‘the reality star who changed britain’

Today I’ve been watching the Jade Goody documentary on Channel 4. It’s a fascinating insight into a relatively novel social phenomenon. Jade, like Paris Hilton, Rylan Clarke-Neal, or a large number of surveyed school-age children, wanted to be famous not for anything, but simply to be famous. Why has this new social arrangement popped up, and what can it tell us about contemporary culture? Jade Goody did not have an easy life. Her father was a drug dealer, pimp and smackhead, her mother a crackhead. One of Jade’s earliest memories was seeing her dad pinning in front of her - she recounts shutting her eyes in terror, because she didn’t want him to know she’d seen him, didn’t want to be touched by him. By five, she was rolling spliffs for her mum. From those dubious beginnings, it is easy to see where a void of love and attention might’ve emerged, why Jade might’ve grown up wanting, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, to be seen.

The relationship we had with her is instructive. First we didn’t like her - we found her crass, and rude, and horrible. Then we started to understand why she was like that - to see the journey she was on - and we started to like her. People were glad she’d made it - ‘it takes bottle’, as one phone-in commentator put it. Then she cashed in on her BB fame, rode it until she said something racist, at which point we turned on her, and she began fighting desperately to retain our attention until the fight, and cervical cancer, killed her.

Hence, what separates Jade from other famous people is that what she is famous for is not product but process: it is not the finished article that is Jade Goody that struck a chord with the public, but rather the process of becoming that Jade Goody was clearly and visibly undergoing. We were allowed to lionise her because her lionisation bore the message: ‘anybody can ascend stratospherically, it just takes guts and spunk.’ The upper class used to draw the middle class around itself as a way of protecting its interests from the complaints of the proles; now they have only to visibly select a few. This is an attitude which has become increasingly prevalent in our society over the last few decades. As I have written before, in relation to The Trap, the logic of rap music seems to carry the same message: the world is fucked, but you can get out of it, and hence the whole thing is justified, and misery is your personal responsibility.

This puts us in a pretty interesting position. Let’s assume, following Henrich (2020), that the world has been trending towards the establishment of institutions which encourage people to overcome their ‘tribal bonds’ - their inborn commitments to each other based on blood, and to their rulers based on divine rights. If this is the case, then what is unique or special about the present day (since Big Brother Began) is that we have now made a spectacle of this social phenomenon. The quality of the person is almost superfluous: what matters is that they ‘made it out’.

What could have possibly created this weird worldview, in which individuals are wellsprings of limitless potential, whilst at the same time the groups they are in are considered to be rigid, inescapable ghettoes? The rampant individualism that sprung from Thatcher can be seen as a proximate cause. However, I think it goes deeper. Postwar sci-fi was rich with dreams of techno-utopia: flying cars, network totalisation, space colonies. Whilst we have managed some of this, our space dreams have stalled. There’s a beautiful bit in Fight Club where Durden is shaving the heads of his boys. ‘Look at you, you look like a monkey ready to be launched into space. Space monkey!’ he crows. This film valorises the self-destructive tendencies of the men it describes, seeing them as the necessary product of a group of hard workers being left by the wayside of a culture that has appeared to turn away from the physical, lonely work of exploratory voyage.

Cut off from meaningful avenues of world-exploration, we have all turned into ‘entrepreneurs of the self’: we may not be able to slip the surly bonds of mother earth, but at least we can get out of our council house in Essex and into a presenting role on Channel 4. Given that, should we not be celebrating Big Brother, and the culture it has spawned? Is it not an agent of social change? Yes and no: because whilst it encourages movement within the structure, it strongly discourages changing that structure. Creating this world in which a select few can rise to the top, leaving the earthbound rabble behind, creates an excessively individualised world in which the existence of social problems is apparently justified by the possibility of escape. This cannot but remind us of our stalled space-age dreams. The drive to ascend meteorically, whether it be mediated by Jade Goody or Kim Kardashian, by The Trap’s ‘Rap or Go to the League’ logic or the City’s barrow-boy mentality - all make use of the argument, ‘the world is fucked, and irredeemably so - let’s get out ASAP, and try not to worry about the scorched earth you leave behind; it was only going that way anyway.’ Hence we see people like Jade Goody undermining their own social interests ‘for the bag’: allowing herself to become a symbol of the ‘chav underclass’, just as rappers contribute, knowingly, to the economic subjugation of others through their pursuit of ‘whips and chains’.

The story of Jade Goody sends the message that many of our other cultural artefacts do: an excessive preoccupation with individualism has left us following a logic of abandonment and escape. So the real challenge is this: how do we help rappers, and Jade Goody, to understand that they’re being exploited, and once we have, what do we get them to do? Its all well and good for me to sit here in relative comfort and criticise them for self-exploitation; but I’m not going to feed their families. Can they get paid serious money for championing better social causes? I don’t just want Jade Goody doing some charity event for crackheads - I want her sitting down and talking to the public about her social situation and how she’s ended up like that. I want a conversation between the public and Jade, where we realise that our love for her stems from unresolved insecurities, that her love for fame stems from the same, and that if we just get all the grubby bullshit media and corporate interests out of the way, the story of Jade Goody can be an opportunity for real personal and social change, both in her and the public. But that’s not going to happen, because she was told she had cervical cancer on live television, as a weird sort of atonement for having been racist to Shilpa Shetty, and died, in full view of everyone, in 2009.

I am writing about her today because we are all, still, Jade Goody: adrift in a world whose sole meaning seems to reside in the approval of others; which promises no escape except by stepping on the heads of one’s siblings; which sees its environment as beyond redemption; and which dares to call this vision ‘realism’. Fuck that. Don’t be an entrepreneur of the self: just do something.