When Jade Goody, who has died aged 27 of cancer, was evicted from the Big Brother house in Elstree, Hertfordshire, in July 2002, the mood was medieval. Mobs chanted "Burn the pig" as she walked down the runway into the chill clutches of Davina McCall, the host of the Channel 4 television reality show. The People had already branded the 20-year-old "Miss Piggy" on account of her appearance, and ran headlines such as "Ditch the witch" and "Gobby Jade is public enemy no 1". For a moment, it seemed that a vulnerable and evidently poorly educated woman was going to be lynched – certainly figuratively – for the 21st-century crimes of being dim, mouthy and libidinous on a reality show.
Goody, though, was no victim, but a young woman who mutated fast from tabloid whipping girl to millionaire multi-platform brand by doing what plenty of others had done before: namely, making the most of her assets. What those assets were was obscure to many: for some, she seemed an icon of celebrity culture's vapidity, a personification of the decline of western civilisation.
She reportedly thought a ferret was a bird, an abscess a green drink from France, that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa, that there was a part of England called East Angular and that there was a language called Portuganese. She had no perceptible skills and was ordinary looking, but still thrived in showbusiness.
"I know I'm famous for nothing," she once said with trademark honesty. No matter: the rise of Jade Goody seemed unstoppable. When the former dental nurse entered the Big Brother house, she had just been evicted from a Rotherhithe council flat in south-east London, owing £3,000 of unpaid rent, and was facing jail over an unpaid council tax bill. Five years later she had amassed a fortune of £2m from her property portfolio, her fitness video, a perfume and a show called Jade's Salon on Living TV which captured the goings on at her beauty salon, called Ugly's, in Hertford. She even, aged 24, had the zeitgeisty temerity to publish her picaresque autobiography and, like everything else she touched at that time, it turned to gold.
In any case, if Goody was going to burn, she would light the touchpaper herself. The chance to do so came in 2007 when she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. There she fell to racially abusing the Bollywood star and fellow housemate Shilpa Shetty, calling her "Shilpa Fuckawallah, Shilpa Durupa, Shilpa Poppadom." She was summoned before the disembodied Orwellian authorities in the Big Brother house's diary room to account for herself. "It's not in me to be racial about anybody," she explained through tears. (She meant "racist".) "If it's offended Indians out there, I apologise."
Suddenly the woman who had been merely a captivatingly thick celebrity became something more sinister: a racist in a presumed multicultural society. Channel 4, which broadcast the show, and Endemol, which produced it, were indicted, leader writers moralised about "Shilpagate", suggesting that the supposed British virtues of articulacy and reserve had been manifested by an Indian woman, while her abuser typified how low Britain had fallen. Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, publicly condemned the show during a visit to India, fearing an Anglo-Indian diplomatic row. Goody was whipping girl again, perhaps unfairly: other white housemates, including her boyfriend Jack Tweed and her mother Jackiey, were equally culpable of abusing Shetty.
After leaving the house, Goody went to India to atone. Max Clifford reckoned her return to the Big Brother House had "ruined a very lucrative career". He was wrong: she launched a second perfume, called Controversial, another beauty salon and another reality TV series. Aged 27, she published another autobiographical volume. Last Christmas she was the Wicked Queen in Snow White, at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln.
Goody's melodrama was just as wild when the cameras were not rolling. She once said she entered the Big Brother house in 2002 for "peace and quiet ... I thought it was going to be a hotel where I could be a kid. I've never been a kid."
Goody, brought up in Bermondsey, just west of Rotherhithe, faced adult responsibility early. When she was five, her mother lost an arm in a motorcycle crash that killed her Uncle Budgie. Subsequently, she did most of the cooking and cleaning. At six, she dragged her medicated mother's body out of their burning flat after an accident with candles (the electricity had been cut off). Her father was a pimp turned heroin addict and thief, thrown out of the family home by his wife because he stashed guns under the cot. "I still have a memory of him jacking up in front of me when I was four and I was lying in his bed," said Goody. He died of a drugs overdose in Bournemouth in 2005.
