The final chapter of Jade Goody's publicity-fuelled career closes today when the reality TV star is buried after a church service in Essex expected to attract intense media attention.

The one-time dental assistant who found fame as an ill-educated but straight-talking TV gameshow contestant, died of cervical cancer last month, aged 27.

The final days of the mother of two were as closely chronicled in the media as her controversial appearances on the Big Brother reality television show.

In February she married her boyfriend in a ceremony that received blanked television and newspaper coverage after she had announced doctors had only given her weeks to live from the spread of her cancer.

Even Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had commented on her illness, joined the tributes that poured in after her death, saying his thoughts went out to her family.

Her funeral cortege will travel through Bermondsey in southeast London where she grew up, to her home in Upshire, Essex, before reaching the St John the Baptist Church in Buckhurst Hill.

Barriers were in place outside the church to hold back the crowds expected to flood to the service.

Many have criticised the media for obsessing over a someone who was famous for little more than being famous.

But her spokesman Max Clifford said Goody had saved lives by using her fame to publicise the risk of cervical cancer.

He told Sky News that young women had written to say they had taken tests after Goody said last August she had cervical cancer. Some had proved positive and were now being treated.

"In years to come her legacy is going to be an awful lot of young women in Britain that will be alive purely because Jade Goody was so public," he said.