Jade.

Article from The Scotsman. By Bill Jamieson.

LIKE a fly caught in a camera lens, everything that Jade Goody did was in public view. By the end, there was nothing private about her at all. In fact, her death was the greatest public spectacle of her entrapment.

"Courage", "guts", "magnificent", "fantastic": these were just some of the verbal tributes showered upon her from the Prime Minister down.

Who would have thought, seven years ago, when Jade Goody first burst upon the national consciousness in Big Brother – a foul-mouthed dental nurse and shoplifter from Bermondsey, South London, whose mother was a one-armed lesbian and father was then serving a four-year sentence for armed robbery – that she would rise to become the centrepiece of this Wagnerian death-apocalypse: flower petals descending, the music swelling, the ascension to mass acknowledgement and the light of a thousand cameras filling the stage with a luminescent radiance?

Jade Goody was no ordinary member of the Celeb Set. She was one of its greatest champions. In the age of instant mass image, Celebrity now rules all that it surveys. And celebrity is sustained by a public fascination beyond mere intrusion.

In the Supreme Senate of Celebrity, there is no inner or private life. Everything you do is for the vicarious consumption of the media. The reward is, well, more fame. And all that more fame brings.

The beguiling pull of Celebrity is that it is genuinely classless, open to all and with barriers against none. It is a meritocracy of sorts, entered by the surrender of any sense of the private, the shameful or the embarrassing.

And it is achieved by dedication of a sort. The first purpose of Celebrity is to become well known.

The second is to become even better known. And the third – the very aristocracy of Celebrity – is to be well known even by people who do not want to know you at all.

Jade Goody passed effortlessly through these gradations like a ghost gliding up a staircase. Here was no wilting wallflower, waiting for an invitation. She kept knocking till we let her in, a distraught heroine bursting out of the pages of an Emil Zola novel.

She was forged by Reality TV, lived unashamedly in the public eye, and was succoured and protected by that ubiquitous escort to the familiar, the court ambassador to Celebrity, the very lord high protector of fame: Max Clifford no less, a man who has himself risen by being well known for looking after others who are well known.

But how did Jade do it? What was her secret, her tricks of the trade, her USP? What turned the brassy Jade into media gold?

Jade was not without talents. A raucous honesty was one. An unfiltered trade in gossip was another. Her ability to make ignorance into an unmissable spectacle was beyond compare. A public favourite was her question whether "East Angular" was abroad. My favourite was her reply to a suggestion that she emigrate to America. "They do," she asked, "speak English there, don't they?"

But none of these quite explains her magnetic pull. How was it, exactly, back in 2002 when most media pundits had her down for an early exit from the Big Brother house, that she survived to the final four?

I must confess, I dissented from the consensus view and had her down to be the winner and was briefly disappointed that she didn't quite make it. But unlike other contestants, Jade became more than a Celebrity. She became a brand.

What counted in my view for the Goody phenomenon is that she captured perfectly the state we're now in. Jade Goody was more than a fly on a lens. She was the unsparing mirror of what a large section of Britain has become. And like all mirrors, we rarely pass up the chance to pause and look into one.

Big Brother was not the grotesque abnormality that many believed. It wasn't all that crude, or dumb or moronic. It was disturbingly close to how many of us at that age behave. In fact, it's as good as it gets.

Were this not so, Jade Goody would not have attracted seven million viewers and a cascade of advertising support. The reality show was one of Channel Four's biggest commercial successes ever. And because of that, they did the least surprising thing – they brought Jade back for a second run in the Big Brother house.

Jade Goody was a one-off. But she was also one of us. She came to typify a large part of the country we have become, just as the Big Brother house was itself a metaphor for Britain. What she lacked in brain she more than made up in heart.

That she was so representative, so one-of-us, is what made her life, and her death, the stunning national events they became.