How I heard that the King of pop was dead

Farewell: Michael Jackson fans outside the UCLA Medical Center salute the fallen star with his trademark single glove
12 April 2012

The woman pushed through the crowd towards Alan Yentob. "Michael Jackson has died," she said, her irises huge.

We all thought she was joking: I mean, how could that happen? Michael Jackson was about to play the O2 Arena, in an epic series of gigs he had already — prophetically — called his final curtain call. Every teenage girl we know holds tickets.

For a second, Alan Yentob looked inscrutably alarmed at the news that his old friend Michael Jackson, the former boss of BBCs One and Two, had moved on to the ultimate controller in the sky.

But he whipped out his BlackBerry and the tiny square screen soon glowed the incredible news that was sweeping the party, as people went up to one another, simply to pass it on.

There had been a sudden death in the global family of pop. The king was dead.

I called a friend in Los Angeles, whose house in Westwood is just over the road from the UCLA Medical Centre. "The scene here is apocalyptic," the writer Meredith Yates told me.

"Helicopters everywhere. Every radio station is ­interviewing anyone they can, even National Public Radio has cleared the schedules and playing his songs, people are just crying in the streets and leaving flowers."

It was one of those frozen moments when everyone already knew they would remember where they were.

For me, the day the music died was when Joe Strummer, lead singer of the Clash, died of a heart attack, also age 50.

But Michael Jackson was not some punk poet, however iconic.

He was the most talented pop star of the last half-century, and the most famous (the talent is more important than the fame) and his death really is the defining cultural moment for the post-baby-boomer ­generation.

I'm not surprised Madonna tweeted that she couldn't stop crying.

Almost everyone alive today has sung along to his pitch-perfect high vocals, belted out Billie Jean, practised the moonwalk sans the King's whiplash grace and boogied at discos to Thriller, especially my ­middle-aged generation.

We loved the music but by the time our children were downloading his songs onto their iPods, it had been weird for a long time in Neverland.

We witnessed the marriage to the daughter of Elvis, the refusal to grow up in his play-ranch, we watched as the boy-man wanted babies and got them, and then put them in masks, dangled one of them over a hotel balcony and seemed to call them all Prince.

As Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's said in his statement praising Jackson: "Though there were serious questions about his personal life, Michael was undoubtedly a great entertainer, and his popularity spanned generations and the globe."

But the best lines came not from Arnie (surprise) but from the LA Times. "As a child star, he was so talented he seemed lit from within; as a middle-aged man, he was viewed as something akin to a visiting alien who, like Tinkerbell, would cease to exist if the applause ever stopped."

What a thing. I can hardly believe it. The King is dead, but there is no king to take his place.

Stand up for Silvio Berlusconi

Our First Lady, Sarah Brown, is shortly to receive a humourless letter from Italian academics urging her to boycott the G8 summit in Italy next month because of "the way Silvio Berlusconi treats women".

Eh? He's separated. It's lonely at the top. He pays as many as 30 women at a time, some aged over 40 — hurray — thousands of euros to attend his Lucullan feasts, at which he showers them with trinkets, encourages their political careers and then, best of all, only one of them has to take one for the team (as he memorably told Patrizia D'Addario, "Go and wait for me in the big bed").

He presumably spends his own money, though he denies this, so he's not even stealing from the taxpayer.

"I have never paid a woman. I have never understood what satisfaction there would be if not in the satisfaction of conquest." Puts a smile on the face, doesn't it?

What a guy. If you don't go to Papi's party, Sarah — I'll go instead.

Biometric bother

Arriving at Heathrow this week, I heard a familiar sound echoing in the passport hall: that of an annoying recorded voice repeating the same command over and over again.

Some poor chap who had registered his biometric data had elected to pass through the iris-scanning lane and was trying to stick his eye into the machine while the machine kept telling him to do something else, in a ghastly Stepford Wife monotone.

Oodles of us passed through passport control while he kept failing.

It's like those self-service checkouts at the supermarket.

You think they're going to be quick and easy but they end up taking twice as long and years off your life.

I have only to hear the woman commanding me to "please remove unexplained item from the bagging area" and I want to curl up in a ball on the shop floor until it all goes away.

Tour guides get raw deal

You know those big signs around central London offering Free Tours?

According to my deep throat, competition in the European capital city tour industry is now so cut-throat that the guides have to pay the tour company to get the gigs (in Munich it's more than 3 a pop), and have to depend on tips.

Some of which they then have to kick back to the company.

It's horrible but it does sound like the logical next stage, after British Airways' pioneering of working for free.

Don't work for pay — pay to work.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in