Jade the obscure: celebrity death and the mediatised maiden

In early 2009 the British tabloid and broadsheet media were consumed with the impending death of reality TV star Jade Goody. Goody, an under-educated working-class girl transformed into a media personality by UK's Big Brother, had already been at the centre of two major media controversies: one in 2002 for her tabloid vilification and recuperation during Big Brother 3 and again in 2007 for using racist language against a housemate on Celebrity Big Brother. Her medical diagnosis of advanced cervical cancer, however, shifted the controversy in terms of magnitude: filming a reality TV show for Living TV during her treatment and rapid decline, Goody was accused of ‘selling her illness’ to the media and even of intending to die on television, the ultimate taboo. These programmes were widely reviled by commentators as the nadir in Goody's mutually exploitative relationship with celebrity media, but we argue that the Jade series is a structurally groundbreaking programme in which real time and television time begin to coalesce in a way that disrupts categories of celebrity, privacy and mortality. Our analysis focuses upon the ways in which Goody's impending death impacts on her self-image and on the series' production, highlighting both her celebrity and the show as emergent texts. Through a close analysis of the series, we interrogate Goody's complex relationship with her celebrity persona in the shadow of terminal illness, and the British public's even more complex relationship with the mediatisation of celebrity death.

Keywords:

• reality TV
• Jade Goody
• celebrity death
• Big Brother
• class mobility
• celebrity authenticity
• ordinariness
• self-surveillance
• diseased body
• screen intimacy
• skin

Notes

1. Living with Boy George, for instance, was the next show to be made in that particular series (22 October 2008).

2. Danny and Simon were also named Jade Goody's godparents for the christening she organised for herself and her sons on 7 March.

3. Indeed, there were very few shots of Goody available after the wedding and no extensive footage. The christening on 7 March for Goody and her sons was a closed-door affair (conducted in the chapel of the Royal Marsden Hospital), so news teams and viewers had to be satisfied with looped interviews with Goody's publicist, Max Clifford, outside the Royal Marsden.