I’ve spent a lot of time of time thinking about Jade Goody recently. Jade Goody has somehow ended up playing an eerily recurring role in the sitcom that is my life, the extent of which only recently became clear.

In 2019 I watched Channel 4 return to form in exploiting the poor woman by creating a 3-part documentary about her rise and fall. Little did I know in merely a year’s time her reality would be my reality. However, it wasn’t until I properly looked into Goody’s life that I understood that the “reality” we had all been sold was in fact a convenient truth that made important and significant omissions.

Most millennials will remember the Goody years. While I can safely say that I have never watched a single complete series of Big Brother, somehow I knew a lot about Goody. Goody was everywhere and whether you followed her or not, the media bombarded you, with often derogatory, stories of Goody.

Goody illustrates a long-standing battle of British culture and class, and to me Goody particularly embodies the Blair-Brown years – The illusionary tumbling of the establishment. No longer was it cool to be old school posh, wearing your Tweed and Barbour. This was the age of the people’s princess and council estate Brit pop bands, lads and Gallagher’s! That’s what I saw in Goody. A girl who lived her life in public, sometimes crassly, sometimes naively and whose aspirations the nation initially rallied behind.

But stiff upper lip Britishness never went away, rather it lay dormant while the social experiment played out. The Brit pop lads moved to the Cotswolds and started making cheese. Soon we’d gone too far and the Ladettes were out of control, flashing their fannies and binge drinking. Our obsessive voyeurism into the heathen women began to spiral and we watched the new Britain fight the old Britain. Nowhere was this as grossly displayed as in the awful show Ladette to Lady – the title of which might as well have been Virgin or Whore; the two only permitted tropes through feminine history.

Once we were done laying claim to Goody’s aspiration came her dramatic fall. I remember exactly where I was when I heard about it…like a cultural 9/11. I’d heard of Shilpa Shetty being on the show. Young Indians knew her from 80s/90s Bollywood but Shetty had long been out of movies when she came to Big Brother. I recall a clip of her walking around the house, completely clueless about the kind of degrading reality show she’d fallen into, prancing around in her big sunglasses retorting to housemates “I’m like India’s Angelina Jolie”.

Goody no doubt had her prejudices and those were fuelled by the playground bully and racist sentiments of the girls she aligned herself with. Goody showed us just how far the ladette culture had sunk. Not only were you crass but you were a racist in a modernising world. Brits collectively threw their weight behind toppling Goody and the insidious racism of the nation…we really solved that one guys!

Goody played the role we wanted to her to play, we goaded her and egged her on and when she failed to see the undrawn line we disgraced her for it. No one wanted to hear any discussion about class, about reality shows, about our own responsibility. We were back to binaries, Shetty = Saint, Goody = whore. One member of the public wrote how Goody represented the “the rapid decline of morals in our society”. While another held Indian values as some sort of beacon of moral piety – “On a recent holiday in India I noticed how television there did not rely on sex and lewdness, unlike contemporary British television. Even television advertising relied on cosy pictures of families and happy couples and children.”

Perhaps they missed the daily reports of rural rapes, lynchings and burnings whilst on holiday.

Shetty shouted at Goody “this is what made you” as if to tarnish her aspirations and the opportunities available to her without a thought for the misogynist, sexist, “item girl” tropes of Bollywood films that earned Shetty her fortune. Her fame was somehow more legitimately earned.

When Shetty “won” she sat on a throne being interviewed by Russell Brand, a man who on radio phoned an elderly grandfather to call his granddaughter a slut. A man who regardless of this then went on to star in Hollywood films and dished out voting advice. Yet its Goody’s sins we are focusing on.

I was in India when Goody’s cancer diagnosis was broadcast. I watched her howl and sob. This was her redemption tour and it would all be for nothing. I remember my aunt remarked “this is karma, she deserves it”. My heart sank. She didn’t deserve it. There were so many nuances at play in this young woman’s life. So much of it we as criminal barristers see day in and out coming through the courts – Poverty, deprivation, addiction. Do those who suffer in the underbelly not deserve our humanity?

