Too Goody to be true

I’m forever tripping over things that would have been useful nuggets to include in my book about the Noughties. That’s the glory of print media, I suppose; as Zadie Smith put it, “...the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after it’s published.” Anyway, in the section about reality TV, I argued that Noughties celebrities in general, and Jade Goody in particular, needed to be “at once real, unreal and hyperreal.” Now the excellent Billy Stockbroker directs us to a thread on David Icke’s site, which starts with the contention that the whole Jade story was a conspiracy to persuade us, the sheepy people, to accept cervical cancer jabs and then gets even weirder:

i challenge you to find me any verifiable proof that Jade Goody existed at all. by verifiable proof I mean a copy of a birth certificate, copy of a tax return, or someone who knew her growing up in her poor white trash lifestyle she supposedly had. Jade Goody was a character played by an actor.

Well, as far as the last sentence goes, aren’t we all? But another user appears to have been reading Baudrillard with one eye and Robert Anton Wilson with the other:

That’s perhaps the most amazing thing about that woman when you think about it. He [sic] whole bizarre life, celeb status and surreal demise was real... She could only be something that could be real in an illuminati controlled world.

So that’s answered that then. She was real. But she was only obeying orders.