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and this one:

Why do we turn up our noses at Jade?
Allison Pearson.
17 July 2002
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As Big Brother 3 moves into its closing stages, the show has recovered from charges that it had become boring to achieve some of its highest ratings. One way it has done this is by demonising Jade Goody. A 21-year-old from Bermondsey, Jade's main crime is daring to be fat, loud, female and unapologetic about it. If you took Sharon Mitchell, the former landlady of the Queen Vic in EastEnders, and blew her up with a bicycle pump until you couldn't pump any more, then you'd have Jade.

I imagine that Big Brother producers were hoping that the council-estate kid would emerge as the Helen Adams of this year's show.

Remember Helen, the daffy Welsh girl whose interests included blinking and handbags, but who had a gentle hopefulness about her that ended up endearing her to millions? Well, Jade is on a par with Helen for general knowledge - she thinks that a strawberry is a kind of vegetable - but she lacks Helen's sweetness, although that is no excuse for the grotesque media persecution of her, which culminated in viewers standing outside the Big Brother House last week waving placards saying: Kill the Pig!




By cruel coincidence, Kill the Pig! happens to be what the boys shout in Lord of the Flies when they smash the fat lad's glasses and strip off the tattered remnants of civilised behaviour. They have become barbarians.

And isn't it barbaric to expose someone as vulnerable and ignorant as Jade to public scrutiny?

A special-needs case if ever there was one, a drunken Jade was persuaded to awkwardly remove her bra and pants in front of the boys who sat there in their clothes laughing at her. And what does Channel 4 call televising her appearing to give a blow-job to a man who clearly cared nothing for her - entertainment?

Jade Goody is what you get when you give a kid a chaotic childhood and raise it in a society where self-abasement is considered a career move.

Her mum told heat magazine that when Jade was bullied, "I used to make her go to school with squeezy bottles of lemon to squirt in girls' eyes. I even gave her scissors once, but she handed them in".

What a marvellous maternal example that was.

A senior Big Brother producer told a paper at the weekend that the show was "an unpopularity contest". He admitted to being concerned for Jade. A little late in the day for that. We can probably count the hours till her bones are left in the sun after the tabloid dogs have got what they want from her.