Just how wacko is Jacko?

AS he sat in his home cinema, watching the little boy on the screen going through a perfectly-executed routine and with a grin from ear to ear, Michael Jackson's face remained impassive. What was he thinking as he relived his childhood on screen? Was he looking wistfully at a time of innocence, or were the beatings and the abuse coming back to him? Or did that boy mean anything to him at all?

It soon became clear that Jackson's time as the undoubted star of the Jackson Five was not the happiest in his life. His voice faltered as he spoke of the abuse he suffered. Of how the rehearsals of those perfect routines were punctuated by regular beatings from his father Joe. Of how the young Michael was mocked for the size of his nose. Of how, when he entered puberty, his pimples became the subject of ridicule.

Travelling the world and performing to thousands of adoring fans, being mobbed at airports and concerts and having the money to buy whatever you choose adds up to a far from normal childhood. Throw in an abusive and unloving father, and it is not hard to come up with a deeply disturbed individual.

The longer Monday night's documentary went on, the more of its harsh light was cast on Jackson's extraordinary life. From climbing trees at his Neverland ranch to driving a buggy around hotel corridors; from a manic shopping spree around a Las Vegas shrine to bad taste, to surrounding himself with lifelike mannequins; from dangling his baby son out of a hotel window to being mobbed at Berlin Zoo when he went to see the gorillas, Jackson's world was even more bizarre than we could possibly have imagined.

And just as fascinating was the discovery of how Jackson saw himself. He was a Peter Pan, who would have no need of a coffin because he was "gonna live forever". He has only ever had plastic surgery on his nose, and those two operations were to help him reach the high notes. His first two children were a "present" from his wife. He sees it as a "beautiful thing" that he shares his bedroom with children.

While that last revelation opened up the possibility of an investigation into child abuse, coming as it does ten years after accusations he abused 13-year-old Jordy Chandler, which ended in an £18m out of court settlement, Jackson himself was unable to see how it could look to others.

"He said a lot of things that obviously will disturb people, but I don't think he meant them in that way. It just seemed to me childlike and nave behaviour," says Cary Cooper, professor of psychology at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. "If he really were doing anything untoward, would he even say those things? Somebody who was would cover it up, would never even appear in front of the cameras."

Jackson's nave approach to life at the age of 44 seems to be the result of his own extraordinary upbringing, a time when he was never allowed properly to behave as a child, says Prof Cooper. "He seems very immature, but maybe he never went through childhood in the same way that more normal people did.

"Maybe, in a way, in his relationship with children he is looking for a childhood he never had, and he is trying to be a caring parent."

Scenes where Jackson took his children to the zoo in Berlin showed Prince Michael I and Paris, his two eldest, being jostled by photographers and fans, apparently scared by the ordeal, but Jackson himself seem completely unfazed.

Similarly, the dangling of his youngest, Prince Michael II, over the hotel balcony. Jackson told Martin Bashir that he was giving his fans what they wanted, but even later, as he fed the baby while jiggling him manically on his knee, he seemed disturbingly over-excited by the adoration of the crowd.

"He is used to that, but his kids aren't. It is part of his lifestyle and maybe he is not sensitive to it because he has lived with it all his life," says Prof Cooper. "But his has been a fishbowl life, constantly trying to meet other people's expectations."

The trauma of Jackson's childhood, particularly the abuse he suffered at his father's hands, seems to have arrested his emotional development, according to Dr Joan Harvey, psychologist at Newcastle University, with the result that he has become a "grown-up juvenile", she says.

And the problem has been exacerbated by that other pitfall of celebrity: by surrounding himself with sycophants, there is no one to question his lifestyle and offer a dose of reality. And nor do they alleviate the loneliness.

"You have got a most peculiar set of circumstances of extreme wealth, living in a world almost divorced from what we would consider to be a normal life, plus a series of traumas in childhood - when you have that combination, it is no surprise that some of his behaviour strikes most of us as odd, and add to that an emotional immaturity," she says.

"This is somebody trying to relive elements of his childhood that clearly passed him by. The problem is, you can't expect somebody who is, in effect, being a child, to be a good parent as well. What he needs is somebody he can employ who will take on a lot of the parenting role and leave him to be a grown-up juvenile."

All this might make him an object of pity, but we should not feel sorry for Jackson, says Prof Cooper. Rather, we should reflect on how we have played a part in turning him into the human freak show he has become.

"We have created him, and now we're criticising him, but I wonder who the real culprit is here," he says. "We want these celebrities to be different: we don't like ordinary celebrities and we're the ones who fashion these people, but when they start to behave differently we say 'Look at the monster!'.

"We haven't given him the privacy he wants, we pushed him through his childhood, we revered him when he was younger, then constantly looked into his private life, and I'm just not surprised at what we end up seeing. It is rather sad, but maybe it says more about us than it does about him."

As he fills those solitary nights watching that 30-year-old Jackson Five footage, Jackson may have physically altered beyond all recognition, but it seems he really is still that little boy on the stage: dancing, singing, and grinning for all the world to see.

* Sharon Griffiths - the fascination of the freak, p11