There are diminishingly few people around who can remember a time before Michael Jackson was a global icon. Having burst onto the scene as a warbling 11-year-old in the late Sixties, he became the world’s biggest recording artist in the Eighties, and then the planet’s foremost gossip obsession at the turn of the millennium. Now, a new three-part BBC documentary – Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy – exposes how alive our obsession with “Wacko Jacko” still is, even as his legacy plumbs grim new depths.
Over the course of three episodes (titled “Fame”, “The Reckoning”, and “Resurrection”), the series charts the tumultuous life of the so-called “King of Pop”. This is, in some ways, a classic “rise and fall” story, moving from his early years as the breakout star of the Jackson 5 (“they were our Beatles,” opines publicist Steve Manning) to his eventual disgrace and early death. “I was always trying to be perfect,” Jackson recalls of his childhood – but in adulthood these obsessive tendencies metastasise. The precocious, soft-spoken Black kid who entranced audiences in the 1970s becomes a megalomaniac, refashioned by plastic surgery, who cavorts with chimps and snakes on a Texas ranch, and faces increasingly lurid accusations about his private conduct. “When you first think of Michael Jackson, you don’t think what a great artist,” a contemporary observer notes in archive footage. “You think: what a weird guy.”
