The Jacksons came and went
What did we make of The Jacksons are Coming on Channel 4 on Thursday night? Admittedly I was only half-watching while sodding about on the laptop at the same time, but who isn’t multi-mediaing at that time of night? Despite that, it seemed to me to be a poor woman’s version of Louis Theroux’s ill-fated pursuit of Michael Jackson for a TV documentary in 2003.
The story, in essence, was that a Devonian martial arts expert had made friends with the Jacksons initially through Uri Geller and Michael J. I know, it’s already sounding highly unlikely. This person (I forget his name, as have the Jacksons by now) was slowly accepted by the family and, for reasons I missed while watching an auction end on eBay, the family decided to go to stay with him in Devon.
Inevitably, the Devonian host couldn’t resist bigging himself up to the local media about this famous guests, meaning the Jacksons - minus Michael, the most interesting one, and Janet, the other famous one - arrived to a media frenzy which they apparently hadn’t expected. Mrs Jackson didn’t even expect it to be cold in England, so you can see how prepared they were.
That was more or less it. There was some scouting for propery, a few paparazzi making hand gestures and lots of voiceover from film-maker Jane Preston. She was clearly trying to build the jeopardy of the film (would the Jacksons adjust to life in Devon? was that ever a real possibility?), but ended up, as I say, coming a very poor second to the whole schtick Louis Theroux had already mined with his film five years ago.
We did get a phone call from Michael, broadcast to a group of fans during an evening event with the Jacksons who had made it to Devon. It was a bit like watching Michael get into a blacked-out 4×4 with a scarf wrapped around his head. Nothing new and just barely proved that he’s still alive.
I’m surprised there’s still room in the schedules for this sort of ‘will they, won’t they get the interview with the famous celebrity’ programme. I certainly wouldn’t call it Cutting Edge, the name of the C4 documentary strand under which it was shown.
September 10th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Nice blog.