When Goody had cancer, her story was ours again. Keep it on brand – Slutty, ladette-y, chaotic Goody. Too dumb to go get checked, too promiscuous, deserves it! Goody didn’t deserve it, no one does.

Goody was infected in her late teens with HPV 16. A very high risk strain. Some papers say she contracted it before being fully sexually active, which suggests that she caught it without full sexual intercourse. Goody was going through treatment much before we knew her as the Goody off Big Brother.

The procedure Goody went through is often performed under local anaesthetic. The process of administering the anaesthetic is debilitating in itself. Then pieces of your cervix are literally carved out of you while you lie there awake. She went through this procedure multiple times before refusing to go back. The cervix is not some vast organ, there is only so much of it you can take out before there is nothing left.

Social media is abound with women documenting their experiences of cervical procedures. One woman tweeted how her nurse called her cervix a mess. While in June 2021, Caitlin Moran wrote about her experience of getting an IUD fitted without any pain relief; a procedure which left her “traumatised”. I don’t blame Goody for refusing to go back. The intense pain of such an invasive procedure followed by the humiliation a clinician may put you through can fill you with dread. But we rarely talk about this. It doesn’t fit the narrative.

Goody’s health deteriorated as she suffered from blackouts and bleeding and eventually she was referred to an NHS oncology team where she underwent exploratory surgery for ovarian cancer and bowel cancer. Yet they missed her rather advanced cervical cancer. Her bleeding explained away as bad periods or miscarriages. Goody may have missed one appointment but there were several opportunities missed by her medical team. Goody’s Harley Street GP later went on to say that she was let down by her oncology team.  

So why do we still talk about Goody as a cautionary tale? What exactly are we dissuading young girls from? Being promiscuous? Not going to your smears? That’s the campaign isn’t it? Don’t miss your smear, the importance of attending your smears, don’t be foolish! Don’t be embarrassed! Our narratives are controlled again in insidious ways.

Sarah Harding died earlier this year from a dangerous and violent form of Breast Cancer. I encourage you to read the linked article. In it Liz O’Riordan, a cancer surgeon, details how the narrative is hijacked every time a young woman dies from cancer. The narrative yet again is to blame women. Missed your check up? Missed the signs? Left it too late?

“I also quickly became aware of another common narrative emerging in the wake of Sarah’s death: that her cancer had been picked up late, so this tragedy could have been avoided, and that if we were all more vigilant, vastly fewer young women would die of breast cancer.

But in reality that just isn’t the case. The uncomfortable truth is that young women get breast cancer because they are bloody unlucky. Some will be cured but some will die within a couple of years, and there’s very little they, or modern medicine, can do about it “

Truth is you can have cancer, attend all your appointments and just be unlucky. We need to rethink the binaries with which we see women and by extension the narrative of our diseases. It’s not a battle you lose and some don’t fight harder than others. It’s not your fault. I attended every smear, had very little sex and I was just bloody unlucky. As was Harding and in my opinion, as was Goody.

When I arrived at Guys Cancer Centre for my surgery, I was taken all the way up to a room towering over Bermondsey. As I watched petrified out of my window my thoughts turned to Goody. My heart still sinks when I think of her. A young girl who aspired to be more than her surroundings, who seemed desperate to leave Bermondsey and yet embodied the beautiful community spirit of it. It’s not that I don’t think Goody was a racist but rather that I forgive her for it. She deserved our humanity more than our vitriol.

I wish we could think of women beyond the binaries of good and bad, virgin and whore, saint and sinner. That Goody could have been a perpetrator and victim at the same time or that Shetty could have been a victim and a clueless elitist at the same time. Perhaps detailing her journey with cancer can help us to stop blaming her, help us to see another perspective and to stop using her story in a way that suits us.