Understanding the medium

In these days of junk news, junk food, junk money and the junk self, authenticity in the realm of reality TV means adhering to Saul Bellow's dictum of following a character not just into the bedroom but also the bathroom (and into rehab, the penis-enlargement clinic, the assisted-suicide facility, the dungeonous punishment pit). It was at this basement level that reality television stars of Jade Goody's vintage (she was selected for series three of Big Brother in 2002 at the age of 20) first made their appearance in the public arena. And Goody's gift from the beginning - her only talent, as she was the first to acknowledge (the girl who thought "East Angular" was a foreign country and that "pistachio" was a famous painter) - was to appear devoid of self-consciousness: to have an innate ability to appear to be unwatched when being spied on by millions; to seem to be heroically unconcerned about how she came across. In this way she found herself occupying the position of the most visible representative of the white underclass in British popular culture: a true avatar of the time. Motto: to think is to regret. Hobbies: getting and spending.

Gordon Burn