Indisputably, the biggest story in the British press over the past couple of weeks has been Jade Goody. We’ve heard how her cervical cancer has spread; that she got married to her boyfriend; and that her children will be brought up by their father after her death.
This has provoked a fierce debate – in established media; in the blogosphere and in the public at large – about whether dying in the public eye is acceptable, along with a whole raft of secondary debates, from whether the age for cervical screening in women be lowered to 20, to the state of public education in the UK.
There are those who question how anyone could possibly oppose Goody doing all she can for her sons in the time that she has left. Just as vocal are the people who feel that the whole charade, with its seemingly endless freebies, and unabashed self-publication by Max Clifford, is all just a little undignified and crass.
Personally, I’m a little uneasy about the whole situation, and the way it holds such grim fascination for so many people. But I can’t put my finger on quite what it is that’s bothering me.
It could just be the fact that we’re being presented with the inevitable and imminent death of a young woman. In a country that’s far more squeamish about the issues of mortality than its European counterparts, it’s probably not surprising that watching someone die in public makes some people deeply uncomfortable.
The hypocrisy of the press is another factor that creeps in here. Since her infamous declaration that she “thought “East Angular” was abroad” in 2002, Jade Goody has hit the headlines for a variety of reasons – none of them complimentary. She’s been lambasted for her looks and her ignorance time and time again. And yet, the very same media channels, so happy to berate and belittle for so many years, are now fawning obsequiously over their subject. Granted, one would be incredibly surprised if they’d printed anything unsympathetic – after all, at the end of the day, this is an incredibly sad story about a young mother with a terminal illness – but something about the level of fawning is nauseatingly insincere.
But, the more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that it’s not necessarily the media’s approach that I find unnerving: it’s the fact that there’s clearly a vast, and seemingly endless, public appetite for the story, with its poignant pictures and the array of minute details. The whole episode has held a mirror up to society’s obsession with celebrity culture, and shown that there’s nothing we don’t want to know about the people in the public eye – even when that’s the gory details of someone’s battle with, and ultimately death from, a horrible illness. And that’s definitely something that should cause some inner debate.
