Race row Jade to tour India - Showbiz - Evening Standard
       

Race row Jade to tour India

Disgraced Celebrity Big Brother star Jade Goody is to tour India in attempt to rehabilitate her public image.

During an appearance on Goody's appearance on Five's The Wright Stuff, she revealed her plan for a trip to India in an effort to build race relations.

She also spoke about how she had endured attacks on her home since she invoked widespread public condemnation after she was accused of racist bullying towards Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty.

She said yesterday: "I'm thinking about going over there because I've been invited over there. I don't know who by but they are high-up people." She claimed her home was under attack as a result of the Celebrity Big Brother race row.

The shamed star said windows at her house in Ongar, Essex, were smashed. Neither she nor her two children were home at the time.

Goody has been staying at a hotel since her eviction from the Channel 4 show and has yet to be reunited with her sons - whom she last saw before entering the Big Brother house about three weeks ago - because she was "not in the right frame of mind" to see them. They are staying with relatives.

Essex Police said they had logged the incident as criminal damage but added that the damage was minimal. The force also denied Goody's claims that they had been guarding her home since her appearance on Celebrity Big Brother.

Goody's appearance on The Wright Stuff was the latest in a round of carefully selected interviews aimed at resurrecting her public image. It is presented by Matthew Wright, who shares an agent with Goody.

She took calls from viewers angry at her description of Shetty as "Shilpa Poppadom".
And she explained: "To some people I know, saying 'coloured' is OK. So I didn't think 'poppadom' was a racist thing to say."

The public reaction to her has been positive, Goody claimed. Politician and former Celebrity Big Brother housemate George Galloway was a fellow guest on the programme and turned out to be one of her biggest supporters.

Channel 4 has launched a review of Celebrity Big Brother and announced yesterday that it has appointed human rights lawyer Rabinder Singh QC to take part in the review.

Singh is a barrister at Matrix Chambers, which he co-founded with Prime Minister's wife Cherie Booth. Born in Britain to Indian parents, the Cambridge-educated QC will sit as the independent member on a three-strong review panel commissioned in the wake of the race row which has engulfed the programme.

Meanwhile, the Big Brother housemates successfully completed their latest task to win a luxury shopping budget of £4 per person per day.

The housemates had to do a showgirls-style dance routine and make no more than five mistakes between them. They made a total of four mistakes and so passed the test.

Ian Watkins, better known as 'H' from the now defunct pop band Steps, who led the routine, said: "We can eat... I'm going to buy a deodorant." Cleo Rocos, who was Kenny Everett's sidekick in his 1980s TV comedy show, got the housemates to give three cheers to Ian.

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