Industrial Disease

The Gabby Logan Show on BBC Five Live this week shows how the insurance industry ducks its responsibilities and allows many people to die long before they pay out.

There are two direct repercussions to this - 1) the person dies a particularly uncomfortable and painful death without any financial support and 2) the pay out is automatically reduced after death even though relatives will have shouldered the cost of care. Both are terrible but the latter is a belter - once the unfortunate person dies then only if there are dependents alive will the pay out be the nearly the same as the award to the suffering person. If not, then it is reduced as non-dependents are supposedly in less need of the money - a nice way to save cash. Dependents are defined as spouses or children under 18.

This is not rocket science. The expense associated with making a claim is huge and it is a lengthy process. As a family, we experienced this when my father was diagnosed with mesothelioma after working all his life for the same company, BP. His only interruption in service for the company came from a stint in the Navy (seconded to the Merchant Navy) during WWII. Despite this, and his being able to pinpoint the most likely period of his employment with the company when he got most exposed, the company denied and denied it. Fortunately, we found the insurers quickly, engaged a good lawyer and claimed. My father, after so long a service with BP for whom he sacrificed a great deal working all over the world and away from the family in places like Alaska and Aden, was heartbroken that his employer turned their back on him, when all he needed was some contribution to things like a downstairs shower or wheelchair.

Even after we had found the insurer, the process outlived him. As he fell to the worst part of the illness, he asked us to pursue the case as he was so upset that his company would deny him. Eventually, an award was made. We had a meal in his honour and opened a bottle of his favourite wine, Barolo, after his service in Italy for BP where he suffered a life threatening car crash after too many hours on the job commissioning a troublesome refinery and where our mother suffered a stroke at an early age. We bought a piece of machinery for the hospital in Swansea where he was treated which would make life a little easier for fellow sufferers - and it says something that a small unit at that hospital needed such kit for such a rare disease - and a bench at the Nursing Home for the terminally ill that he spent his final hours in.

I will not go into the disease other than to say it is the most virulent of cancers which is caused by asbestos and affects the lining of the lung - it is inoperable and terminal in all cases, yielding a terrible death.

Insurance executives should read such articles and view programs on it and think about how they would like to die. If they should contract such a disease from the negligence of their employer, then the one thing they would want is some comfort and help during their suffering.

That is the one thing insurance companies in these cases do not give. I have no sympathy or respect for that industry in total. Faceless executives betting and profiting on misfortune and making it onerously hard to get access to what is rightfully claimed. You need a cold heart to be successful in it - and most are.

Reality TV Gone Mad?

I think the new form of voyeuristic entertainment is cheap, unimaginative, morbid and totally lacking in talent. It's lining the pockets of the makers who are thin on ideas but exploiting the public's fascination with other people's lives - however uninteresting they may be.

Big Brother is about the nadir of it. The original formula of unknowns slung into a house and the camera is the fly on the wall. It could not be more boring and lifeless. I once spent an entire party talking to a guy who gave me the rundown of the characters and why they were entertaining. By the end I stopped him and said that he had said nothing of any interest in the last two hours so he called me an unintelligent expletive.

But that's the sum of it - try explaining the phenomenon to someone else and it sounds boring and that's because it is just like watching paint dry.

The Rise Of Talentless Stars

I had formed my opinion early on Jade Goody. She was brash, mouthy and in many ways unattractive as a person and the epitome of what is known as an 'Essex Girl'. Yet she was propelled from backwater Essex into stardom after winning a Big Brother series. She got her own shows, her own perfume and when her stock faded perhaps because the public found out there was not much more to her than her mouth, she got to go on that home of failed stars and former convicts, Celebrity Big Brother.

She rose again to notoriety, this time for the wrong reason. I watched some of the clips of the Show and was angry that this unintelligent girl with a mouth bigger than her brain had been allowed back on prime time TV and behaved in such a way. She was jealous of intelligence and sophistication and so she reverted to racist remarks - and like all who do so, claimed she was not a racist.

She tried much to rub out that tag - travelling to India after profuse apologies and then the ultimate publicity stunt, a place on India's version of Celebrity Big Brother hosted by the very person she had insulted, Shilpa Shetty. We were mugs to give her another chance and it sent out all the wrong messages to young people.

Jade Goody - The Person

But this Essex Girl had the ultimate clock ticking. On that program, results of her smear tests were revealed on air and she was given the news she had Cervical Cancer to a degree that she required immediate treatment. She left the program and returned home.

The sequence of events is lost for me as my interest was no more than passing. I have to honestly admit that I suspected a cruel hoax was afoot to try to endear the girl to the public and she would be 'cured miraculously' so she would once again have an elevated status on TV.

But reality has a nasty habit of being - well, reality.

Perhaps the ultimate insult to us all was that Goody had submitted to the influence of Publicist Max Clifford and agreed to a documentary tracking her treatments and her life with the The Big C.

I was cynical and alarmed. It opened up personal wounds and all sorts of dilemmas sprung to mind. For instance, Jade Goody was proposing to make money from her illness and I thought of the amazing Jane Tomlinson who had run for her life when terminally ill, raising countless millions in the cause of fighting her disease. I thought of another celebrity, Wendy Richard, who had recently faced her illness and death with dignified privacy. I thought of countless cancer victims like my father who faced their disease with humility and courage, who asked for little and got little. It's a disease that is very personal to a lot of people and here we saw a TV star doing the 'Big I am' and pointing the arrow of sympathy toward herself and making money in the process.

Something inside me was deeply affronted but something also thought differently.

The Reality of Disease And Death

"I never took my boys for granted, nor my house. I took just living for granted," said Jade Goody on the Show last night and I admit at that point my opinions changed. She was boorish, mouthy, unintelligent - she couldn't even pronounce 'Welwyn' least of know where it was even though it was not a few miles from her home - yet she was very human.

For all her lack of finesse, her shameless lack of any discernible talent, her seeming lack of intellect and ability to express herself without expletives, she had the nous and the savvy of a mother to provide for her offspring and family in the only way she knew how. Having exploited the public's fascination in reality TV stars to get where she was, she shamelessly was using the same people - and more - to extract as much money as she could to provide for her boys after her death.

You could have no truck with that no matter how you may feel about the silent deaths of millions of others from the disease.

What It Means

At the age of 27 and in the public's avid eye, this young mum was to show how she was fighting cancer and preparing for her death. From what little I have seen it has been a humbling experience - full of humility, more than a modicum of fun, full of the fear of dying and the anger of someone robbed of a long future and the lost prospect of bringing up her young sons.

It is the hardest of realities.

I have a problem with filming people dying. I have a problem with society's frenzy on celebrity. I have a problem with the violence in which we live and seem to accept as life. I have a problem with TV makers lacking in ideas just rehashing turgid ideas and exploiting society's fascination with the lives of others and the sin of 'Envy'.

But I no longer have a problem with Jade Goody. In her short life she has led us a merry dance - from loud-mouthed, talentless Essex Girl to racist to fighting cancer. If just one young girl avoids cancer because of Jade's celebrity then her Show and life will have achieved something.

But her one real achievement in life is the very human motivation of all mothers, to provide for her children both when alive and when gone.

She will have achieved it and good on her.