:: Farrukh Dhondy

Jade Goody and the reality of TV

By Farrukh Dhondy

Mar 21 : Once again one returns to the public death of one Jade Goody. This 27-years-old Ms Goody suffers from terminal cancer and is about to die. Sixty thousand other people have been diagnosed with terminal cancer and are destined to die in more or less the time span that the death of poor Ms Goody is predicted, monitored, photographed, transmitted and written about all over the world.

Ms Goody is not a particle scientist who has added to the sum total of humanity’s knowledge of the physical world. She is not someone who has written sublime prose. She has not contributed through sheer obstinacy to the collapse of an Apartheid regime or salvaged the souls, if not the bodies and their ills, of the street sufferers of Kolkata. No. Ms Goody is/was (the world so shamelessly awaits the change of tense) a foul-mouthed victim of the lumpen cultures of 21st century British society. She came from parents whose purpose in life couldn’t be characterised as an "occupation" or even a job. Yes, her mother may have worked somewhere, sometime and she may have even known her father somewhere sometime, but her history written up reveals that Ms Goody was from what Britain calls a "dysfunctional family". She went on to breed her own dysfunctional family. She had two boys by a man who couldn’t, for whatever reason, maintain a relationship of any sort with the mother of his children from almost the day they were born. This is not a strange phenomenon in today’s British lumpen class. I call them "lumpen" because they are, in technical terms, one rung below the working classes, since they don’t seek employment, are probably unqualified to do anything useful and are content to live on the benefits handed out by the state.

Ms Goody came to the attention of the nation because the predators of British television chose her to be one of the "specimens" who would appear in a show called Big Brother which features a chosen set of people confined to a sort of free hostel environment, allowed to interact with each other and watched by cameras 24 hours a day for the viewing public’s entertainment. The programme is this century’s equivalent of the 18th and 19th century’s public spectacle of the public viewing of the prisons for the mentally defective. Crowds of ordinary citizens would be given access to watch the arena in which the mentally ill, in confines called hospitals such as "Bedlam" would live and interact. In those centuries the public derived its entertainment from watching these poor wretched creatures.

The "reality TV" programme resurrected the spectacle using contemporary media by bringing together the sort of specimens with feeble mentalities who were willing, for the sums of money that today’s TV is able to pay, to subject themselves to being watched in this way. There is no illusion in Britain that this sort of show is anything more than the degraded spectacle it is intended to be.

Ms Goody and her foul-mouthed mother were recruited to be participants on the show. They were a great hit and were invited onto the next series to vent the vulgarity that had become popular entertainment.

Jade became a household word in Britain because she had been on camera and called a non-white person a "poppadom". All good clean fun disguised as the sort of "racism" that would pale to insignificance when placed next to what Manglorians say about Tamils. It was television contrivance manipulated to get viewing figures and it worked.

The sparks that emerged from this dirty conflagration were mistaken, for a short time, for "stars" and poor, poor Ms Goody was one of them.

Then she went on an Indian vulgarity called Bigg Boss, an imitation programme of Big Brother without the courage to require and show male and female animals living together in the same zoo, and was told by a doctor on live TV that she had cancer. This was real progress for the penetration of life as it’s lived. We were, thanks to Bigg Boss, getting life as it dies.

Ms Goody returns to England. In the full glare of the media now her doctors tell her that the cancer is spreading and that she will soon die. They give her months. She has two infant sons. She has discovered that she has found a public life by camera and resolves now that she will face a public death by camera — only now she knows she can auction the spectacle.

She tells the press and through them the nation that she will sell her story of death to the highest bidder and thus leave money for her sons to grow up in comfort and with education. She proceeds to allow the paying media to record the stages of her deterioration and death.

Hundreds if not thousands of people suffering from terminal cancer will die in the same week as Ms Goody. They will be mourned, Ms Goody will leave a legacy.

She lived by the camera, now she dies by it.

The nation poises itself for this death, as it must have celebrated the public beheadings and hangings at Tyburn and at Tower Hill. The people executed in public then were deemed guilty of treason or some death-demanding crime. Ms Goody is guilty of nothing. Or maybe she is the first public victim of the crime of celebrity.

I have the feeling that Ms Goody is a martyr to the grim fact of death. The secretive acceptance of the fate that awaits the living has been dragged by the media from the shadows into the light. Ms Goody is dying on "reality TV". She is challenging us to face our own reality, the truth of which is death.

She has gone bald because of the chemotherapy and dresses up in wigs to leave more alluring photos for her boys. A great last gesture which the rest of us can’t emulate — our kids don’t want to see us in wigs or in any framed "reality".