Tasteless spleen venting - look away if offended.
I’ve been wanting to write this for quite some time.
No, I tell a lie. I think I have been subconsciously longing to write this for quite some time but my conscious mind has been keeping it well under wraps until such a time when I can just about get away with it without pushing the ‘taste’ boundary so far to the left it falls into the kind of pit of depravity occupied only by Trey Park/Matt Stone collaborations, the people responsible for Hostel, and the Japanese.
So, hot off the press as of about three weeks ago, Jade Goody died. Now I can’t help but feel it would be unsporting and a little to easy to have a dig at her, plus it hasn’t escaped my notice that my ire has faded somewhat in direct proportion to the now-diminishing hype and media sob-stories that surrounded her over recent months, but the whole thing has had me contemplating a few things in the broader spectrum, and I will hereby direct my wrath away from the late Ms Goody (mostly) and towards a wholly related but more fitting and considerably more deserving target.
REALITY TV.
If there’s one thing the Jade Goody story has taught us recently it’s that in this great day and age of narcissistic pointless self-obsessed reality television absolutely anyone can become famous for doing absolutely ANYTHING.
No, let me re-phrase that.
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
This was a concept unheard of until about ten years ago. Before Big Brother and all its deformed bastard children ran riot over Channel 4 and began monopolising the air time like a swarm of attention-seeking hyperactive attention-deficit chimps (and Russell Brand) fame was a strange and nebulous thing. It could not be caught or contained, and nor could it be sought after. People didn’t want to be famous. They wanted to be ‘a famous film star’ or ‘a famous singer’ or even ‘a famous scientist’ if they were that way inclined or the performing arts tutorials at their particular “Elitist Grammar School For Pretentious Over Achievers” were full up that year and they had to make do with subjects that meant you actually had to use your brain and stuff. The point is: fame had to come hand in hand with achievement. It was either recognition for something you were really good at or a necessary mode of self-publicity used as a means of flogging the end result of something you were really good at. It was NOT, as it is today, fame for the sake of being famous, which is what the talentless plebs of modern society seem to be striving for.
And God knows why. When you see the endless cavalcade of unlikeable pretentious twerps paraded out by Big Brother every year under the banners of the Good, the Bad, the Ugly and the Walking Cases For Human Euthanasia you can’t help but think “Jesus, if I was one of those people I wouldn’t want to fling myself out onto national television! I would want to hide under a rock and bone up on... something - like typing or ping-pong or the kazoo or ANYTHING - just so I didn’t look like a completely pointless lobotomised gimboid in front of four million people.” Never before have the Thick and the Obnoxious been so utterly pleased with themselves for being just that. And certainly never before have they been encouraged to make a LIVING out of it.
And let’s face it, ‘fame’ in this day and age largely consists of having your photograph printed enough times in numerous trashy magazines accompanied by ‘articles’ (and I use the term so loosely it’s in danger of losing its molecular integrity and melting away into a collection of intangible atoms - yes alright, it’s a METAPHOR!) Articles in which your friends, family and other loved ones bemoan your current mental/financial/marital strife for large sums of money, leaving the ‘readers’ (who for some reason give an apparent flying fuck about you) fretting over your wellbeing for the next seven days until you can have your rebuttal in the next issue declaring that you are all fine and dandy and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. Again, for large sums of money. (see previous rant on Kerry Katona.)
Congratulations, you have joined the brigade of smug little shits who somehow make a living out of being famous for being famous. It’s a cushy career if you can get it, and if you can live with the tedious soul-destroying boredom, because from what I can gather all you need to do is turn up. Or not. Sometimes the press just turn up at your house. So no, you don’t. You just have to be alive. Or not. Which brings us succinctly back to Jade Goody.
I have to admit, I too jumped on the Jade-hating band wagon through-out most of the time she was in the press. Even during the lengthy cancer tales I found my dislike of the woman only grew as the popular press continued to churn out yet more sob stories about how brave she was. And yes, I have to also admit, I cracked the odd joke when she finally snuffed it, mainly regarding the hideous irony that she had the audacity to shuffle off her all-too-frequently-photographed mortal coil on Mothering Fucking Sunday of all times, and how Channel 4 were probably going to buy the rights to Mothers’ Day and re-brand it National Jade Day, declaring it a legal requirement that we all shave our heads and go around pretending to be racist and thick on the anniversary of her death, starting a nation wide tradition that was to transcend all living memory and continue into a time in the distant future when nobody really understood who it was all about any more and thought it was something to do with the Virgin Mary going through a rebellious punk phase in her younger teenage years and having a bit of an axe to grind with some Israeli hoteliers who lost her reservation.
You see? It’s just too easy.
