The King of Pap

I don't give a flying V about Michael Jackson.

It's been the water cooler discussion for a whole blimmin week and I just can't be arsed with it all.

I'm sorry. Maybe I'm just not in tune with the nation on this one, and I need to get with the program.

Ever since that Martin Bashir docu-drama got plastered all over the evening telly it's been hot debate about Michael bleedin' Jackson, does he or doesn't he, how many times has that nose been in the pencil sharpener and is the guy a total fruit and nutcase or what...

All this fuss and palava about a bloke who is trying to turn himself into Mickey Mouse is leaving me stone cold. King of Pop? Lemme out of this timewarp, people!

This is all going on when we're all about to get into World War Three with half the world's godbotherers.

Cowlin Powell is banging on the U.N. furniture and raising a posse for the big High Noon with Saydam Huwsayn. Yet we're all getting worked up about a so-called famous person who we should all have forgotten about by now.

Celebrity is a curious thing. Someone can be associated with a public event, a popular song or a TV show for what, maybe, ten minutes and that's it. The world's TV producers will stalk you till the day you die.

You spend a few decades making music that people like then you're suddenly the star of the Truman Show. Every breath you take is recorded by the world's media as if it is headline news. Your brainless, witless meaningless theories about the world are reported by the worlds press as if a nations security depended upon it.

This whole who-har about whether this crazy celebrity is a menace to society is total bollocks. Who give a flying V what some Howard Hughes figure is doing with his millions. Who cares what shape his nose is.

To me this is just some prime time freak show designed to keep us from thinking about real life.

Who is to know that this Michael Jackson feller is even real anyway. I've always thought that celebs are totally fictional and are played by actors.

Who is to say that the person you see miming to some pop vid is the person that actually sang the thing? Is the soft-porn pop goddess the same person who put the vocal track on that hit song. Whose word have you got that the floozy was even in the vicinity?

To me Bashir's attitude seemed a bit of a an ego trip to me. A proper journo would not be posing about on Miami Beach agonizing about asking a celeb the one question he was paid to ask. I'd have rather seem a real maverick like Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore make this so-called in depth docu-drama. Anything but Lady Di's cardboard confidant, who clearly ingratiated himself into the Michael Jackson camp only to put the boot in later.

I came out of the whole thing feeling that Bashir had blown it. Jacko is clearly a freako of the first order, but is also a major musical talent. Martin Bashir's approach made you wonder if he had the slightest respect or understanding of why Michael Jackson was famous in the first place.

Praps that's what I missed about the whole thing.Yes, we had the Howard Hughes figure with a Walf Disney complex. A famous child pop star gone Bad - with a cart load of innuendo surrounding his every move. But nothing about his music, which made him famous in the first place.

Sod Iraq. I should be worked up about a saddo celeb dodging the cameras instead of real life. I should concern myself about some semi-fictional has-been instead of a very vivid reality. That's just the way of the twenty-first century. I've clearly got some catching up to do...

B