LITMIR.BIZ

      Contents

      Title Page

      Acknowledgements

      Prologue

      The Voice of Big Brother

      Introduction

      1. Low Life

      2. Best-laid Plans …

      3. Re-re-wind

      4. Jack the Lad

      5. Kiss and Don’t Tell Me Again

      6. Running Scared

      7. Ch-ch-changes

      8. Highs and Lows

      9. Big Mistake

      10. Trial and Error

      11. New Beginnings

      12. Making Amends

      13. Back to Reality

      14. Hot and Bothered

      15. Hopes and Fears

      16. Lost Treasure

      17. Jack’s Back

      18. Family Values

      19. Fat Chance

      20. Friends and Fun

      21. End of the Road

      Epilogue

      Afterword

      Copyright

       Acknowledgements

      Thanks to my mum for loving me unconditionally. You have as many great things about you as you have faults and it’s because of what I’ve been through that I’ve become the strong person that I am today. I love you to bits.

      Thank you to Sean O’Brien for taking me under his wing when no one else would.

      Thanks to Danny Hayward and Simon Bridger for being good friends, and also to Lucie Cave for helping me write another brilliant book.

      Finally, thank you to Bobby and Freddy, my beautiful boys, for helping me get through the tough times and making me smile every single day.

       Prologue

      ‘It’s just a heavy period – nothing to worry about.’

      That was what the doctors had said to me when I was rushed into hospital after collapsing from severe bleeding (for the fourth time in as many years).

      I still have those words ringing in my ears now. Ringing, banging, screaming, SHOUTING in my ears. Because that turned out not to be the case.

      I was actually suffering from the aggravated stage (i.e. very dangerous) of cervical cancer. What’s more, I’d been carrying the nasty disease around with me for at least the last two years.

      And, despite all the tests I’d had, it hadn’t been detected.

      I was now being told that, if nothing had been done about it, I’d have been dead within three months. I’ve had some things thrown at me in my time but this took the bloody biscuit. Was there anything more that could happen to me?

      Just like everything else in my life, the news that I had cancer was played out in the most public way possible – on live TV. In a weird twist of fate I was now a housemate on Bigg Boss – the Indian version of Celebrity Big Brother. And it was here, in the familiar surroundings of a diary room chair, that I was once again told my fate. Only this time I wasn’t being told that I should put on some clothes or be quiet; I wasn’t being told that the public wanted me out; I was being told something much more serious, and something that I had absolutely no control over.

      I had cancer.

      And I needed to go back to the UK for treatment immediately.

      The night before I flew home I lay in the bath in my hotel room for what seemed like hours. I felt numb. How had it come to this? Why hadn’t it been detected before? Was I going to die? What would my boys do if something happened to me? Does this mean I can never have kids again? If I stay in this bath any longer am I going to turn into a prune?

      Ironically, what upset me most of all at that time was the fact that I had to leave India just as I was starting to redeem myself for all that had happened …

       The Voice of Big Brother

      Normal human behaviour in the Big Brother house includes the participants rowing and making up. And what even many of the show’s biggest fans cannot believe is that such events are unplanned. The manipulative, all-seeing producers must have chosen Jade and Shilpa in order to provoke racial conflict. They do not understand that Big Brother is 12 characters in search of a story. The producers put this group together, but the cast wrote the script. And no one knew in advance what that script would be. With 35 cameras, 20 security staff and a production team of 200, it is carefully managed. There are rules which the housemates must abide by, including prohibitions on violent or threatening behaviour. Of course they fall out and take sides from time to time, but the production team finds that the housemates usually resolve their differences, as happened on this occasion when Jade and Shilpa made up. All sorts of things occur in the house, but it is absurd to claim that this series was designed to serve up racism as entertainment. Indeed, was racism involved at all?

      No doubt about it, according to the Sun, the Mirror and the News of the World (‘Vile racist’, ‘Vile Jade Goody’). But the many columnists who debated the issue were evenly split between racism, bullying and class as the motive for the fallout. The complaints to Channel 4 were also divided. The point is that you cannot be certain about a person’s motives. So this was never an open-and-shut case. As it happens, I know Jade Goody and I do not believe her to be remotely racist. Her father [was] mixed race. She spent nine weeks in the Big Brother house in 2002 with three black people without the hint of a racist attitude. She had a blazing row with one of them, Adele, but that was about verrucas.

      Jade certainly has a temper and may be prone to bullying – not an attractive trait, but not a crime either.

      Peter Bazalgette, chief creative officer of Endemol,

       Prospect magazine, March 2007

       Introduction

      December 2006

      ‘John, it’s going to kill me off. Going back on Big Brother will be the death of me. I just have this feeling.’

      ‘Don’t be a fucking idiot,’ he laughed. John Noel, the agent I’d been with ever since I emerged from the Big Brother house in 2002, wasn’t one to mince his words. ‘Come on, Jade, get your head out of your arse. What have you got to lose? You’re going to make money out of it; and you’re hardly in there for any time at all. The worst that can happen is that you don’t win it. It’s a great opportunity. What can go wrong?’

      5 January 2007

      Time to face the crowd. Wow! What an overwhelming

Скачать книгу