Joan Smith: What Jade and Diana have in common
For some, bad publicity is painful, but not so bad as none at all
Sunday, 4 March 2007
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This week's quick quiz: what's the connection between Jade Goody, the disgraced "reality" TV contestant, and Diana, Princess of Wales? One is from Bermondsey, the other a palatial country estate - and that's only the beginning of a lengthy list of differences.
But as Ms Goody fell into another trap of her own making last week - she was caught out on her trip to India wrongly claiming that her nemesis, Shilpa Shetty, had invited her to tea - it suddenly became clear to me that she and the late princess do have something in common.
Like Diana, Ms Goody is fatally addicted to attention. After she was shamed on Celebrity Big Brother - accused of racism, bullying and being terminally working class - Ms Goody took herself off to The Priory, appearing to be on the verge of a breakdown. She gave a self-lacerating interview, claiming she had become such a hate figure that she was afraid to go home and feared for her children's lives.
But she was out of The Priory in no time and off to India on a totally private trip which attracted yet more publicity. Diana's behaviour was not dissimilar during her frenetic final days in the summer of 1997, endlessly complaining about press harassment and spending hours on the phone to royal correspondents. For women of this type - fragile, egotistical and manipulative - bad publicity is painful, but it isn't as dreadful as the other possibility, which is to be out of the limelight altogether.
It doesn't just apply to women, of course, and you don't have to look much further than the Big Brother house to find plenty of examples: Michael Barrymore, dogged by questions about the unexplained death of a young man in his swimming pool, or Pete Burns, the surgically addicted cross-dressing singer.
Such programmes depend on a steady supply of exhibitionists, and what gets people watching is a horrible combination of bonding, rivalry and bullying.
Less consideration has been given to the desperate craving for attention which drives the contestants, a dynamic similar to that behind one of last week's nastier stories, which featured an eight-year-old boy from North Tyneside who has health problems because he weighs nearly 16 stone. Why else would his family, and those of similarly afflicted children, think it was a good idea to allow them to be exposed in the media?
Tellingly, the triggers for obesity include low self-esteem and a need for comfort, and it's not difficult to imagine that obese children and their families might be suffering from a collective lack of attention.
In a culture where working long hours is admired, where single parents struggle to combine jobs and childcare, and where instant solutions to boredom are likely to involve machines rather than human beings, it's hardly surprising if this is a widespread problem - or if people are flattered when a TV crew appears on their doorstep. I don't suppose Ms Goody had had as much attention in her entire life as when she first appeared on Big Brother, even if much of it consisted of people laughing at her.
Addicts always go back for more and that is what Ms Goody keeps doing, still not recognising the destructive cycle which she is in. Diana was much the same, unable to do the one thing - stepping out of the public eye for a while - that might have given her peace of mind (not to mention a normal life expectancy).
We can laugh at Ms Goody and get sentimental about Diana, as befits their different class and status, but what about the people who supply their drug of choice? I think the word I'm looking for is pushers.
