Jade Goody was exploited by the media – and Britain’s hatred of ‘chavs’ meant it was somehow OK

Ten years since Jade Goody’s death, it’s easy to forget just how vilified the one-time “most hated woman in Britain” was by the same press that propelled her to stardom. A new three-part Channel 4 documentary, Goody: The Reality Star Who Changed Britain aims in part to force us to remember. The first instalment of the documentary, which aired last night, tracked Goody’s meteoric rise, from her childhood through to life after her first stint in Big Brother.

In 2002, before we began to realise the immense damage that reality TV can have, Goody was cast in Big Brother aged just 20. She was a “real person”, a vulnerable, naive working class girl from a tough background in Bermondsey who would rope in viewers with her lack of filter. That’s what the producers thought, and it worked – almost overnight, Goody was ridiculed, not only for her perceived lack of intelligence but for her looks, too. “She totally delivered on what we thought she would, in a cold hard way. The viewers hated her,” says one producer during the documentary.

Not just the viewers: the press, too. Goody pulls up front pages that seem archaic now, with fatphobic headlines and cruel imagery. Tabloid journalists were interviewed, with one gleefully revisiting his coverage, laughing at headlines that compare Goody to a “pig”. She was vilified, the entire country over, for how she spoke and looked. Her Big Brother housemates mocked her, and footage of viewers outside the house show people chanting to “vote out the pig” and telling her to “die”. Looking back, it seems like she never stood a chance.

The hatred of Goody was symptomatic of the hatred of those like her in Britain in the early 2000s – a fear of working class people, of “chavs”, was endemic in the country. But unlike so many others, Goody eventually got the platform to tell her story. After it was revealed that Goody was the “impoverished daughter of drug addicts”, the public finally started to see her as a person. Suddenly, papers that just last week had been publishing cruel photoshopped photos of Goody saw her as a vulnerable sweetheart.

In the documentary, Goody’s mother is chillingly generous with her anecdotes. She tells horrific stories of punching her daughter for taking away her pipe, talking openly about her daughter “growing up too fast”. Shocking images show a very young Goody smoking weed, and her mother confesses that she believes Goody went into the house just to get away from her and “to get her childhood back”. It gives an insight into where Goody came from, and why she felt she had no choice but to go on reality TV. She even calls Big Brother her “golden ticket”.

And despite not winning, Goody was suddenly inundated with press, money, TV shows. She was famous for being famous in a time that slightly preceded Paris Hilton and the Kardashians. She went from poverty to book launches overnight, all through the sheer power of her personality. She worked it well; selling her own “candid” images, taking every opportunity, chasing everything she could. But that, the documentary reveals, ruined her too: she worked constantly, and, as ex-husband Jeff Brazier tells it, “never taking her foot off the pedal” lest the press move on to someone new. Therein lies the working class curse: it’s impossible to ever sit back and enjoy your success. Somebody will always be there to take it away from you.

Goody exposes the problem with reality TV that we wilfully ignored in the early 2000s, and it took genuine tragedy to make us understand. Reality TV offers people with nothing a free opportunity to win money or fame or, in the case of The Jeremy Kyle Show, answers. They, as Goody did, see it as their rise out of poverty. But they aren’t prepared for the vilification that being put on TV in front of the entire country can bring. Nobody ever really is. They’re encouraged to be their “authentic selves” so viewers can tear them apart, told that they can have everything – but they aren’t told what that new fame will take away. With no blueprint, Goody had no idea what she was getting into, but nothing could be worse than the life she lived before.

When you grow up in impoverished or abusive circumstances, you don’t have time to become a whole person. You don’t get to learn from your mistakes or be taught what isn’t the right thing to say. Every day is survival: there really isn’t that much time for nuance, and your development is often delayed. Goody was forced to grow up, live on TV, after a mostly insular existence living with parents who didn’t raise her. That delay made people think Goody was “thick”, made them talk about her as if she wasn’t in the room. But the documentary shows that she was self aware: “People don’t like the real me, and that hurts” she says in one clip. Goody exposes that grotesque reality, and will hopefully force people who were complicit in her takedown to reconsider what they did. Goody’s infamy made her, sure – it took her away from her mother’s house. But at what cost?

Part one ends just before the incident that enabled the entire country to justify their hatred of Goody: her racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother in 2007. The incident would destroy the vulnerable image she had built, and she would die two years later believing she was being punished for her cruelty. There is no excuse for what she did. But what the first part of Goody gives us are reasons for just how this perfect alchemy of equal parts lovable and loathsome, vulnerable and cruel, came to be the most hated woman in Britain before she had ever done anything wrong but be working class.