It's the story of the mimmenium, folks. A really, really famous person has died. Cue lots of confused and stupid people crying in the streets and the media clambering over each other to film them and get that soundbite.
My favourite soundbite is of the girl outside the hospital, hysterically crying: "I'm so confused, I don't know who to trust right now..."
Doesn't that sound like the reaction you might have when your entire family has been needlessly and suddenly murdered for no apparent reason? An earthquake survivor perhaps, or someone involved in a "terrorist outrage"?
Well, this girl has just heard that Michael Jackson is in hospital.
I think the world might be over reacting just a tad. We didn't know him, we didn't own him - well, some people owned his records. As a race we would all be lying if anyone said they didn't know one song by him that set their toes a'tapping. But does that give people the right to behave like their world has ended?
This is public grief on a scale unprecedented since Princess Diana's sudden death, and I found that distasteful and hypocritical also.
We must prepare ourselves for what crawls out of the woodwork in the coming months and years. Giant mountains of paperbacks purporting to tell the "truth" about life in the Michael Jackson camp by people who never got past the gates. Unfinished recordings by Jackson released by people claiming to know this is what he would have wanted - the mediocre hummings waiting to be turned into masterpieces that will now be forever lost to the mists of time. Tabloid interviews with the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker - or in Jacko's case: the surgeon, the bleacher, the vitamin-injector...
Once again, an unhappy man with too much power and a refusal to listen to advice dies an addict, virtually alone at the mercy of conniving "yes" men, quacks and leeches.
My favourite soundbite is of the girl outside the hospital, hysterically crying: "I'm so confused, I don't know who to trust right now..."
Doesn't that sound like the reaction you might have when your entire family has been needlessly and suddenly murdered for no apparent reason? An earthquake survivor perhaps, or someone involved in a "terrorist outrage"?
Well, this girl has just heard that Michael Jackson is in hospital.
I think the world might be over reacting just a tad. We didn't know him, we didn't own him - well, some people owned his records. As a race we would all be lying if anyone said they didn't know one song by him that set their toes a'tapping. But does that give people the right to behave like their world has ended?
This is public grief on a scale unprecedented since Princess Diana's sudden death, and I found that distasteful and hypocritical also.
We must prepare ourselves for what crawls out of the woodwork in the coming months and years. Giant mountains of paperbacks purporting to tell the "truth" about life in the Michael Jackson camp by people who never got past the gates. Unfinished recordings by Jackson released by people claiming to know this is what he would have wanted - the mediocre hummings waiting to be turned into masterpieces that will now be forever lost to the mists of time. Tabloid interviews with the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker - or in Jacko's case: the surgeon, the bleacher, the vitamin-injector...
Once again, an unhappy man with too much power and a refusal to listen to advice dies an addict, virtually alone at the mercy of conniving "yes" men, quacks and leeches.
The real tragedy in all of this is that three innocent children were brought into this freak show when all else was failing and Jackson needed to look like a family man. Instead of passing on his Peter Pan philosophy of childhood being an endless wonderful dream, he has brought these children nothing but pain and confusion, which is, in the end, all Jackson seemed to know himself.
