This story was on the fucking cover of the NY Times!!! Could we have this in America for Jerry!!! Goddamn Brits stealing our thunder.

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Squirming, but Watching a Dying Reality Star


By SARAH LYALL
Published: February 19, 2009

LONDON - Before television shined its warped light on her, Jade Goody was surely destined for a life of hardship and obscurity. Crude-talking, hard-drinking, overweight, barely educated, in debt, the child of drug addicts, she appeared on the reality show "Big Brother" in 2002 as a kind of token lowlife.

But something about Ms. Goody, then 21, struck a chord - even if it was a patronizing one - in a restless nation searching for ways to allay its millennial boredom. She became a bona fide media star, a working-class Paris Hilton. Britons eagerly devoured every detail of her life, no matter how banal. They worked out to her exercise videos, bought her perfume, read her autobiography and, when she made racist remarks about an Indian actress on "Celebrity Big Brother" in 2007, angrily turned against her.

Now they are watching her die.

Ms. Goody, who has two young sons, learned she had cervical cancer last August, on camera, as she appeared in the Indian version of "Big Brother."

The cancer has since spread to her liver, bowel and groin; on Friday, her doctors told her there was nothing more they could do.

And then she told the British public.

"I've lived my whole adult life talking about my life," she explained on Sunday in The News of the World, one of the media outlets that have bought the rights to her end-of-life story. "I've lived in front of the cameras. And maybe I'll die in front of them."

This is reality television carried out to its most extreme, grotesque conclusion, one not even envisioned in the film "The Truman Show" all those years ago. The question of why, exactly, the story is so compelling - how to negotiate the line between poignant and voyeuristic, whether newspapers are exploiting Ms. Goody or she is exploiting them - has twisted the media into knots, even as they provide daily updates on Ms. Goody's deteriorating condition and state of mind.

They are motivated partly by guilt. Many newspapers have been intermittently nasty about Ms. Goody, holding her up as a sorry symbol of vulgarian, instant-gratification Britain, "someone who achieved a sort of fame for having displayed her incalculable stupidity on television," as Rod Liddle wrote in The Spectator. Some people even suggested at first, as have many anti-Jade sites on the Internet, that she did not really have cancer but was just trying to get publicity.

Now that she is dying, many of the same papers are now squirming with unease at their collusion in the endless building up, knocking down and exploitation of a woman they always counted on to increase their own sales.

Every time Ms. Goody, now 27, leaves the hospital, hunched in a wheelchair, her head wrapped in a scarf, the cameras are there to watch. They were there when her 21-year-old boyfriend, Jack Tweed - recently released from prison after serving time for assault, and wearing an electronic ankle bracelet - proposed to her after hearing her grim prognosis. They were there when the couple went to Harrods to pick out her wedding dress, and to Tiffany to pick out their rings.

The wedding is scheduled for this Sunday, and the celebrity magazine OK! has reportedly paid more than $1 million for the rights to cover it. Mr. Tweed, who has reportedly secured permission to break his court-mandated curfew so he can attend the reception, has said, "She'll be down that aisle - even in her hospital bed." Elton John has reportedly offered the use of one of his houses for their honeymoon, if there is one. The whole thing is to be filmed by the cable channel that is following Ms. Goody's cancer struggle in a program called "Jade's Progress."

"The whole country will be worried and anxious about her health," Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain told reporters at his monthly news conference on Wednesday.

"We're all obsessed with it - broadsheet and tabloid audiences are alike in being transfixed," said Julia Hobsbawm, chief executive of the media analysis firm Editorial Intelligence. "I don't know who's doing the exploiting, but it's very, very compelling."

Some are arguing that Jade, as everyone calls her, should reclaim some of the dignity she sold years ago by doing her dying at home, alone. "Please, please, please demand some privacy now, for your own sake and your children's," Jane Ennis, former editor of the celebrity magazine Now, where Ms. Goody had a column and appeared frequently on the cover, wrote in The Daily Mail. After the racist remarks that led to the debacle on "Celebrity Big Brother," the magazine printed an article titled, "Jade We Hate You."

The alternative school of thought is that Ms. Goody, far from being a pawn, has seized control for the first time, cannily leveraging the only commodity she has ever had - her life - to secure her children's future.

"I know some people don't like what I'm doing, but at this point, I don't really care what other people think," she told The News of the World.

Perhaps she feels there is really no other choice.

"Presumably she's become desensitized to the media because, to some extent, she only exists now in front of the cameras," Ms. Hobsbawm said

Ms. Goody's publicist, Max Clifford, said that there were no plans to broadcast the moment of his client's death. He explained that she had three reasons for wanting to spend her last days in public: to earn money to leave to her children; to keep busy through the horror of dying; and to alert young women to the need to have regular tests to detect early signs of cervical cancer.

Since Ms. Goody's diagnosis, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of British women seeking such tests, a phenomenon doctors are calling "the Jade Goody effect."