Press mourns Jade
2009-03-23 12:00
London - Jade Goody was Britain's first reality TV star to live and die in the glare of the media, and newspapers here paid tribute on Monday while also questioning why her story had so struck the nation.
"Mummy's in Heaven" splashed the Daily Mirror tabloid, with a photograph of the 27-year-old with her two sons. "At Peace on Mother's Day," said the Sun, noting Goody died on Sunday, the national day dedicated to mothers in Britain.
Although most newspapers had decried Goody for being fat, ugly and stupid when she first hit the small screen in reality television show Big Brother in 2002, she consequently won over millions of Britons.
She became one of Britain's most popular celebrities - despite a blip where she was accused of racism toward Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty - and the public were with her every step of her seven-month struggle with cancer.
Phil Edgar-Jones, the television executive who selected Goody to appear on the 2002 show which made her famous, said her difficult background - her parents were drug addicts and her father spent time in jail - and her lack of education made her an unusual star, but one many people could relate to.
Touched a nerve
"Middle-class people were potentially really appalled by her and what she represented about Britain, whereas millions of millions of people in Britain live Jade's life," he told Channel Four News.
"So she touched a nerve in that way, and I think that's what propelled her to superstardom."
A commentator in The Guardian agreed, writing: "Because they are so rarely seen in public life it is easy to forget that the people in this country for whom Jade was a peer, not an affront, are in the vast majority.
"Maybe they won't have quite her litany of childhood abuses and difficulties, but her experience was still closer to the experience of the many than the lives we usually see held up for examination in public."
She also had a character that was larger than life, noted the Times, and was happy to reveal all her hopes and fears in a very endearing way.
"Though her life after Big Brother was conducted through tabloid clichés, her popularity endured for seven years because she was, even refracted through the headlines, a recognisable and three-dimensional human being," it said.
But the Daily Mail warned against holding Goody up to be more than she was.
"She did not have a talent, a marketable speciality or a gift. All she had to peddle was a peepshow, a window in her life that was sold to the highest bidder," wrote one commentator.
"Perhaps she was so addicted to fame that this was the only exit strategy acceptable; being the centre of attention had become a way of life, now it was to pave the way to her death."
- AFP