Goody stops breathing, do you think? When she’s pronounced dead? When we see her crying children placing flowers on their dead mother’s grave?
“No. Sad as it seems, sad for the haters, even more than the hated — who will by then be in a place where they can no longer touch her — the rivers of loathing which pour down upon the broken body of this young, naive, defenceless young mother, born into massive poverty and underprivilege, with everything stacked against her, seem unlikely to end with her death.”
It didn’t. But though living well is reasonable revenge, having your death mean something more than the sorrow of your loved ones is an achievement indeed, and one that none of her trolls will ever have.
About half a million extra cervical screening attendances occurred in England between mid-2008 and mid-2009, the period during which Jade was diagnosed and died. At its peak, in March 2009, attendance was 70 per cent higher than expected.
Professor Julietta Patnick, director of the NHS cancer screening programmes, said: “Jade’s tragic diagnosis and death played a huge role in raising awareness of cervical cancer.”
As the ODNB said: “She died with dignity, planning for the future of her children, and contributed to public awareness of cancer and its prevention. In the phrase of the age, she was a celebrity for being a celebrity, but in the end, her life had meaning.”
How many of us will leave such a legacy?
