Clicking on this image will take you to the touching Daily Mail article about Jade & Jack's engagement

The image above from the Daily Mail is without doubt the most touching, truthful and painfully sad depictions of Jack and Jade’s love that I’ve ever seen. The picture captures the desperately sad fact that despite their love for each other, they know they don’t have a long future, and it makes me weep every time I look at it simply because of the immense honesty of the picture.

And Jade Goody is, among many other things, honest; often painfully so. At one time, I would have said that honesty was born from the lack of sufficient intelligence to lie or carry out a deceit because as I’ve mentioned in my articles about Jade on this site before, when she first shot to fame on Big Brother in 2002, I couldn’t stand her.

I thought she typified the ‘chav’ type of young woman; loud-mouthed, inarticulate, crass, vulgar… in fact, I thought she was exactly what she portrayed herself to be – the ill educated product of a broken, dysfunctional family who lived on state benefits on a rough council estate. The fact that she seemed to be proud of – or at least not embarrassed by – “being thick” embodied for me many of the things that I felt were wrong with young people in this country today…

Here’s a collection of clips of Jade during her appearance on Big Brother 3…

Jade’s childishness and childlike persona on BB irritated the hell out of me and for a while, I thought it was all an act; her ‘thing’ was being thick and silly and vulgar, just as the lovely Brian Dowling’s ‘thing’ was to be funny and revolting Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace’s ‘thing’ was to be a repellent dog.

What I didn’t know initially is that her childlike behaviour on BB was probably simply because she didn’t have one at a time when that kind of behaviour would have been appropriate to have. While other children attended and/or dodged school, Jade would be doing housework or rolling joints for her drug-addicted mother, Jackiey. The police were frequent visitors to their home and Jade spent a great deal of time in and out of social services care.

Jade’s father was also a drug addict who, it’s alleged, used to “stash guns” beneath his daughter’s cot. He died from a heroin overdose in a KFC restaurant bathroom. “One of the classiest exits in history” remarked Jade of her father’s demise.

Now Jade is herself facing her ‘exit’ and is doing so unashamedly publically. As she told many media outlets, “I’ve lived in front of the cameras. And maybe I’ll die in front of them.”

Her decision to allow the end of her life to be filmed is not for the same reason that she joined the ranks of Big Brother housemates. She’s no longer a fame hungry wannabe but is now simply utilising the benefits that her original hunger for fame brought her.

However, whereas many ex-BB housemates have now faded into obscurity, their fifteen minutes of fame well and truly over, Jade, through good management, hard work and a dedication to capitalise on the opportunities that Big Brother afforded her has remained in the public eye.

Of course, that eye has often been a very critical one, and never more so than over the ‘race’ debacle when Jade and Jack Tweed appeared in the Celebrity version of Big Brother alongside Shilpa Shetty.

She wasn’t the only person involved in alleged racist comments of course; Danielle Lloyd and Jo O’Meara said just as many things that could have been – and were – construed as racist, however, the difference between those two and Jade is that Jade didn’t just crawl under the nearest stone, hoping it would all go away. She had the balls to apologise on camera… here’s a clip from just one of her many TV apologies.

And in fact, it was an attempt to build bridges over that event that prompted Jade to appear on India’s version of Big Brother, ‘Big Boss’, where as we know she received the news that she had cancer and that it needed treatment immediately. Here’s a clip from her reaction to that news on the show…

Since then, which was just six months ago, she – and we, through her reality TV series on Living – found out that she had advanced cervical cancer which had been ‘missed’ by doctors and her local hospital for three years and was, as we now know, at a point of no return.

OK, so all that is Jade’s potted televisual history which I’ve gone into such detail about not as some form of mini-biography, but simply because it provides the backdrop to the point of this article, which is to ask you if you believe it’s now time for Jade to step out of the public eye?

Should she live out the rest of her tragically short time in private, or, is she right to carry on doing what she’s been doing since 2002; that is, allowing her life to be filmed, scrutinised, commented upon and judged, albeit that it’s now for very different reasons?

As I mentioned earlier, she’s no longer simply fame hungry, she’s now a woman maximising her potential earnings to leave behind for her children.

