Wendyl Nissen: Too many Goodys leave us Jaded

When Natasha Richardson died swiftly after a skiing accident last week, there was only one thought skimming through my head: Jade Goody must be gutted.

The former dental nurse-cum-Big Brother celebrity was supposed to have died at around the same time as Natasha. Instead, as OK! magazine circulated her tribute issue while she was still alive, one can only imagine the severe pressure placed on her to perform her exit.

Welcome to the new tabloid genre - grief porn. Jade Goody found out she had cancer while performing for cameras on the Indian version of Big Brother a year ago and from there it was the documentary Living with Jade as she went through treatment, the documentary of the wedding as she married her boyfriend Jack Tweed, the 700,000 pound ($1.8 million) deal with OK! magazine and the upcoming "love letter to her sons". A cancer diary was described by her publishers as a "modern day parable".

I'm not sure which moral or religious lesson we will gain from Goody's experiences around death but let's hope it's more of a page turner than the Prodigal Son.

To the uninitiated, Jade's ability to play out one of life's most taboo subjects in the public eye would seem distasteful and her massive earning power from death unseemly.

For many, death is still the last taboo, in more ways than one, something to be held as sacred, private and steeped in ancient ritual.

For those of us who have worked in the tabloid genre for most of our careers, grief porn and its associated media spin-offs have not surprised us. It is akin to an airline pilot marvelling at the new brakes just fitted on his jet, or a cow-shed having some new electronic control devices installed. It's called progress.

A decade ago the thought of someone real, not an actor, crying on television, having a screaming match or having sex would have been unthinkable.

Yet today, it's all part and parcel of that genre we call reality television. Prepare yourself for a new reality show already on the desks of network executives around the world entitled The Hospice - They're All Gonna Die ... Eventually.

In a few years we will eagerly watch a long-running series which charts the demise of 10 people diagnosed with cancer. Liver cancer sufferers will be a sure bet to get on the show, as will lung, whereas breast and cervical cancer survival rates are a little higher so they might not get on.

As Stephen Fry took the 30 seconds it takes to Twitter his tribute to Jade - that she was a "kind of Princess Di from the wrong side of the tracks" - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown took a little bit more time instructing his press secretary to release his statement that "she was a courageous woman both in life and death".

What they really meant to say was that Jade Goody was simply good talent. And in tabloid that's what we look for.

The daughter of drug addicts, she was uneducated, prone to shocking examples of foot-in-the-mouth and blatant racism.

She had an estranged half-brother in Australia who has fallen out with their mother and didn't manage to see Jade before she died, despite the world's media alerting him to the fact for a year.

And she had a husband who risked missing her funeral if he was thrown in the rusty nail for assaulting a taxi driver. You couldn't find a better script on Coronation Street.

Then there is the justification. There isn't a tabloid editor who hasn't approached a star to do a tell-all and used the line: "If just one little girl is saved from this terrible disease, then isn't your story worth it?"

Jade is already being credited with prompting a 20 per cent increase in young women getting smear tests that can detect cervical cancer.

And the inevitable bottom line. The one we used when Princess Diana was pursued by paparazzi and lost her life in a Paris traffic tunnel: "We wouldn't publish it if you didn't buy it."

OK! magazine's coverage of Jade's wedding boosted its circulation threefold to 1.8 million copies.