What an unfortunate week for Paul Gascoigne, alcoholic and self-confessed wife-beater, to take to the airwaves and try to tug at the nation's heart-strings. It isn't poor Gazza's fault that his life has been such a car crash, see. It's the booze/his horrid ex-wife/his thoughtless 12-year-old son. I'll have to check but I think he may have forgotten to blame his star sign.

Take some advice, Paul, and save your breath. The public has just watched the remains of Jade Goody, 27, being carried out of her house. Right now sympathy-wise that puts you in the UniBond League. I'm sorry for your troubles but I'm more interested in the internal life of this bluebottle on my windowsill than I am in the never-ending sob story that is Paul Gascoigne.

The same goes for the Winehouses, the Dohertys and all the other self-pitying celebrities who squander their good health to drugs, drink and - pause to stifle a yawn - “body image issues”. It's boring. Mind-numbingly boring.

Am I a heartless harridan who can't begin to understand the complexities of substance addiction? Actually I have a great deal of sympathy for some addicts. But one of the things that Goody's death has illuminated is that there's a difference between incurable, unstoppable end-stage cancer and an illness that can usually be controlled if you get a grip and stop feeling sorry for yourself.

It's not just me saying this. You can hear similar views on radio phone-ins and website forums everywhere. Yesterday I spoke to a group of teenage girls who, in the dramatic way that teenagers do, said that after watching Goody being eaten alive by cancer, any celebrity who now urinates their life away with hedonism and drugs would be a “disgusting w****r”. How refreshing. Let's have more.

The fact is that to many young people Goody's passing feels like the first untimely death of someone they “know”. They are steamrollered by it. She was the flawed ordinary Joe who personified limitless possibility; a vicarious ticket to the in-crowd behind the velvet rope. Now she's gone and they see that, ultimately, all that fame and wealth that they lapped up via glossy magazines was powerless. This has been their Princess Diana moment. And however cheesy you find the comparison, who cares if for young people it suddenly lifts the veil on what matters in life?

The BBC received 70 complaints for giving Goody's death “too much prominence” in its news bulletins last Sunday. But editors are not stupid. They know how much she resonated with an age group with which news programmes are desperate to engage. Much has been said about Goody inspiring thousands more young women to go for cervical screening tests. But it would be gratifying if she left another legacy, too - a compassion fatigue and zero tolerance for all of those on the pampered celebrity circuit who wilfully abuse their bodies, despite being able to access all the help they need to stop.

It would be nice to think that, rather than commanding rock'n'roll respect, those famous photographs of Winehouse's bloodied ballet pumps or Doherty's dead, rolling eyes would be met with disgust by young people who have now seen live footage of a woman in so much pain she had to suck on a morphine lollipop to be lifted into an ambulance.

Once you've seen that pathetic image of Goody's grey arm reaching from a stretcher, the light in her eyes already dimming, can you observe the needle marks on a healthy young person “experimenting” with drugs and feel anything other than very, very annoyed?

It would be nice to think that young women will finally see the absurdity of pursuing a fashionably skeletal body. Here was a woman who would have loved to be able to eat, but in the final nine days of her life managed only a few sips of Coca-Cola and, as the weight fell off her, was unable even to speak. How's that for size zero, girls?

The young feel themselves immortal, but Goody has shown them in excoriating detail that they aren't. On April 4 they'll be shown again when, in front of the cameras for the final time, she is carried into church in a rectangular box.

In fairness to Gascoigne, he is now cleaning up his act. But part of that process surely involves taking full personal responsibility, not going on TV to play the victim and accusing your 12-year-old child of “using” you. This is pathetic and the audience knows it. Part of Goody's almost biblical redemption was that she admitted her faults.

For what it's worth I do think that Goody will inspire a period of enlightenment among the young. My friend's 19-year-old daughter, who has spent this week obsessively googling “young women/cancer/ death”, has cancelled her sessions at a tanning booth and vowed never to go again. A small thing but, to my friend, little short of a miracle.

But like the new puritanism that is tracking the recession - “who needs expensive restaurants when you can grow your own veg?” - it won't last very long. Life is not like that. We've all had that near-miss in a car or spent weeks anxiously waiting for blood-test results and then are so grateful it's OK that we resolve to be better people. “I'm going to be kinder, less materialistic, give more back!” we say, then within a week we're shaking our fists and making gargoyle faces at an elderly motorist who's been tardy setting off at the traffic lights. In the end we tend to revert to type.

For some that moving-on process has already begun. In this week's issue of Heat magazine it is Kerry Katona's latest marriage drama that gets top billing on the cover with “Britney - don't call me fat” as the rider. Jade Goody - its one-time cover queen - does not merit a word. Not just on the front page but in the entire 130-page issue.

This is the showbiz beast in all its naked brutality. The queen is dead. Long live whoever can sell, sell, sell on the newsstands.

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