But the point I’m trying to get to before having to start dodging salad and beer bottles is this: I don’t hate Jade Goody. I hate what people like her do to society, inspiring either adulation or hatred from people who have never even met them. I mean look at me; I just made a crass joke about the death of a woman I’ve never met. How fucked up is that? I wouldn’t say something like that about a perfect stranger under normal circumstances! Well, not unless I had just found out they’d murdered my entire family or wiped out a small village of orphaned quadruple amputees or something, but you catch my drift. WHAT THE FUCK?
On the other hand the starry eyed praise poured onto these people by the media in their glory days only serves to lead more bone-idle attention junkies to the belief that they too can be perceived by the public as being totally fucking awesome for doing totally fuck all with their lives. And the sad thing is, these people are held up as inspiration! Inspiration for what? Inspiration for those with sufficiently little brains, qualifications and ambition required to really genuinely WANT that kind of lifestyle. Since when did Jordan become a role model for young mothers? When did Posh "I haven’t had a career since the nineties but it don’t matter ‘cos I married a footballer" Spice become the perfect specimen of the working woman? When did Kate Moss’s opinion on green issues start to matter more than the organisations and charities that have been fighting for them since day one? It’s as if we’re losing sight of the people who are genuinely important in our lives and electing some briefly empowered false idols and scapegoats to distract us from the fact that we’re totally fucking miserable and have no idea who to blame or who to look to for hope, and so our magazines simply churn out this never-ending diatribe telling us who to love/hate this week. And we the readers actually get sucked in! This is what makes it so surreal! It actually elicits an emotional response! Love or hate, that’s all we know! No-one ever won Big Brother by just being ‘nice’. Well someone did, but from what I gather she immediately appeared in said magazines defending herself against the hordes with the words “I’m not boring.” If she’d said something pig ignorant or made fun of a Bollywood movie star, perhaps the masses would have found her more entertaining. I can’t help but notice she’s vanished into obscurity now, so I can’t see the same outpouring of condolences when she finally corks it.
The trouble is, if Jade Goody had just been some quiet housewife in Essex (as I suspect she would have been were it not for her stint on Big Brother) then I would have had a hell of a lot more sympathy: A young mother dying before her time of a horrible illness and leaving behind a grieving husband and two young boys. THAT’S a genuine tragedy. The trouble is, the genuine tragedy has been stripped away, emotionally desiccated, ground down to a fine powder and then spoon fed to the masses as a dry and hollow attempt to sell magazines thinly disguised as a ‘tribute’. Sad story or not, you are eventually going to get sick of hearing about her. And the trouble was, we were sick of hearing about her already. Yes, people can argue that if you don’t want to hear about it then don’t read about it, but YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ IT! You just have to be alive in the same century as her and happen to walk past a newsagent or a supermarket at some point in your life. Or turn on your TV. Or have a conversation with another human being. Or leave the confines of your small and isolated cave and trundle down the mountain into the nearest village to find some pleasant-looking goat to chew on, and you can guarantee some retard will come up to you and utter those immortal words “what do you think of all this business with Jade Goody then?”
And the sad thing is, you can never know how much of this was Jade’s fault. You have to be lenient and assume that the press ALWAYS have some say in how much or little they will print on a certain individual, and this will ALWAYS be influenced by how much of the tripe people will read, and based on the vast volume of Jade-related articles I can only assume that the tripe-absorption rate of the general public would put Bounty Kitchen Rolls to shame, but putting on my cynical hat again for a moment I would like to point out that ALL of these people who go on these pointless and obnoxious little shows have asked for the attention in the first place. This isn’t like when Madonna and Kylie bemoan the press intrusion and the world in one unanimous and wholly unfeeling voice declares “Oh but you ASKED for the fame, you’re in the public eye now!” shortly before shimmying over the mansion wall and being savaged by Doberman Pinschers for the sake of a blurry paparazzi photo and a pair of frilly stolen knickers. These are not people upon whom the public eye has fallen as a side effect of a successful career in the entertainment business, these are people who thrust themselves into the public eye wearing their most glaringly awful outfits and their blingiest tacky accessories, mouthing off this way and that in the hopes of attracting more attention than a quadruple-breasted alien stripper cavorting up and down a lamp post on Oxford Street during the Boxing Day sales, and I hate to sound mean or unsympathetic in any way, but people like that deserve to go to a special kind of hell reserved only for mass-murderers, rap artists and people who talk in the library.
With this in mind, I have an idea which I would like to put to the producers of Big Brother:
Firstly, make this the last series. No, really. And if you only take me up on this part you will still have my undying gratitude, even if you ignore the next bit.
Secondly, advertise this very clearly when organising the auditions. There will be no second chance for totally asinine no-talent twat-baskets to splash their names all over the tabloids. This is it. You will get thousands applying. And then, once the rampaging thicko hordes have emerged, usher them all into the audition room, which should be in Wembley Stadium or the NIA or some such place, then lock the doors and shoot them - all of them. Or gas them. Or bludgeon them. Or drown them in Angel Delight. Or trample them under the many feet of a herd of angry hippopotami. Anything!