A television tribute to MJ brings his childhood days into focus.
At 8 pm tonight, Discovery Travel & Living is all set to showcase a tribute to Michael Jackson. It seems the world simply can’t get enough of the popstar after his untimely demise and apart from MJ-themed parties at pubs and lounge bars across the country, a lot of television content — music programmes, documentaries and what have you — is being devoted to Jackson.
What Discovery Travel & Living will do is no different. Having watched the DVD of The Michael Jackson Story, a one-hour programme that will be aired on the channel this evening, I recommend it as a must-watch for MJ fans. Unfortunately, for others there’s very little to keep you interested. That, however, cannot be a flaw. Why? Because, as music producer Pete Waterman says in the documentary, “There was so much that one knew of Michael, it was difficult to tell the truth from fiction.” So, if you’re the sort of person who, like me, doesn’t tire of watching anything related to Jackson, this documentary, a compilation of interviews with Jackson’s family, friends and business partners, prepared much before he died, is one you wouldn’t want to miss.
The documentary succeeds because it shows you glimpses of Jackson when he was “so young, so tiny, so talented”, as Smokey Robinson of Motown Records puts it, and captures the fall of an individual, who despite all the success, “was on a lonely road”. That’s what one of his sisters says on the show.
Television all over the world has been busy capturing mainly the fall of this fabulous star, so it is refreshing that The Michael Jackson Story concentrates on his childhood days, and then moves in chronological order.
His mother, who explains how the children used to sing all day and night, especially when it would be snowing outside, recounts how Michael would wake up in the middle of the night and make music and go “woohoo for no rhyme or reason”.
In fact, these are moments when one is forced to think how a person so dedicated to his work that he was waking up at night just thinking of nothing but his music, became embroiled in ghastly controversies. There are moments in the documentary, when, listening to so many people and watching glimpses of Jackson’s live tours, you begin to realise the degree of charisma that Jackson possessed. This from a person whom singer Gladys Knight remembers “sitting in a corner in the dark before his performance and just wanting to be on his own, alone”. It’s interesting to see his appetite for live shows that would be “big, bigger and biggest” — on the Dangerous tour, for instance, he told his managers that he wanted to “fly off the stage with a rocket strapped on his back”. That was Jackson, wanting to create music and live a life that the world would remember for decades to come.