The Jade Goody Rant

Okay, I don't know about the rest of you, but Jade Goody gets on my tits.

She really does.

Jade Goody is one of those people who I hate with a vengeance - the ones who have very little to offer society and yet through a quirk of fate she's somehow catapulted to the top and receives fame and fortune for being...nothing. She got her big break on Big Brother - hardly a worthy candidate for intelligent programming at the best of times - and for a while after that she was that annoying buzzing sound you get with mosquitoes and I ignored it because, well, she's Jade Goody and I have little time for her. And then the Shilpa Shetty thing happened.

I'm not going to lie - I watched it when I saw it in the papers. I was amazed at how swiftly the news went from tabloid to broadsheet. I was stunned, literally, to see how quickly papers like The Independent and The Times and even the hated Grauniad picked up this story about the daft idiot from Big Brother a few years before and how she had single-handedly caused a race row on television. And what made it even more stunning was that throughout the whole thing, Jade Goody made herself out to be some sort of victim. She came out and said to Davina McCall that she had no idea she was so obnoxious and for a while it seemed that Jade Goody and her supporters treated it all as some sort of joke. It really amazed me as to how she was vilified, how swift her fall from grace was. In what I can only say was a single fortnight, Jade Goody went from a media darling to media horror. It was incredible to watch. And to be honest, I had very little sympathy for her then - I sent a complaint email to Channel 4 after watching the incident - and to this day, I still have no time for her.

What I find curious is that in the months following the Shetty incident, Jade has been busy trying to build public image and now, thanks to her recent "revelation" that she's been diagnosed with cervical cancer, public sympathy. I'm sorry, but I can't find sympathy for her. Yes, it's horrid that she's got small children who may end up growing up without their mother and it's horrible that she's facing a long fight against a vicious disease - but I just cannot bring myself to show any form of sympathy for her. And to read in the papers and see it online that she's got problems now because she's losing her hair to chemotherapy? Sweetheart, what do you want me to say? What do you want us to think? Thousands of women go through chemotherapy each day worldwide and every year thousands of women die from cancer in all it's variants. Do you think you're special? My Mother had a lump pulled from her breast when I was fourteen and she faced the possibility of it being cancer with the cliched steely determination and for her, chemotherapy wasn't as frightening a prospect as dying. Maybe you want to get that into your skull, dear - you can die from cancer. You won't die because you lose your hair.

*sighs*

Seriously though, I can't think as to what makes me so unsympathetic towards her. Maybe it's the fact I've never found her entertaining or that I think she's a coarse, crude little madam who racially abused someone on television (yes, I know that cretin from S Club and that little tart who whips her chesticles out for cash were involved, but Jade was the ringleader), but there's something about Jade Goody that I find inherently...vile. Christ, maybe it's because I have this old-fashioned idea that celebrity means you should have done something worthwhile to gain that status. What did she do? She appeared on a reality television show and that's that.

Yeah.