Alpha Mummy: Jenny Colgan on the Great Jade Goody debate

In the queue at WH Smith I stood next to a teenage girl who was craning her neck to see a front-page newspaper picture of the bald, tumour-riddled young woman that is Jade Goody.

“Ugh, don't read it, it's too awful,” said her mother, pulling her away. At the till they bought a bitchy celebrity magazine.

God, what strange creatures are human beings. That a mother will happily buy her daughter a publication that mocks females for being anything less than physically perfect, circling every sweat patch, ogling every boob job, crowing over every bingo wing, yet shields her from the reality of cervical cancer, which affects 3,000 women a year in the UK, shows how upended our values have become. If it was my teenage daughter I know what I'd rather she read. And it wouldn't be the publication that suggests that women are unsightly slatterns if they edge beyond a size 10.

But then we have a curious attitude to death in this country. As we speak people are busily recording their disgust on internet forums and elsewhere that 27-year-old Goody is doing her dying in public - and being paid for it. Though many overwhelmingly support her, others find the photographs of her hairless head, greying skin and agonised face as she talks about leaving her two young sons motherless, possibly in less than eight weeks, to be exploitative and tasteless. As one says: “Dear God, can this not be done in private?”

It's true that the pictures, and the accompanying details of Goody's blocked bowel, are not pretty. But so what?

This is what terminal cancer looks like. Why should it be tucked away and camouflaged like a toilet roll beneath a crinoline doll? Why, in fact, are we obsessed with the idea of death itself being private? It is the one certainty we all have and yet we live in prissy, Botoxed denial of it.

Perhaps if we brought it more out into the open, as they do in other countries, we'd realise that there's more to life than £800 handbags. As Saul Bellow said: “Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”

Having written a fair amount about voluntary euthanasia, I'm continually bemused by our squeamish double standards around death. In Britain if terminally ill people want help to end their life they must travel to Switzerland so that they can do so without incriminating their loved ones because we can't bear to legalise it here.

And yet we all know that terminally ill people regularly starve and dehydrate themselves to death in hospital and we turn a blind eye. It's nice and hidden, you see. We like the dying to have the good manners to stay out of sight so that we can continue in our delusions of immortality.

Ah, I hear many of you say, but it's the money part that mostly bothers me about the Goody story. It is crass that newspapers have paid hard cash for photos of Jack Tweed proposing to her in her wheelchair and that her £1 million wedding this Sunday might be televised. It's obscene that TV crews have been filming her chemotherapy treatment and that she has even talked of dying on camera.

Well, let me ask you this: what would you do in her shoes? You can't say, of course, because the vast majority of you have never come within a country mile of Jade Goody's shoes. This is a woman raised by a former crack-smoking mother, whose father died from a heroin overdose, whose childhood was sacrificed to caring for her mother after she was disabled in a motorbike accident, the same mother who took a photograph of Jade, aged 5, with a spliff in her mouth.

However distasteful you may find it, reality TV was Goody's saviour. If she was exploited then at least it was as a consenting adult and not a petrified child. From the moment she appeared on Big Brother in 2002, a dim blonde who thought “East Angular” was abroad, her life direction changed. But as a “celebrity” with no talent to offer the only thing she had to sell was her life. And she did so, spectacularly.

Now all she has left to sell is her death. And if that's what she wants to do to leave the maximum amount of money to her children so that, as she says, they can enjoy the education denied to her then, really, what business is it of yours? Like the WH Smith woman, you don't have to look if you don't want to.

If Goody had been a dying Shakespearean actress would there have been quite so much gnashing of teeth around these photographs and interviews? Snobbery has always dogged her every step. When Prince Harry, raised with all the privileges money can buy, called a colleague a “little Paki” he was instantly forgiven by the public. When Goody, with every social handicap imaginable, made a less offensive racial remark to Shilpa Shetty, she was flayed alive. But that's how it is.

What surprises me is that some of those who gorged on the exclusive buy-ups of Goody's life - her relationships, her babies, her break-ups, her cosmetic surgery - are among the very people suggesting that she now close the shutters and retire from view. It is as if they resent her forcing brutal reality down their throat, as if she has reneged on a deal that she'd always be reassuringly shallow.

In her most recent interviews, conducted from a hospital bed, she has displayed a wisdom never apparent in all those frivolous TV programmes. As she grows weaker, the girl once labelled a national embarrassment is blossoming in stature, fulfilling her most meaningful public role. In the six months since cancer was diagnosed, the number of women seeking screening tests for the disease has risen by 21 per cent. Experts are in no doubt that the “Jade Goody effect” will save lives. And if anyone was unsure about their teenage daughter having the new cervical cancer vaccine, surely the sight of Goody's ravaged features will settle it.

No, the final irony of the ultimate reality TV creation that is Jade Goody is that she turned out to be anything but shallow.

I wonder if those who lapped up her celebrity lifestyle but now wince and look away can say the same?

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