During the selection process for the third series of Big Brother in 2002, at a time when it was still a revolutionary show and retained some pretensions to being some sort of serious social experiment, the production team were slogging their way through sack loads of VHS audition tapes from fame-hungry wannabes every day.
In Jade: the Reality Star Who Changed Britain (Channel 4), the executive producer of the show at the time, Ruth Wrigley, recalls the very moment of conception of Jade Goody as reality star, 21st-century celebrity and pioneer of modern fame culture: “I’ve found one!” yelled an exhausted but excited researcher at the other end of the office. “One” of what wasn’t spelled out, but it seems clear enough now – a charismatic “chav”, in the pejorative term of that era. Goody was to be the pin-up for this new phenomenon of the reality TV star, a magnet for a mesmerised audience, and, in due course, perfect fodder for the tabloid press.
So she was. But the media, we see, was also tasty fodder for her, a sassier, tougher and shrewder woman than the “ditsy blond” she appeared. Though not alluded to in the documentary, I was oddly reminded of Princess Diana in that respect.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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Ten years on from her death from cervical cancer, and Goody remains remarkably well known because she was one of the first people, if not the first, to be “famous for being famous”. One of the many well-chosen contemporary clips in the programme showed the sort of withering contempt poured over Goody which only a trio such as Mark Lawson, Germaine Greer and Tom Paulin could have got away with.
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The documentary, the first of three weekly instalments, takes us through the first phase of the Goody phenomenon. There are early videos of her, some charming pictures of the little Jade, and the first-hand and dismayingly honest testimony of her mother, Jackiey Budden. Jackiey owns up to being a crackhead, calls Jade’s dad a heroin-addicted pimp, and remains proud, very proud, of what Jade achieved for herself. Not a conventional career, no, but a very modern one, and one she was good at.
Goody seems to have been perfect for that turn of the millennium moment. This was a time when the “old” media – red top newspapers and a new wave of celeb-obsessed gossipy magazines – was still supreme, when the internet as we know it was just forming, primarily as a subsidiary arm of the press and broadcasting, and a few years before the arrival of social media. At first the media, echoing public opinion, takes Goody apart – “the pig” she was called, ridiculed for her ignorance, as when she famously asked if “East Angular” is abroad. A fellow contestant recalls how a rock was thrown over the wall into the Big Brother house garden with a message – “Jade, die you pig”. “Am I minging?” a tearful Jade implores of her housemates.
But then, innocently clowning and goofing around, utterly unpretentious, the public began to appreciate Goody, even feeling remorse for her “chav” victimisation, and the media follows suit. The under-blanket nosh-off with housemate PJ Ellis marked another TV first for Goody while confirming her astonishing naivety in regard to choosing suitable men. The Channel 4 boardroom fretted about how it fitted with their sexual “penetration protocol”, but either way Goody’s coverage blossomed. As Kevin O’Sullivan, then the Daily Mirror’s official “anti-Big Brother correspondent” explains, he told his editor, Piers Morgan, that he wanted to “reverse ferret Jade”, and wrote of how he had changed his mind, and now thought she was brilliant – some sort of class-war hero. Although she only finished fourth, she really won Big Brother, the biggest personality that ever emerged from the series.
After that Jade really learned the fame game, teaming up with a celebrity photographer to stage fake “pap” images which could be flogged for £25,000 a set, securing an £80,000 fee for her first interview with Heat magazine, and £250,000 for a column in the Sun. We also meet her husband and father of her two boys, Jeff Brazier, himself a reality TV star (of something called Shipwrecked). Reflecting on how quickly their “difficult” relationship became “impossible” because of media intrusion, he sees how obvious it is now that their phones were being hacked – and ex Sunday Mirror hack Dan Evans is good enough to fess up to doing it to them. The hacking made Goody’s life more miserable than it needed to be, and with no public interest defence whatsoever. Those in my line of work need to be reminded of that. It was the beginning of another “reverse ferret” by media and public, as they began to tear her down as they’d built her up.
This first chapter of the Goody story ends with Jade’s mum Jackiey saying “then it all went wrong”, as it certainly did. Jade Goody was another name added to the list of stars who died at the age of 27, alongside Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse. After watching this touching tribute to her short life, and a higher opinion of her than I started with, I think they are in good company with our Jade.