Desperately average media starlet Jade Goody has died, after achieving the dubious honour of being one of the few celebrities to sell their "death rights" to a celebrity magazine. Tributes are flooding in, with a small army of mourners outside her home placing flowers. The bishop who blessed her recent wedding remarked to the BBC that Goody was an extraordinary person
and has become for all of us almost like a saint, a saint of Upshire, a princess from Bermondsey
,an inspiration, a light, a torch of hope burning brightly across the world
. 
Of course, us grumpy cynics will now be blamed for everything, while idiots fawn over this opportunity to reinject some emotion into their dull lives. Goody has, in death, become Diana 2.0. Like Diana, she has come to a tragic end, and provided a spectacle for the emotionally hollow to mope about. I heard on the news a few weeks ago that there were "solidarity vigils" outside Goody's home. Seriously. Do these people not have lives? How pathetic and empty your existence must be to need to go around to the homes of Big Brother contestants and stand outside "in solidarity"? This is a woman who has had perhaps the best medical care she could to treat her cancer and made an absolute bucket-load of money in the process. Where is your solidarity for women in Africa having their genitals sliced up by religious barbarians or for non-violent Falun Gong practitioners in China who allegedly have their organs removed to sell to rich Westerners. Or perhaps the fact that Omar al-Bashir has cut off access to Sudan by international aid agencies and NGOs, thus condeming thousands to death and despair. But, no, who gives a shit? We need to express solidarity with a mediocre reality television star who is dying of cancer.
We've seen this all before with the death of Princess Diana. The ridiculous outpouring of public grief for "the People's Princess" (it's no time for soundbites, so here's a soundbite). There was a man who claimed that he cried more when watching Diana's funeral than when at his own mother's funeral. There has been more public grief over Diana than there was over Churchill or Alan Turing. Imagine a world where Jade Goody had a superb education, went to Oxford and was working hard on a Ph.D in, say, mathematics. Can you imagine the same reaction? Flowers outside the house, national media coverage. If someone were to write a snarky or dismissive column saying that, well, she was just a mathematician - nothing special - could you imagine people getting up in arms about it? But if you substitute mathematician for Big Brother contestant, that changes.
I'd like to say I'm mystified. I'm not. Whenever large groups of people do something very stupid looking in public, everyone says they are mystified about it. I'm not. There is a persistent sentimental streak in the British public imagination which can lead it down some very stupid paths. There's a new politically-based inverted snobbery that is the reason why, thirty years ago, Margaret Thatcher undertook voice training to sound posh and today's politicians undertake voice training to turn their plummy Etonian pronunciation into passable Estuary.
Oh, bugger the lot of you. I'm off to read a book. Someone drop me a line when all this idiotic sentimentalism has disappeared from our media. The sad thing: from all reports, Jade Goody was a delightfully nice person that it would be impossible to warm to, and she has certainly done good in raising awareness of how cancer isn't just something older people need to worry about. Ain't that always the way? It's all the publicists, PR, TV and media people who turn them into arseholes for profit.
Like Diana, it's sad when anyone dies. But what makes it worse is the fact that a little bit of reserved, stiff upper lip attitude from the media, as well as some fucking honesty - Jade Goody was a normal person elevated to celebrity precisely because of her utter normalness - would be far better. For every person who goes out and takes a smear test and maybe gets an early diagnosis, there's ten people in school who will leave without any useful qualifications, who won't try and go to university or work hard to do something interesting, because they think they'll be able to become a celebrity. Jade Goody has done good things for health but the celebrity machine she was a part of is gut-wrenchingly awful for the collective intellect of this nation.
