First Night: Living with Michael Jackson

Jacko reveals all, about Bashir's grip on reality

Living with Michael Jackson offered an intimate glimpse into the mind and life of a man who has become insulated from reality by his vast income and the adulation of the yes-men who surround him. Yes, this was Martin Bashir exposed.

For eight months he had allowed the Tonight cameras to accompany him as he trailed in the footsteps of Michael Jackson and the resulting film included startling revelations about the man known to some as the Prince of Pap.

There was quite a lot of stuff about Michael Jackson too, of course, but that was rather more familiar to anyone who's studied his career or who saw Channel Five's recent film Michael Jackson's Face. I wouldn't want to be churlish about this. Since Oprah Winfrey's less than incisive interview with Jackson several years ago (presented as an audience with a martyred saint) nobody has really got close to the nasally whittled superstar. So ITV's near-hysterical excitement at its own coup was understandable.

And when Bashir promised you, "Michael Jackson as you've never seen him before" the image on screen appeared to back up the boast. Sailing round the corner of his private go-kart track came Michael in a miniature car, elf-child face just visible behind the quarter-scale windscreen.

Oprah got inside Neverland, the kindergarten San Simeon that Jackson has constructed in the California countryside, but she didn't get an invitation to climb the Giving Tree, where Jackson perches when he's looking for inspiration.

Nor would I want to underestimate the lurid appeal of much of the footage. Jackson's shopping trip to a gift shop at the Venetian casino in Las Vegas – which holds the world's largest reserves of overpriced ormulu crap – was a dazzling example of speed acquisition.

"Michael definitely knows his art," oozed the shop's manager, eyes flickering like an overloaded till as his customer ordered two of everything (in fact, Michael doesn't know his art from his elbow, if the paintings in his house are anything to go by, but nobody close to him is going to tell him).

Bashir brought little to this sad fiesta of psychological damage. When the voice-over began to chart Bashir's laggardly suspicions that Jackson might not be eight pints to the gallon the result was comic. As the jittery superstar tried to stuff a bottle into his baby's mouth, through the scarf which conceals his face from the hostile world, Bashir's voice gravely announced: "Jackson's behaviour was beginning to alarm me."

Nothing gets past this guy, you thought.