Liam Rudden: Bringing down the final curtain in a dignified way

Published on Friday 27 March 2009 09:01

SHE slipped away quietly and quickly after a brave battle with cancer. The end of an era.

After more than four decades entertaining on TV, Wendy Richard died on February 26. However, the actress best loved as the dippy Miss Brahms in Are You being Served? and the hard-done-by Pauline Fowler in East-Enders had one last appointment with the TV cameras, a programme called Wendy Richard: To Tell You the Truth, which documented the last three months of her life.

Richard wanted to use the airtime to dispel widely held misconceptions of life while under-going chemotherapy. The result was an emotional and poignant insight into a very personal experience with which thousands will have related.

Most importantly, Richard, though visibly fading, retained her dignity, laughing through the pain, a trouper to the end. Importantly, filming stopped a few weeks before she died.

Last weekend, amid the media circus that accompanied the death of Jade Goody, dignity was not a concept to be embraced.

Goody's story highlights everything that is obscene about 'reality TV' and as such, it is a stark indictment of today's society – a society in which a diagnosis of cancer can be given live on TV and the reaction captured on film to be broadcast again and again.

Of course, that was just the start of what became a growlingly exploitative media exercise. Someone, somewhere, it seems, made the decision that Goody, whose only claims to fame were her foul-mouthed rants and the ability to connect with the lowest common denominator, should be deified in her final months.

I have to be honest here and admit that I never understood the attraction of Goody or her need to throw herself into the spotlight at every opportunity. She was not, as the tabloids would have you believe, the world's first reality TV star – reality TV has been around for decades, how do you think the likes of Sheena Easton and even Les Dennis got their big breaks?.

That said, I never believed that Goody was as thick as she would have had viewers believe. She was certainly every bit as manipulative as the TV producers who thrust her upon the viewing public, and had some degree of business nous – how else do you became a millionaire?

I also have to question the motivation of those celebrities who queued up to be linked with her and, more worrying, the politicians who bought into her hype.

As Prime Minister, at what point do you agree to single out one person to send your best wishes to, when all around the country people are nursing loved one through exactly the same nightmare. Of course, sending them good wishes wouldn't make the headlines, would it? Cynical, me?

I'm only surprised there was no request to Buckingham Palace for a telegram from The Queen.

The fact that Gordon Brown then went on to lead the tributes after her death is deeply concerning. As the global economy splinters you'd think he'd have more important things on his mind.

A genuine show of sympathy or a pathetic attempt to be seen as retaining the common touch – you decide.

Goody was created by Big Brother, let's hope her funeral a week tomorrow marks the end of Channel 4's 'social experiment', once and for all.

Ironically, after all the coverage, I guarantee that ten years from now it will be Wendy Richard who is still remembered fondly through her legacy of work.

Reality TV stars on the other hand need headlines to survive, and there are few of those once you're dead and buried.