“She totally delivered on what we thought she would,” gloated one of the show’s producers. With a supporting cast of goading bullies, “chav” Jade picked off Shilpa Shetty, articulate and beautiful symbol of cultural globalisation, and subjected the Bollywood actress to racialised insults. Caught in the spectacle of self, Jade manifested the character she had been assigned. A second stint in the Big Brother house, this time as the “Celebrity” her first appearance had elevated her to, saw Jade embroiled in a racial bullying scandal. So, Jade Goody became “Jade,” an icon – the inverse Diana – constructed through image, possession and consumption. It became clear that Jade’s “absolutely average” character – her boisterousness, unexceptional looks, naïve malapropisms – were ripe for demonisation: criticisms of Jade soon became coded attacks on the British working-class, or “ugly, thick white Britain” as the ever-honourable Guardian put it at the time. It tells us: average people are only actually important once they become a spectacle.Īs is now well-known, Jade provided spectacle in abundance, aided in no small way by a manipulative media and pantomime public. But the capitalised “Celebrity” on the Big Brother website is a knowing wink. On reality television, “very little happens that would not take place outside the context of the indifference of our own lives.” We see the apparent foregrounding of the average: the promise of recognition, adoration and legacy, the repeated reassurance that average people are important. Umberto Eco once wrote that “television's ideal is the absolutely average person.” This is, at least ostensibly, true of reality television in particular. She left the show, however, a “professional not-known-for-anything-of-note Celebrity figure,” in the words of the show’s own website. Jade was but a humble dental nurse upon entering the Big Brother house in 2002. Where Diana was introduced to the consuming public in an elevated position, born into nobility and always-already royal (if rejected by some in the Royal Family itself), Jade was different in so far as she was precisely nobody. So, we can only know Jade in the way Chancey describes – and like with Diana, we, the carnivorous public, came to objectify and “symbolically possess” Jade through these representations.Ī key distinction between these two figures, though, comes at the point in which they entered the mediascape. The spectacle of the entrance – all cheers, shutters and flashes – was replaced with the quiet of a house rigged with cameras: she too was to never be unwatched again.
Much the same can be said for Jade Goody, who waded through hordes of television fans, ascended a metal staircase, gave the crowds one final wave and fatefully entered the Big Brother house.
Chancey takes this idea and asserts that “like nearly all mass media consumers, I can only know through the media’s representation of her life in pictures.” Diana was introduced into the public eye “blushing and blinking into this lens and that lens,” an icon baptised by a wave of clicks and flashes, immediately recognisable and never to be unwatched again. Susan Sontag famously wrote that photography “turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” On the capricious construction of Princess Diana’s simulacrum – her life captured and reconstituted in tabloid photography and reportage – Jill R.
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