BUCKHURST HILL, England — I’ve been to many funerals but none like this before: an intimate service for family and friends but one that was slickly choreographed for those who never met her, as well as the world’s media.

Jade Goody had the ability to touch the hearts of people from all walks of life.

Some media commentators have said Jade Goody’s funeral — along with the flowers thrown at the hearse and doves being released along the route — is reminiscent of Princess Diana’s early death 12 years ago.

The comparison is fatuous in one sense of course — Diana never had to cope with deprivation and appalling drug abuse at home and in her case collective hysteria gripped the country for what seemed like weeks — but both women had the ability to touch the hearts of many people from all walks of life. As Max Clifford said in his eloquent address in church, Goody was “ordinary yet extraordinary” and her legacy may mean more women being tested for signs of cervical cancer, the disease that killed her.

And, for many people too young to remember the princess, Jade, the young woman raised in Bermondsey, in a gritty part of southeast London, meant as much to them — if not more — as Di ever did.

Another comparison is valid: both women left behind two sons, although Goody’s are 10 years younger than Princes William and Harry were were they were bereaved.

The father of Goody’s two young sons certainly spared them an ordeal by keeping them away from the funeral. While they will of course be grieving for their mother in a way that is incomprehensible to us adults, at least they have not had to appear before a battery of cameras, with every gesture and tear being analyzed by Fleet Street’s commentators.

Saturday’s service was certainly less stiff and solemn than Diana’s service in 1997, and there were none of the public recriminations between grieving relatives that electrified Westminster Abbey then.

Jade Goody was above all an entertainer and she realized that, organizing her funeral with meticulous attention to detail. She may not have been Brain of Britain but she made people laugh and she didn’t take herself too seriously. For many of those who attended the funeral service Jade was one in a million.

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