Jade and her immediate circle of advisors and friends have all plainly and readily stated that the reason she intends to continue to be filmed right to the end is simply to make money; as much money as she possibly can in order that her boys can have a start in life that is infinitely better and world’s away from the one she herself had. Here’s what Max Clifford and Piers Morgan have had to say about this decision…

Jade wants her boys to have a private education and despite the fact that she believes many people will be critical of that decision, including the boys’ father Jeff Brazier, which decent mother doesn’t want the very best of everything for her children?

The very fact that she IS an excellent mother is something of a minor miracle, given the example she was set by her own mother. Through her fly-on-the-wall Living shows we’ve seen how devoted she is to her children and how she lavishes love upon them without turning them into ‘celeb brats’. In one of those shows, Jade said the main reason she was so determined to “beat the cancer” was because of her heartfelt belief that, “I’m the only person good enough to look after the boys” Sadly now, that’s no longer an option.

We’ve seen in the Living shows too how she’s forgiven her mum Jackiey for being a worse than useless mother to her in the past and equally, we’ve seen how Jackiey has been trying desperately hard to make up for all those past child-rearing misdemeanors by doing everything she can for her daughter now, when arguably, she needs her the most.

On Sunday, Jade will marry Jack Tweed and she wants Bobby and Freddy to be christened so they’ll be able to understand that there is a Heaven and will therefore believe their Mummy is looking down on them and watching over them.

I have nothing but respect for her decision to accumulate as much money for her boys as she possibly can. I just wish someone would give her the money she would have earned in return for nothing and allow her to enjoy her big day – and what are sure to be subsequent horrendous days – in privacy and peace… but dying sells. A celebrity dying sells even better, and how many of us, hand on heart, can say that we won’t watch or read anything about her last weeks? I know I can’t.

That said, Jade’s horrendous and very public plight has meant that literally thousands of women have now gone for smear tests which, without having heard about and watched her devastating story, they probably would not. As Max Clifford pointed out in the above clip, there’s been a 20% increase in young women demanding cervical smears, so she’s undoubtedly saved lives.

A sad footnote to her being under constant scrutiny is that she is very much conscious of what people might think of her. At one time, following the racism debacle, she couldn’t open her mouth without someone feeling the need to jump into it and right down her throat, which I commented on in a recent article.

In the latest of her fly-on-the-wall Living shows, Jade said of her bald head and generally changed appearance due to her cancer, “There might be people out there that think I look horrible, but I don’t think I look horrible, so I’ve still got a little bit of confidence. I’m fighting for my feminine, feminivity, feminivity, femma, femma, whatever – fighting for that.”

On the subject of the arrangements for their wedding this Sunday, Jack said, “She’s done it all from a little laptop. Booked the place, got all the catering, got a helicopter for herself.

“I helped her pick the food earlier. Well, I didn’t, I listened to her pick the food earlier.”

Here’s a clip from the latest Living show which also has footage of a frail looking Jade leaving the Royal Marsden…

On her big day, Jade will be wearing a £3,500 cream and ivory silk gown which was given to her as a gift by Harrods owner Mohammed Al Fayed. The dress will need to be ‘customised’ to allow the concealed containment of Jade’s pain relief medications. We heard last night too how Jade wept when she tried her dream wedding dress on while she was in hospital.

Pictures of Jack going down on one knee were offered for £10,000 and the wedding itself will earn Jade more than £1million from OK! magazine and LivingTV, a subject which was hotly debated earlier this week on Radio 4’s Today programme vis-à-vis the ‘taste’ – or lack thereof – of this paid coverage.

Much to his credit in my book, following the airing of that debate, the Prime Minister then felt behooved to speak out and he said of Jade, “Her determination to help her family is something that we’ve got to applaud” and he expressed his sympathies to Jade and her family on behalf of the nation.

So, we’d appreciate your views on this issue; is Jade right to capitalise on her fame – and her terribly tragic prognosis – for the sake of amassing money to leave to her children or should she live out her now regrettably short life in private? Let us know by leaving your comments below.