Cast your mind back, if you will, to 2005. Michael Jackson found himself charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy at his Neverland ranch, and was tried in the Santa Barbara County Superior Court before the world’s media. The trial was closed to broadcast cameras, so Sky chose to cover the case the next best way, by hiring a Michael Jackson impersonator to wear his silliest wig, put on his silliest voice and read out real-life court transcripts on a nightly reenactment show entitled Michael Jackson Trial.
You might (correctly) remember what an all-out horror show the programme was; a cavalcade of bad wigs, stilted delivery, nightmarish prosthetics and the sort of tinpot production that makes a daytime soap opera look like an Avatar movie. It was bad, gimmicky television, designed for nothing but the worst kind of boggle-eyed rubbernecking, and it was destined never to be repeated.
