ONCE upon a time, Britons used to go to freak shows, bait bears and hold cock-fights for entertainment; nowadays, we buy Heat magazine and watch reality TV.

We used to tour mental hospitals and enjoy a good hanging; today we watch the unravelling lives of off-the-rail celebrities.

Britney, Boy George, Gazza – all of them and more have pressed the self-destruct button, making their private lives a public spectacle that casts their talents in the shade.

Some people decide they will not participate in this pantomime, and they have my admiration and respect. The rest of us are not quite so noble. We like to watch.

Reality TV has made even those who have no talent fodder for our entertainment. Jade Goody, a dental nurse, was catapulted into stardom largely through being ignorant of where, or indeed what, Cambridge and East Anglia were.

She was set up to make a caricature of herself on national TV and she had neither the insight nor the guile to see the trap she was falling into.

Simply by being herself, she became an object for the public to sneer at; a figure that we could mock and disparage.

By showing us her faults, she allowed the rest of us to scorn her and arrive at the conclusion that because we knew better than to behave as she did, we were somehow better people.

How we might fare if put under the same scrutiny did not come into it, because we wouldn’t be so foolish as to put ourselves in that position.

And it was somehow morally defensible, in fact it was fair game, to watch Jade pull herself to bits on national TV.

She has become the perfect celebrity. Famous for being famous. She has no talent, no career, to distract us from sitting in judgment over her. She has never really left the Big Brother house, so public has every turn of her life become.

Now, like the very best celebrities, Jade has become a tragic figure who will die young.

And there is something grimly fitting about the fact that she has chosen to make her death, just like her life, a matter for public consumption.

Her every movement was public in Big Brother; now her illness, her treatments, her prognosis are all known in minute and intimate detail.

Her wedding, her husband’s curfew terms and the christenings of her poor children: all have been available for us to mull over. Thankfully, the tabloids seem at last to have stopped predicting how many days she has left to live.

Jade has remained true to herself by putting her last days on the front pages. She has not pretended to be something she is not; and she has done the most she is capable of doing for her children.

Being unable to protect them through to adulthood, she has decided to get as much money as possible out of her spectators to give her kids the best start that she can. She has smiled for the cameras, answered the questions, in spite of her pain and exhaustion, for the sake of her children. In fact, what she has done is really admirable.

As for the rest of us, I’m not so sure. Jade will certainly have saved lives by making her cancer so public, but can the rest of us cling to that figleaf as an excuse for continuing to gawp at her?

We are poring over her last days as we would stare at a car crash, and we ought to be ashamed.