The story behind the documentary that ruined Michael Jackson’s career

When the documentary ‘Living with Michael Jackson’ aired in February 2003, it was watched by an astonishing 15 million people in the UK, and a further 38 million on ABC in the US, as well as many millions more around the world.

Conducted by Martin Bashir, who has recently rejoined the BBC as its religious affairs correspondent, it was seen as a way of turning the eccentric singer’s reputation around, following the 1993 accusations of child abuse which had already battered his career.

Jackson, who was a huge fan of Diana, Princess of Wales, was keen on receiving the kind of public sympathy Diana got after her now infamous ‘Panorama’ interview with Bashir in 1995.

But instead it was an unmitigated disaster for Jackson, with the tabloid media focussing on his admission that ‘many children’ had slept in the same bed as him over the years. Jackson wanted to portray himself as a ‘Peter Pan’ character, but it could not have been more damaging for him.

The following day, The Sun ran the headline ‘Jacko kids at risk, social services probe mad star’, while the Daily Mail went with ‘Why I sleep with little boys, by Michael Jackson’. The footage of him dangling his infant son Blanket precariously over a balcony in Berlin, above a sea of paparazzi, was also totally irresistible to the tabloids.

The interview took place over eight months, from May the previous year, with Bashir visiting Jackson’s Neverland ranch, and then later meeting him in Las Vegas and Berlin. Things began in a fun, knockabout fashion, Bashir racing cars with Jackson around Neverland, learning the moonwalk, discussing his music, and climbing the Giving Tree, which Jackson said provided him with inspiration.

But it was during final leg of the interviews that Jackson must have first begun to suspect that the finished programme would not be what he had envisaged.

Bashir had broached the subject of his changing appearance, the abuse he himself suffered as a child at the hands of his father Joe – who would watch the young Jacksons rehearse holding a belt, and would mock him mercilessly over the shape of his nose and his acne – and his unorthodox relationships with children.

But in Miami, as their final meeting took place, Jackson became increasingly upset over the more aggressive line of questioning, about his operations, the biological parentage of his children, and his habits of sleeping in the same bed as minors or letting them sleep in his.

“Why can’t you share your bed? That’s the most loving thing to do, to share your bed with someone,” Jackson said in his defence. “You say, ‘You can have my bed if you want it. Sleep in it. I’ll sleep on the floor. It’s yours’. I always give the beds to the company.

“Everyone who knows me will know the truth which is that my children come first in my life and that I would never harm any child.”

Because of confidentiality agreements, Jackson refused to discuss the 1993 abuse case, though he did reveal he settled out of court to avoid ‘a long, drawn-out affair, like O.J.’.