A perfect symbol for this crass age
As the reality TV airhead Jade Goody is chosen to join the pantheon of great Britons . . .
HER FAME rested on her three chief attributes — her stupidity, her loud mouth and her dignity towards the end of a tragically brief life. Her name still resurfaces in the media from time to time, usually as a footnote to some lament about reality television or on a list of former clients of the publicist Max Clifford.
But, as far as most people are concerned, she was the gobby bird off Channel 4’s Big Brother who was felled by a racist remark, bounced back and became the embodiment of dumbed-down Britain with her spectacularly asinine public pronouncements.
They included: ‘Where is East Angular? Is it abroad?’; ‘Saddam Hussein — that’s a boxer’; ‘Sherlock Holmes invented toilets’; ‘Do they speak Portuganese in Portugal? I thought Portugal was in Spain . . .’
Now, four years after her death at the age of 27, she is to be elevated to the ultimate posthumous hall of fame. As of this morning, the name Jade Goody is to be found between the 18th- century physician Edmund Goodwyn and the 17th- century puritan reformer Hugh Goodyear in the Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography (DNB).
Here, in a ‘who was who’ of 58,500 great Britons stretching from Boudica to John Lennon via Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill, the Essex girl is now immortalised as a ‘television contestant and celebrity’.
If proof were needed that reality television is now an official part of the fabric of this nation, then, I am sad to say, here it is: an exhaustive 2,000-word entry about a woman who ‘could always be relied upon to say or do something inappropriate, though usually comical’.
When future historians come to pinpoint the moment when Britain formally recognised crassness as a virtue, when a lack of education became a blessing rather than a handicap, then today’s publication of the new DNB might serve as an appropriate landmark.
There is nothing new about the modern phenomenon of the self-inflating celebrity, the non-entity famous for being famous. But, until now, we have not taken these artificial creations seriously for the simple reason they haven’t actually done anything.
Whether we like or dislike punk music or modern opera or Tracey Emin or Jimmy Carr, at least they have all made an effort. They are part of the cultural debate.
But what is there to debate about someone thrown off a show as crass as Celebrity Big Brother for insensitivity after calling an Asian housemate a ‘poppadum’?
YET, now, we must accept that the reality television contestant warrants a designated place in the pantheon of national figures alongside those dreary old categories of soldier, statesman, scholar, artist . . .
At the start of each year, the DNB adds a new batch of entries from those who died four years before. So, this morning, it is the turn of those who departed in 2009.
There are 225 names in the new intake, including trade unionists Jack Jones and Eric Hammond, economist Sir Alan Walters, actors Richard Todd and Natasha Richardson, and former England football manager Sir Bobby Robson.
The last veterans of World War I — Harry Patch, Henry Allingham and Bill Stone — are in there. From the world of letters, Sir John Mortimer and J.G. Ballard are joined by Keith Waterhouse and Anne ScottJames (both late of the Daily Mail). Sir Ludovic Kennedy and Brian Barron are among the broadcasters.
From business and finance, there is Lord [Eddie] George, former Governor of the Bank of England, and Sir Ernest Harrison, chairman of both Racal and Vodafone.
Most of it reads like an exalted New Year Honours List, brimming with achievement, creativity, duty, strength of character and merit. So what on earth is Jade Goody doing there?
‘We’re trying to be reflective of the nation we now are,’ explains Dr Lawrence Goldman, editor of the dictionary and Oxford University historian. ‘We’re not just about the lives of the great and good but people who are notable for different reasons. We’ve added celebrities because they are very much part of our lives and we would defend that robustly.’ Pointing out Goody’s unpromising start in life — an absentee criminal father, a drug-addict mother and a poor education — Dr Goldman explains that she is ‘ emblematic of the social breakdown in modern Britain’. He also highlights Goody’s public persona at the end of her life.
‘She comported herself nobly in death and the fact she died from cervical cancer encouraged hundreds of thousands of women to present themselves for testing who might not otherwise have done so.’
Certainly, nothing so became her as the manner of her parting. And her devotion to her two young sons — her greatest legacy — was profoundly moving.
In her final days, following her fairy-tale wedding and £700,000 photo exclusive, Goody made arrangements to ensure that money was set aside to give her boys the sort of education which she herself had manifestly not enjoyed.
All very laudable. But does that make her a serious figure for the register of great Britons? Certainly, the DNB is not all about high-minded pursuits and the winning of prizes.
Dr Goldman points out it is about people who have made a ‘notable contribution’ to their times, for better or worse. He also acknowledges Goody’s inclusion is bound to upset some people. Entries are put forward by more than 450 distinguished experts via 43 specialist panels ranging from archaeologists to zoologists.
Goody emerged from the panel on ‘popular culture and broadcasting’ — but there was hardly a queue of academics wanting to write an essay on her life.
So, to his credit, Dr Goldman agreed to write it himself, despite not being a Big Brother afficionado. ‘The editor cannot duck controversy, so it was right for me to do it,’ he says.
Since its creation in 1880, the DNB has included several eccentrics — including the 18th-century transvestite diplomat Charles d’Eon — and many monsters ranging from Jack the Ripper to Myra Hindley. So probity and popularity have nothing to do with it.
It is an extraordinary historical record, revised and digitised in 2004 after a 12-year overhaul costing £25 million — a colossal undertaking which no ordinary publisher would countenance.
BUT Oxford University Press were happy to subsidise it through other operations. A full 60-volume set costs £1,500 but it’s free online at public libraries ( oxforddnb.com).
‘The DNB has always been regarded as a national project,’ says Dr Goldman. ‘ We are thinking of the researcher many years from now, not just the reader of today.’
But let us look through the dearly departed of 2009 to see who was omitted to make way for Goody. Many would argue that the TV chef and writer Keith Floyd was a celebrity of greater stature than Goody, even if he did like a drop while on the job. No mention of him.
I notice that one name on the list is actress Wendy Richard, formerly of EastEnders and Are You Being Served. Few would argue with that.
But what of her magnificent partner from Are You Being Served who also died that year? I would have included Mollie Sugden — aka Mrs Slocombe — well ahead of Goody.
It is, of course, fashionable to pooh-pooh the old Establishment. So I am not surprised that, say, the baronet, boulevardier and aspiring UKIP politician Sir Dai Llewellyn failed to make the 2009 cut.
But I’d have thought the 2009 intake should have included the 2nd Earl Haig. The fact he was son of the World War I Field Marshal is nothing to do with it. A veteran of Colditz, he was also devoted to the Royal British Legion, an accomplished artist and active trustee of umpteen Scottish charities.
As for sheer bloody brilliance, what of John Watson? One of the finest plastic surgeons Britain has ever known, he worked with the great Sir Archibald McIndoe, helping to rebuild the lives of young airmen who suffered horrific burns during World War II.
Watson had been at the sharp end in the RAF, twice mentioned in Despatches, before joining McIndoe’s pioneering ‘guinea pig’ team at Queen Victoria’s Hospital in East Grinstead. He would go on to develop such impressive treatments he was elected secretarygeneral of the International Confederation of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons.
Beyond medicine, he was an expert on bee-keeping, orchids and astronomy — so much so that an astronomical textbook had to be amended after he discovered a miscalculation.
Countless people, from fighter pilots to children with cleft palates to Lord Lucan (referred to Watson after a speedboat accident) were the beneficiaries of this great Briton.
He died a few weeks before Jade Goody. Yet future generations will not learn of the eminent Dr Watson.
Instead, they will read that a woman who retired from the 2006 London Marathon on the grounds that ‘ I don’t really understand miles’ later launched a cheap perfume called ‘Controversial’.