Leslie Ann Horgan:
What would we make of Jade Goody now?
Perhaps it’s because of Trump and Brexit and everyone harking back to simpler, happier times, or maybe the well of inspiration has simply run dry. Whatever the reason, Celebland seems to be caught in a sustained period of nostalgia.
In the music industry, we’ve had comebacks from everyone from the Spice Girls to, improbably, Bros. And in the world of acting, there’s been reboots, reimaginings and reunions aplenty. In the past few weeks alone, we’ve seen the casts of My Best Friend’s Wedding, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and The Hills reunited for ‘look at them now’ photoshoots. Forget ‘Throwback Thursday’, we’ve entered a period of ‘Throwback 24-7’.
Amid all this looking back, it suddenly struck me that it is almost ten years since reality TV star Jade Goody died, on March 22, 2009. And so much has changed in just a decade.
I remember clearly the wave of shock tinged with disbelief that engulfed me 10 years ago when it was announced that Jade had passed away from cervical cancer. Surely it wasn’t real? The girl we’d all laughed at couldn’t actually be dead? Looking back now, I feel ashamed to admit that I’d assumed that Jade’s illness had been exaggerated or over-hyped in some way; the death of a 27-yearold mum-of-two wasn’t how this script was supposed to read.
Jade was the first proper star of the reality TV era on this side of the Atlantic. A Marmite figure, she made her TV debut in 2002 in the third series of Big Brother. It was the year that the game-changing show really hit its stride, bringing together a collection of bright young things who understood that the louder they shouted, the longer they’d stay in the spotlight. And we lapped it up, delighted and disgusted in equal measure. To an Ireland still wriggling out from under the thumb of the Catholic Church, these people were particularly fascinating.
Who would want to be gobby and stupid and drunk and naked on TV? Were they totally naïve or fame hungry and calculating? What would their mothers think?
Of course, we knew what Jade’s mother thought: Jackiey, a former drug addict who lost the use of one arm in a motorbike crash, entered the Celebrity Big Brother House alongside her daughter in 2007. By that time, Jade had five more reality TV series, an autobiography and her own perfume under her belt. Her boyfriend, Jack Tweed — who she would go on to marry a month before her death — was also among the housemates.
That was the series where Jade became public enemy no.1 after making racial slurs against Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. Racist remarks still rightly have the power to imperil a career today (see Liam Neeson), but would we even blink at the rest of Jade’s antics in 2019?
In the decade since her death, reality television has explored every corner and plumbed every depth. We’ve seen people going on first dates naked, eating kangaroo
In the decade since her death, reality television has explored every corner and plumbed every depth
testicles, having surgery of all sorts, having sex in a box while being analysed by experts. And those are just the mainstream shows.
We’ve seen countless wannabes enter Love Island/Geordie Shore/ Ex On The Beach, where being drunk and naked are prerequisite — along with aggression, promiscuity and varying amounts of cosmetic surgery.
We’ve seen the rise of social media and what people are willing to share on the internet: their depression, their divorce, their body, their children’s lives. We’ve watched as the girls next door became cult figures and later power-brokers in the arenas of fitness, fashion, beauty or the allencompassing ‘lifestyle’.
Today, being a reality TV star or an online influencer is a valid career choice, and no one in either sphere is naïve about what they have to do to wring every last droplet out of their 15 minutes. The once rarefied notion of celebrity has been stolen by the masses, but none of it is any more real.
From ‘scripted’ and ‘constructed’ reality TV to heavily filtered Instagram posts and hidden ads, it’s all just fakery with a pretence of candour and an attractive layer of gloss. That’s why there’ll always be room for another Jade Goody; a silly, gobby and utterly authentic person who was a genuine breath of fresh air — albeit for the briefest moment before she too became a celebrity.