Jade: As seen on TV, as crucified by tabloids

She's the mouthy one from 'Big Brother'. The one who thinks East Anglia is abroad. The one everyone is having a laugh about. But the life of this fame-seeker is too real for reality TV

So it was Adele, after all. As the self-styled lesbian virgin emerged from the Big Brother house to a disturbing chorus of boos, Jade, the early favourite for eviction, settled down to another week inside.

This was an extraordinary turn of events. At the beginning of the week, Jade Goody, a 21-year-old dental nurse from south London, was described in the tabloids as "the most hated woman in Britain". She was at the head of the list of those facing eviction, having accrued six votes from her housemates – Adele Roberts received only two – and she was a dead cert as far as the bookies were concerned.

But then, as the vilification mounted, Jade seems to have benefited from a wave of sympathy. In the biggest – and most profitable – vote in the history of Big Brother, Adele received 2.1 million votes for eviction, 62 per cent of the total.

For Jade, meanwhile, this may be a brief reprieve. Her unpopularity is real, but puzzling. She has simply been loud, drunk, coarse and ignorant, none of which would raise many eyebrows in the Old Kent Road on a Saturday night. Jade's crime, or her misfortune, has been to behave like that while other contestants were prettier and better groomed: and that was just the men.

Old-fashioned manners prevent most of us from making personal remarks about people. But there is nothing personal about television. Those are not feeling human beings, but patterns of light dancing on a screen. Now that many newspaper columnists have to scrape a living from the crumbs beneath television's table, they've not felt any restraint. Jade is thick, we're told: she's a bitch, and she "looks like a pig".

Of course, if you write for The Sun, say, there are obvious dangers in ridiculing someone just because she thinks that East Anglia is abroad, that Rio de Janiero is a person and that you can get a disease called "insomnina". Safer to savage her looks.

In The Sun, Jade has become The Pig. There was a whole page poster, one day, saying VOTE OUT THE PIG, bylined Dominic Mohan, who has the misfortune to look like a weasel.

The Daily Star, meanwhile, claims to be the official Big Brother paper, but that hasn't stopped its Save Miss Piggy's Bacon campaign, illustrated with an amateurish montage with a pig's face over Jade's. Even Graham Norton, a supposed wit, has provided his own variations on the porcine theme.

The media are not setting the pace, however. They did not hand out Slaughter the Pig placards to the people outside the Big Brother house in Elstreewhere, in another Britain, The Railway Children was made. They have not forced people to ring chat lines and log on to fan sites to join in the abuse. They didn't order schoolchildren to bully their friends on the grounds of an imagined resemblance to Jade.

Jade knows nothing of this, yet. But her family are reading it all. The Daily Mirror, which dubs itself "The Official Anti-Big Brother Paper", interviewed an aunt last week, who said Jade was in danger of hanging herself because people were being so nasty.

"Jade survived a childhood that could have easily left her damaged – now she is being damaged even more," said Michelle Caddock. (Channel 4, however, produced Jade's mother on the Friday night eviction show to demonstrate how happy she is with the situation.)

But when you look at it, Jade's story is a bit too real for reality TV: her father left home when she was small, and was in and out of prison. Her mother lost the use of an arm, so that Jade had to feed and dress her. Jade has done well. She has a good job and lots of friends locally.

In Bermondsey, they look after their own. "They're not just having a go at her," said one local, busily organising an army to meet Jade if she's evicted. "They're having a go at everyone in Bermondsey."

The same supporter, quoted in The Sun, mentioned something else about Jade that has gone scrupulously unmentioned but that might, on some level, explain the extraordinary hostility to her looks: he said she is of mixed racial parentage.

Actually, neither papers nor public were responsible for raising the emotional temperature of Big Brother this time around. It was a decision by makers Endemol and by Channel 4. There was a problem with the British Big Brother: the British. The Scandinavians cavorted naked, the Spaniards rowed passionately and the Germans worked hard. All the British did was drink tea, chat and try to ignore one another.

This time the producers have removed distractions and activities, so that inmates would have nothing to do but "interact". Either they'd have sex (Jade and PJ duly obliged, after a fashion) or they'd bicker. Dividing the house into the pampered "rich" zone and the spartan "poor" zone provoked endless grievances.

At first, they seemed the most boring group yet. Vain, ignorant and cynical, they were openly competing. Boredom made them snipe, and competition made them cynical. Big Brother 3 has been a ratings success, but its viewers are older and poorer than advertisers like.

Never mind: C4 has found huge new income streams: its E4 subscription channel, its internet stream (previously free, now £9.99 a month) and a whole range of paid-for phone lines and text messaging update services.

But what about the golden geese? What happens to the contestants after Davina has forced them to look at artfully edited clips of their embarrassing faux pas? The channel promises they are well looked-after. There's an open-ended debriefing with a psychologist. Then they can go home or to a hotel, where another Endemol employee helps them sort their media offers.

And that's what they're looking for. According to Cynthia McVey, a psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University who worked on Castaway 2000 for the BBC, most reality TV participants want to be television presenters, and won't be told otherwise. "They hear, but they don't believe it," she says.

But how many previous Big Brother contestants are on our screens now? Rumour has it that if you have enough time and enough channels, you can sometimes see handyman Craig wielding a router on a DIY show. Sadly, there is not enough presenting work for the untrained output of the reality TV industry: it's all gone to people from the docusoaps.

Jade, inevitably, has always wanted to be on television. That's probably what drove her to the house. When she comes out, says McVey, she will be facing a "baptism of fire: she has no idea in her head about what's been said about her." It will, she says, be "a horrible experience".

In 1986, Leo Braudy, an American professor of literature, wrote The Frenzy of Renown, a history of fame. He says that most of those drawn to fame (as opposed to having it happen to them as a by-product of a lifetime's work) tend to have psychological damage and unhappy family histories. They hope the attention of the many will compensate for a lack of attention from the crucial few.

But it doesn't help. We think fame is a proper reward for our qualities: Jade, for instance, told the Big Brother recruiters that she'd be "good to watch". Well clearly she is, but not in the way she had imagined.

According to Braudy: "The famous soon realise that fame has them, rather than the other way round." And fame can drop us as quickly as it picks us up.

As McVey says, pondering Jade's future: "People will forget her: but she won't forget."