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Jaded opinion
Mar. 23rd, 2009 12:28 pmThe Internet provides us with all the news we want and some we don't - and after being alerted to Tony Hart's death a few weeks ago by a set of Youtube comments pouring into my inbox, it was a bit of a surprise this weekend to be invited to a Facebook group called "RIP Jade Goody".
This situation is different, of course. If you're among the half of my friends list who will have no idea who she is, rather than the half who wished they had no idea who she was, it's a bit difficult to explain her role on television, largely because she didn't really have one. She was one of the breed of lack-of-personalities that became famous for no real reason after the fallout of one of the Big Brother series - remaining in the public eye because of what the Telegraph called "her observations, which were often amusingly wide of the mark and sometimes downright silly", which is their way of saying that she was famous for being a complete idiot.
But there is a tremendous guilt there, when somebody who you've wished (however secretly) would just disappear from the world suddenly does so - I now realize that this had been going on for some time, but I hadn't been following it until recently when I heard she was near death. It's a cause of great confusion to me - until recently I would have described her as an entirely worthless human being, but in her cancer at the height of her celebrity status, and as a result of the love affair that the equally execrable tabloids had with her, she's improved the awareness of the disease for the rest of the country. Her death really makes me think - certainly much more than her life ever did.
This situation is different, of course. If you're among the half of my friends list who will have no idea who she is, rather than the half who wished they had no idea who she was, it's a bit difficult to explain her role on television, largely because she didn't really have one. She was one of the breed of lack-of-personalities that became famous for no real reason after the fallout of one of the Big Brother series - remaining in the public eye because of what the Telegraph called "her observations, which were often amusingly wide of the mark and sometimes downright silly", which is their way of saying that she was famous for being a complete idiot.
But there is a tremendous guilt there, when somebody who you've wished (however secretly) would just disappear from the world suddenly does so - I now realize that this had been going on for some time, but I hadn't been following it until recently when I heard she was near death. It's a cause of great confusion to me - until recently I would have described her as an entirely worthless human being, but in her cancer at the height of her celebrity status, and as a result of the love affair that the equally execrable tabloids had with her, she's improved the awareness of the disease for the rest of the country. Her death really makes me think - certainly much more than her life ever did.