She claimed the fact that she was never "daddy's girl" was what made her love-life so troubled. The TV presenter and reality show regular Jeff Brazier, with whom she had a long-running relationship, fathered her two sons, Bobby Jack and Freddie Brazier, born in 2003 and 2004. She later had a relationship with Tweed.
In August 2008, Goody went on Bigg Boss, India's Big Brother. While in the house, Goody was told she had cervical cancer and left the show. In September, Tweed was jailed for hitting a teenager with a golf club, despite asking for a suspended sentence so he could care for Goody during her cancer treatment.
After the cancer diagnosis, Goody underwent months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, later learning her cancer had spread and that she only had months to live. Typically, she did not shy away from the publicity, nor did she lose any of her business acumen in using the publicity surrounding her looming death to make money. "I've lived in front of the cameras and maybe I'll die in front of them," she told the News of the World. Even Shetty, her one-time nemesis, offered prayers for Goody.
She gave streams of interviews about her struggle with cancer, and her by then bald head became a front-page tabloid fixture. Throughout this media event of an endgame, she demonstrated the openness and seeming guilelessness that once had marked her out as a fool with a big mouth, but which now made her, for some at least, seem like a saint telling uncomfortable truths as she marched, head up, to her televised martyrdom. Even so, there were moments of tragi-comedy: "I lost lost my hair once before," she told the Sun. "When I smoked crack to get close to my mum."
Like a working-class Princess Diana, Goody became the object of strangers' intense feelings, and she became a sacrifice, a woman whose suffering and death made it possible for people to ritually cry for someone they scarcely knew. For those Britons repelled by Jade's melodrama of death, those feelings seemed confected and mawkish. "I know some people don't like what I'm doing, but at this point I really don't care what other people think," Goody told reporters. "Now, it's about what I want." This up-yours attitude had guided Goody through her media career and sustained her now. Her shamelessness never became her more than in the manner of her dying.
A lot of people did like the fact she chose to die — as she had lived — in public. Many were pleased she drew attention to the risks of cervical cancer among young women and that she had brought death, so often airbrushed from British public life, unmissably centre stage. A campaign was launched to reduce the age of screening for cervical cancer from 25 to 20 in England.
And then, as some under sentence of death are tempted to do, Goody decided to get married. She reportedly planned her wedding to Tweed on a laptop in her hospital bed. The event, which took place on 22 February in a country house hotel near Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, was attended by boy-band stars, TV presenters and – naturally enough – Clifford, who brokered the sale of rights to the ceremony to OK! magazine for £700,000. The Living channel had already paid a reported £100,000 to show footage of the event as part of its series about Goody's last months.
In a plot twist too far-fetched for EastEnders, her fiancé, recently released from jail, had the conditions of his curfew relaxed for the wedding. He was spared having to return to his mother's house in Essex by 7pm so that he could spend his wedding night with his dying bride.
Gordon Brown now mutated into Goody's unlikely champion, telling reporters we should "applaud her determination to help her family" by selling the media rights to her wedding. Goody stipulated that the £800,000 should be passed on to her sons. On 7 March, in the chapel of the Royal Marsden hospital, west London, mother and sons were christened together. She wanted, she disclosed in her updated autobiography, Catch a Falling Star, to give them the childhood she never had.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales, praised her bravery, while tabloids could not find a bad word to say about her. The pig who deserved burning had become our sacrificial lamb, garnished with sentiment. Britain had turned 180 degrees to embrace a woman it had earlier scorned. Symbolically, at least, it was the right time for Goody to die. She told OK! magazine as much in the special issue devoted to her wedding: "I've had the happiest day of my life. Now I'm ready to go to heaven."
In a 2006 interview for the Guardian, Goody was asked what she wanted to be doing when she was 50. She replied: "I want to be retired, living in a big house, with my kids grown up, happily married to a man who puts me on a pedestal." Sadly, she never got that far.
Jack and her sons survive her.
