Michael Jackson used to insist, “I’m bad!” — until his pleas turned instead to, “I’m innocent!” His fixation on children was a pure and loving thing, he said. Or, as we heard him lamenting to his rabbi in recordings aired in Michael Jackson: The Trial (Channel 4), “Children … just wanna touch me and hug me. Kids end up falling in love with my personality; sometimes it gets me into trouble.”
Which is putting it lightly. The trouble won’t go away for as long as we’re still talking about Michael Jackson. Yet somehow, despite all the allegations, the 2005 court case, the overwhelmingly damning Leaving Neverland documentaries, he’s still pretty much the King of Pop.
His music is all over the radio, last week Kemi Badenoch was fondly choosing Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough on Desert Island Discs, while in her new film, Melania, Mrs Trump says Jacko is her favourite artist. Coming soon is a big movie biopic celebrating his genius. All reason enough, perhaps, for another documentary raking over the lurid old ground of the singer’s infamous 2005 trial for child molestation.
Yes, we’re here again, and this four-parter moonwalks us right back into the eye of the media frenzy around Jackson, which erupted after his interview with Martin Bashir in 2003. That was when the singer admitted that he shared the same bed as young boys while a 13-year-old named Gavin Arvizo rested his head adoringly on Jackson’s shoulder.
The series aims to peer a bit deeper, or wider, at the notions of tainted fame and the way a media circus seemed to feed the justice system. More than that, to my eye, it is unusually balanced regarding Jackson’s assumed guilt, presenting a kind of push-pull between certainty and uncertainty, even if most viewers will have made up their minds.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the singer’s “spiritual guide” from 1999-2001 and someone sympathetic to Jackson, played us excerpts of their soul-searching chats to show how deeply broken the icon was by his father and to help to explain why there were two sides to the singer. “One needed love and validation, the other needed attention and celebrity.”
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A clip from the inside of Jackson’s limo of faces glued to the windows was remarkable for giving a sense of just how rabid his fans were (are!), their blind devotion bordering on religious mania.
New interviews switched from Jackson’s inner-circle videographer saying, “I never saw a sexual side… I saw an asexual man who wanted to be 12 years old and have water balloon fights,” to a suspicious Arvizo family friend who didn’t know Jackson. “Jackson built an amusement park in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think that’s the behaviour of someone who’s not attracted, sexually, to children,” made her sound a bit as if she had a pitchfork hidden under her chair.
If the sensationalist media hunted Jackson across news cycles like some modern-day Frankenstein’s monster, as is the impression from this series, the singer of course had only himself to blame. And it’s when you arrive at the footage in episode two of Arvizo’s interview in 2003 — where we see the teenager describe in detail Jackson’s sexual abuse of him — that one’s response inevitably enters more revulsed territory.
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That’s before we get to a former Jackson PR’s recalling his discovery of a “naturist magazine” among the singer’s belongings, its adverts for videos of “naked kids” allegedly marked for order.
What a swamp of dysfunction, accusations and rebuttals. The series inevitably has a whiff of picking at scabs, yet that’s the thing with Jackson — it’s hard to stop watching even as you start to feel the need for a shower.
★★★☆☆
On Channel 4 streaming
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