US: Wacko-watching reached new heights last night as the reclusive star told all to Martin Bashir, writes Shane Hegarty
The first thing that you looked at on last night's Living with Michael Jackson on ITV was the star's face. It all seems to be in order. Not quite as we might have known it from his younger days, yet not quite so bad as the photographs have often suggested. His nose behaved impeccably throughout, and resisted living up to expectations by sliding from his face.
Jackson, though, lived up to his end of the deal. Martin Bashir's eight months filming the star confirmed a man living his life in ever-increasing circles of strangeness. He lives a secluded life on his Neverland Ranch, where he is kept entertained by empty fairground rides, and kept company by elephants, giraffes, two orang-utans and many statues of Peter Pan. Bubbles the chimp, we learned, has checked in to the animal sanctuary equivalent of the Betty Ford Clinic. His two favourite past-times, he says, are "water balloon fights and climbing trees".
In his house, he sits below a painting of himself flanked by cherubic angels, and in his private cinema he and Bashir watched old footage of the cherub he once was. Bashir asked him about his face. The camera, insists Jackson, does lie. The press, he insists, make up these stories because they cannot give him credit for all he has really achieved.
He fully lived up to his reputation as the boy who never grew up, but with none of the romanticism of the Peter Pan he says he is "in his head". He talked of the beatings at the hand of his father, and the rigours of a childhood spent either on the road or in a recording studio.
The programme proved that while we've long learnt so much about how Jackson has gotten to where he is, there remains deep fascination about what he does now that he's there. Here we saw him booking seven suites in a Las Vegas hotel, and spending much of the time either playing computer games or going on ridiculous shopping sprees. When particularly bored, he zips up and down the hotel corridor on a motorised shopping cart.
The creepiness of his existence, surrounded by toys and grotesque mannequins, would be less worrying if there weren't three children being brought up in its wake. On days out they find themselves accompanied by the world's press and mobs of people, while their father strolls on as if it's the most natural thing in the world. Which, for Jackson, it seems to be.
Bashir met all three kids, the elder two hidden under masks whenever in public, and the youngest being dangled from the hotel balcony in Berlin.
His view was the one every showbiz reporter on the planet would have wanted. He was in that hotel suite within minutes. But this was only the latest scoop for Bashir, a news reporter who five years ago was dragged out of relative obscurity when Diana, Princess of Wales chose him as the interviewer through which she would speak to the world.
Since then he has specialised in the maligned, those who have complained of trial by media before using an interview with Bashir as their own version of taking the stand.
RTÉ, meanwhile, would have been forgiven for replacing its normal programming with the test card.
It's a programme that will have been watched by a massive audience both in the UK and here, and TV3 was a major beneficiary. It broadcast it simultaneously with ITV, the latest advantage of being part-owned by the programme's makers, Granada.
Indeed, it is Granada that was the real winner. It has already sold the programme to the US network ABC for £3.5 million sterling, has also made deals with Australian and New Zealand television and expects to sell it many times over.
Wacko-watching remains a pre-occupation of much of the world. Last night Jackson dispelled some of the mystery, but for those always eager to hear the latest twist, he made sure there was plenty left over to fuel many a tabloid headline yet.