March 22nd will be the feast of Saint Jade.

As I said once before I didn't have a lot of time for Jade Goody and have always been at a loss to understand how the fuck she stayed famous after Big Brother Number Whatever (can't remember or be arsed to look it up). So while I had some sympathy because I felt her numerous faults didn't merit a protracted death from cancer, I can't honestly say I'm in mourning for the woman. But the press, particularly those with a tendency to show pictures of tits, seem to be making her into Diana Mk II. Let's not forget that when she was on Big Brother the media had a field day. Some papers called her pretty at the start of the show, presumably because she was blond with big tits that she might be inclined to get out for the tabloids' cameras. Then they had plenty of laughs with her apparent lack of knowledge about almost anything you care to think of. Next, sensing the public mood was turning against her, they turned her into a hate figure - 'vote out the pig' ran the headlines. It should have been clear then how the story was going to go. Has anyone ever been built up and knocked down by the media in such a short space of time before?

And of course it didn't end there. Goody turned out to be fairly bright in one respect - she was happy to exploit what ought to have been a brief moment of fame and make it last and last. Hiring Max Clifford was a good move, but in retrospect it looked like the tabloids were already falling back in love with her before that. She was happy to tell "her BB story" for money, and since the show was so popular the tabloids were hardly going to turn their noses up at the chance to sell a few more copies of their arse wipes on the back of that. So she she became a media darling again, and that lasted until, laughably, she went on Celebrity Big Brother (and surely even she got the irony of including a minor celebrity who was only a minor celebrity because of being on the no-celebrity version). We all remember the fuss over the borderline racism of her remarks, even those of us who didn't watch the show, and we all saw how quickly she became a hate figure again. Then Chancellor Gordon Clown was in India at the time and the row over Goody's name calling of Shilpa Shetty overshadowed his visit. Can't remember what he was there for (and can't be arsed to look that up either) but I do remember he had to make some comment about cheap name calling not being representative of British values or something along those lines. But that was nothing to what was said in the UK papers - thick, ignorant, jealous, fat, racist, fishwife and pig were all terms I recall being used about Goody. I think it was the Mirror that even suggested calling her a pig was insulting to farm animals. Max Clifford commented on her spectacular own goal suggesting that she'd probably destroyed her career, and he must have known how hard she'd have to work to get back into the media's good books again.

We'll never know if going on the Indian version of Big Brother would have worked because getting cancer turned out to be just the thing to get the media back on her side. Racist thick fishwife ignorant pig Jade turned into poor cancer stricken battler Jade practically overnight, though there were some who thought that the cancer thing was manufactured, perhaps a scare that had been expanded on for PR reasons. But it hadn't, and it as soon as it turned out to be terminal the canonization process began. The formerly racist thick fishwife ignorant pig Jade turned poor cancer stricken battler Jade became brave Jade, media darling once again. I'm not sure she herself changed a great deal in her 5 years or so of fame and notoriety, but fucking hell did the media's attitude towards her change or what? Even David Cameron and Gordon Clown have weighed in with tributes (while, as Guido points out, three dead soldiers are brought back from Afghanistan almost unnoticed). The pinnacle, or nadir depending on your point of view, was what i think of as the celebrity death edition of OK magazine. Far from hitting the shelves before she'd started cooling down as we might expect, the tasteless bastards didn't even wait for her to stop breathing. But basically every paper that reviled her only a year or so ago is full of the tragic news of her death, gushy gushy, glowing obit, blahblah. No doubt it's only a matter of time before time before they report that a second miracle has been attributed to Jade when it was confirmed that some airheaded teenage slapper with more breasts than brain cells has prayed and has now been shagged by a footballer and will soon be appear on I'm A Non-Entity, Get Me A Contract For Something.

Dead of cancer, she's being buried in hypocrisy. But as The Chaser boys noted a while back, all their faults are forgotten when they take their final breath...


Yep. It's not how they lived that counts but how we rewrite the book after they've snuffed it.