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Jodie Marsh seems to exist for one reason alone: to out-skank the glory that once was Jordan. Though she too has a appeared on "Page Three " and in a few reality shows — she was the first contestant to be evicted on Celebrity Big Brother, and was a particular target of former Labour MP and possible psychotic George Galloway — she is best-known for appearing in public wearing outfits that would seem immodest at a leather party: harnesses that cut painfully into her giant boobs, chaps and, and most famously, at an FHM party in 2004, nothing but three strategically placed, diamond-encrusted belts. She has made her predilection for group sex well known to the media (she participated in a threesome relationship with two men; and a story involving four different men, another woman, and a barn has gotten particular play). She also enjoys a long-standing public feud with Jordan, who, with typically Dickensian alacrity, has likened Jodie's nose to a "builder's elbow" and her breasts to "a spaniel's ears." Jodie, who thanks to her high-school academic record is supposed to be the smart one, managed only to retort that her rival's nose was "hooked like a witch."
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| Above, Jade Goody; below, OK! Magazine |
If, on account of their mutual loathing, Jordan and Jodie are Britain's answer to Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan times infinity, Jade Goody is its Jessica Simpson. Not because she is a singer; as of this writing, she isn't. Not because she has a creepy dad; though hers abandoned her as a baby and is currently in prison, he can't touch Joe Simpson. Not because she shot to fame on a reality series (the UK Big Brother), not because she is often held up as the quintessential arbitrary, irrelevant celebrity foisted on the public by the entertainment industry, and not because she launched a spectacularly inane fragrance line — the hilariously named Shhh...
No. To truly understand Jade Goody, it's best to let her speak for herself.
On farming: "What's asparagus? Do you grow it?"
On self-esteem: "I am intelligent, but I let myself down because I can't speak properly or spell."
On the U.S.: "They do speak English there, don't they?"
On art: "It's the Mona Lisa that's symmetrical, innit?"
And finally, on peacocks: "Don't think I'm daft, but them things that look like eyes, are they them real eyes?"
But unlike the inimitable Ms. Simpson, Jade Goody is more than just a bundle of adorably illiterate malapropisms. She has amassed a fortune of roughly $7 million simply by presenting and appearing on reality shows — Celebrity Wife Swap, Celebrity Driving School, Back to Reality, Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes, and most recently Jade Goody's Diary, which is sure to rival that of Samuel Pepys in capturing the zeitgeist of the British society of the time. In October, suffering the stomach pain that often accompanies a sudden dip in media coverage, Jade underwent emergency screening for colon cancer (in U.K. speak, "bowel cancer," a term at once deliciously visceral yet vague). When the prevailing medical opinion was that her abdominal pain was probably the result of a few nasty kebabs, Jade let her anger out by slugging a grandmother in the face at the cinema, in a fracas possibly instigated by her nineteen-year-old lover, Jack Tweedy (she has since broke things off with him, after several tabloid photographs surfaced of him in the embrace of a naked blonde, speculated by some snarkier British gossip blogs to be celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.) The granny, surely the kind of woman who lives in a flat decorated with Royal Wedding memorabilia and serves her guests tea from charmingly mismatched floral china, had this to say about Goody: "She called me a fat cunt. I used to like her from the telly but now I think she's a pig-faced thug."
While she may not be exactly what Antonin Artaud had in mind when he first floated the idea of living one's life as a work of art, Jade Goody is nevertheless the epitome of arbitrary renown; the ne plus ultra of commercialized insta-fame. As Henry V was the perfect English warrior-king, so Jade Goody is the perfect English tabloid celebrity.
This is all not as incongruous as it appears. While it may seem that America has exported its penchant for inexplicable celebrity to the U.K., perhaps it is the other way around, yet another symptom of what President Bush calls "our special relationship" to the mother country. For whatever its other strengths, Britain is not, and has never been, a meritocracy, but a place where a seat in Parliament, a title, a throne can arrive through the most arbitrary means of all. Britain has always had undeserving public figures — they used to be called the nobility. Earls, viscounts, barons, rendered barely functional by centuries of inbreeding were the original celebrity class, twittering away in their stately homes, guaranteed a life of privilege and the ear of power through an accident of birth. With that kind of historical perspective, it's hard not to root for the self-made Jordans of the world. At least a little bit.
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Rachel Shukert is the author of Have You No Shame?. Her work has also been featured in Best Sex Writing 2008, Best American Erotic Poems, and 2033: The Future of Misbehavior. She lives in New York City with her husband and her cat. Her website is rachelshukert.com. |
©2006 Rachel Shukert and Nerve.com |
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