This week's Michael Jackson TV documentary gave us a glimpse into a celebrity world usually hidden from view by fame and fortune, writes Róisín Ingle
Thanks to the finest example of car-crash TV in decades, the first words of J.M. Barrie's classic children's tale, "all children, except one, grow up", never seemed as chilling as they did last Tuesday night. "I am Peter Pan," insisted Michael Jackson sitting in Neverland, looking more like a reject from the Rocky Horror Picture Show than a cute pixie from the pages of a fairytale.
Just like the juvenile he claims he is, Jackson has been stamping his feet and crying "not fair" since that Martin Bashir interview. Somewhere between his tree-climbing antics in Neverland and the baby-dangling incident in Berlin, he lost control over something even more precious than, say, his recently purchased replica of King Tut's tomb. The man with the most-talked-about face in pop lost control of his image.
The "Michael Jackson is Very Strange Indeed" headlines which followed the programme hardly came as a surprise to any of us. The most intriguing part of the whole Living With Michael Jackson peep show - apart, that is, from the baby juggling display and disturbing naked portrait of the star surrounded by cherubs - is why on earth he allowed Martin "I turned Princess Diana's life around" Bashir such unlimited access to his wacky world. For some reason, Jackson appears to think Bashir had flown all that way to show the public the truth about the life of an eccentric father of three, not to get to the bottom of his nose jobs and obsession with children. No wonder he feels so "appalled" and "betrayed" at a programme he says was a "salacious ratings getter".
Only the most powerful celebrities, most of them American, can achieve the kind of control over their image Michael Jackson had managed before he got the Bashir treatment. Rumours swirled around the star, some he is said to have started himself, incredible stories about oxygen tents, pet monkeys and plastic surgery, but few imagined that 10 years after settling out of court with a child who claimed he was sexually abused by Jackson, the King of Pop could still be found cuddling 12-year-olds in his bedroom.
Like Howard Hughes before him - the billionaire recluse famously developed a paranoia about germs, refusing to cut his hair or finger nails - Jackson has enough money and enough well-trained, ask-no-questions flunkeys to convince himself and his fans of the veracity of his lifestyle. No such good fortune awaits lesser, mostly British, celebrities behaving badly such as Michael Barrymore, Gary Glitter, John Leslie et al. Their notoriety provided no escape when their secret lives were exposed.
A similar "you'll never work in this town again" fate befell one of the the first silent movie stars, Fatty Arbuckle, when he became embroiled in a scandal involving drugs, prostitutes and suspected murder in the 1920s. Although the performer was later acquitted, the incident signalled the end of his career.
Vast wealth and influence, however, can mean the flaws and foibles of the likes of Jackson and Phil Spector become part of the legend. It takes a murder charge or, more trivially, an ill-judged documentary, to reveal the true extremes of their persona - and even then the star may still be allowed to shine.
Perhaps Jackson's belief that he could pull one of his many masks over the eyes of the world, thus injecting fresh life into his waning career, stemmed from his devotion to Peter Pan. In Barrie's story, the asexual, self-absorbed boy who refused to grow up entreated readers to save the life of Tinkerbell the fairy by clapping their hands.
"Tinkerbell is going to die because not enough people believe in fairies. But if all of you clap your hands real hard to show that you do believe in fairies, maybe she won't die." It seems as sound a theory as any that Tuesday night was Jackson's attempt to convince us that he is not actually away with the fairies.
Clap your hands and you might just believe he is a down-to-earth billionaire with a penchant for water fights, sleepovers and carousels. If he says he has had no surgery - oh OK, maybe one operation on his nose to make him sing like Diana Ross; oh all right then two - clap your hands and you might just be convinced despite evidence to the contrary which is as plain as the nose on his face.
Yes, young boys who he is not related to have shared his bed and if he says that is normal then that should be good enough for you. If he thinks the image of him snatching his just-born son from a surrogate mother and running home with him, before nurses even had time to clean the baby, is somehow funny, you are supposed to laugh. And if he jigs his baby manically on his knee, taking a moment to locate the correct orifice in which to stick the bottle, you might just marvel at his parenting skills.
Clap your hands, godammit, clap your hands.
It didn't take a degree in psychology to see that Jackson's retreat into childhood as an adult stems from his early stardom and abuse at the hands of his father. But what the programme showed us more than anything is that this contemporary leader of the Lost Boys has gone too far to see that what he needs most is help and not the validation of the whole world. On the whole, the US press have castigated Martin "Jackson's behaviour was beginning to worry me" Bashir for helping the 44-year-old to write what has been described as the longest professional suicide note in the history of pop.
"This makes for good television if you consider good television watching an apparently troubled individual reveal things about himself that are profoundly disturbing," said the Washington Post.
Despite his residency in never never land, it won't have gone unnoticed by Jackson that sales of his Thriller album increased by 1,000 per cent in some London record stores in the wake of the programme and that his compilation album, History, was, according to one retailer, "flying off the shelves". Viewers may have cringed their way through the shockumentary, but it left them nostalgic for the man's music and aroused the curiosity of a whole new generation of fans.
In the US, it is proving more fashionable to heap sympathy rather than ridicule upon the star. One American viewer went so far as to describe Bashir's treatment of Michael Jackson as "legitimate pimping". Mega celebrities in need of a career revival should form an orderly queue.