Victim

The Michael Jackson documentary that ABC paid big bucks for and is airing on the 7th, debuts tonight on the British ITV:

The ITV program is the result of the unprecedented access Jackson granted Bashir, famed for a historic interview with the late Princess Diana in which she confessed to being unfaithful to Prince Charles.

Bashir revealed snippets from it during the weekend in an article for the Sunday Times newspaper, while the television company — which is expected to sell the show worldwide — is guarding the secrets ahead of Monday’s screening.

Jackson, said Bashir, thinks nothing of spending a fortune on shopping sprees and is surrounded by an entourage who would never dream of telling him that to dangle his baby from a hotel balcony is ludicrous and dangerous.

He went with Jackson on a shopping trip to Las Vegas in which the star spent $6 million without once glancing at any price tags.

….Bashir arrived at Jackson’s Berlin hotel last November just 30 minutes after he had dangled his youngest child from the balcony to show fans below.

“Not one of his entourage was prepared to tell him that what he had done was ludicrous and dangerous,” Bashir said.

Jackson spoke openly of his childhood in the Jackson Five and told how his father would choreograph the brothers for shows.

“He practiced us with a belt in his hand,” Jackson told Bashir. “I remember hearing my mother scream, ‘Joe, you gonna kill him, you’re gonna kill him.”‘ Jackson was just 7 years old at the time. [Reuters]

Thoughts on the show from the Times online:

Bashir specialises in notoriety and victimhood: famous people who feel that they have been misunderstood. Today Barrymore, tomorrow Baghdad. Whom a Great Name chooses to interview him says as much about his self-confidence (or self-pity) and the image he seeks to project as anything he may say in the interview.

I am certain that Jackson was a victim, but so were the other children and they have turned out a bit less…eccentric. More germane is that Jackson is a victim of his own success, having the money and influence to pursue his feverish vision of perpetual childhood as his touch with reality has grown ever more tenuous. Very strange things can grow in a hothouse.