Jade Goody Celebrity Cancer: A Fight, A Row And Gail Trimble’s Quadruped Graminivorous

JADE Goody Celebrity Cancer: A Fight, A row and Gail Trimble.

The Sun (front page): “I’LL BE DEAD IN A MONTH”

“Jade’s cry to neighbour on way to hospice.”

There is a picture of Jade looking anguished as she boards a car.

A friend said: “Freddie and Bobby have been getting upset watching Jade deteriorating. She is concerned about the long-term mental effect it may have on them.”

Turn off the telly. Cancel the papers.

“She can’t bear the kids watching her dying in the family home. So she’s staying the weekend at the hospice to see how it goes.”

They can follow mum’s progress on the telly and in the papers…

Glasgow Daily Record: “Jade Goody rushed to hospice after bust-up with neighbour”

Jade is unchanged.

DYING Jade Goody burst into tears after a furious argument with a neighbour yesterday.

She was being rushed to a hospice after strong medication triggered hallucinations.

But as the cancer-stricken Big Brother star left home, Jade had an angry exchange with a neighbour who was washing his car.

Told she was going back into hospital, the bespectacled man is said to have retorted: “Good, at least I can get some peace and quiet then.”

Angry Jade, 27, shouted back: “I thought you were all right”. Then she broke down in tears.

To the golf clubs…

The neighbour retreated inside his house without comment.

Daily Star (front page): “JADE: I’M GOING OUT WITH A FIGHT”

See above.

BATTLING Jade Goody showed her old fighting spirit yesterday in a bust-up with a “Victor Meldrew” style neighbour.

The cancer-stricken star lashed out after the man said he was glad she was leaving for a hospice as he would get some “peace and quiet”.

Daily Mirror: “JADE GOES TO HOSPICE”

“Painkillers spark hallucinations.”

Says Jade: “Where am I.”

Answer: All over the papers.

Daily Express: “TEARS AS JADE HEADS TO HOSPICE”

Tears is a given.

Irish Independent: A Nolan who was once on Big Brother tells us about Big Brother star emeritus Jade.

There is a disturbing website called “When will Jade Goody die.com”. You type in the date and time, and if you are correct in predicting when this 27-year-old woman is going to lose her life and leave behind her two young sons, you win a 3G phone.

There’s a link to the website, which you can follow should you want to be disturbed.

The Independent: “Howard Jacobson: Earning respect has got nothing to do with whether or not you’re educated - There is nothing specifically of our time about hating a clever clogs. We always have”

This Two Nations thing that’s been going on all week – I don’t mean the Bankers and the Rest of Us, I mean the know-everything middle-class girl who answers all the questions on University Challenge, and the know-just-about-nothing working-class girl who came to our attention on reality TV and is now fading from it by the same means, dying by degrees in our very living rooms – recalls to me the opening schoolroom scene of Dickens’s Hard Times, in which one child who is asked to define a horse cannot, though she knows horses well, and another, though he knows nothing of horses in actuality, can. The difference being that while we have been singing the praises of Gail Trimble for being quick on the know-all buzzer, Dickens’s sympathies are on the side of the child who’s slow.

Nuts for Trimble’s thimbles.

Better the girl who has lived with horses but lacks the language to describe them than the boy who answers by rote – “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive…”

Jordan plays with horses.

None of which is meant to reflect badly on Gail Trimble, who would appear to be – though I haven’t watched her on University Challenge – a bright girl with a keen sense of the ridiculous. And yes, she is an example to kids less educated than herself, but only I suspect because her cleverness has made her famous. Should it make her a fortune, to boot, then she will indeed become a role model. Money and/or fame being, as any teacher will tell you, the only measures of achievement the young now recognise. Thank you, Mr Brown, Mr Blair, and Mrs Thatcher. You sanctified money and now money – even in its absence – is all there is.

Show me the money.

That being the case, we should be kinder to Jade Goody who clambered to her brief place in the sun without the help of any of the advantages Gail Trimble enjoys. Comparing the two young women last week, a popular newspaper described Jade Goody as someone “who made a fortune from her ignorance”. I think that is cruelly untrue. Her ignorance, when we first encountered it on Big Brother, made us gasp right enough: there seemed to be no end to all she didn’t know. But in the world of reality television the ignorant are 10 a penny. Ignorance is the sine qua non of their bastard profession, though I doubt they express it that way themselves. Slip a knowledgeable one in and the public quickly votes her out again.

So something else in Jade Goody must have arrested us. Ask only what Dickens would have made of her. He certainly wouldn’t have been put off by her uneducatedness – for which he would have roundly condemned our education system – or her desire to better herself in a way that many of us, with a hypocrisy he would also have lambasted, find crude. (As though any ambition to improve one’s circumstances can ever again look crude after the toxic avaraciousness of the City.)

My guess is that Dickens would have seen in Jade what thousands of viewers saw, a vitality of spirit, an undirected rage that had some nobility in it, however coarsely voiced, a brave conviction of baffled entitlement at the very heart of her dispossession, an uncowed intelligence at the very heart of her ignorance. It was an anti-charm but it was charm.

Is charm overrated?

Anorak

Posted: 28th, February 2009 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts Comments (20) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink