-Kay Burley sets the tone for the evening by introducing Pastor Lucius Smith as Father Luscious Smith. Repeatedly.
-Mariah and her melons waddle on to oversing I'll Be There with someone I don't recognise. Perhaps feeling overcome by the emotion of the occasion, as well as struggling to stay upright with those chesticles about to tumble out of her not terribly discreet dress, she looks skyward mournfully on numerous occasions. She has also really overdone it with the blusher, making her cheeks less of a healthy glow and more of a measles red.
-Can I have a glory note? Hell Yeah. Can I have staccato warbling that'd put a canary with palpitations to shame? Hell Yeah. Can I have a Thank You, Jesus? Hells Yeah!
-Queen Latifah, alas, not performing tonight in the guise of Mama Morton from Chicago, introduces the crowd to the concept of poetry with the help of Maya Angelou. Maya also gives us the first instance of a song title being a part of the speechifying. I predict it won't be the last.
-Ladies and gentlemen, Lionel Richie.
-A lot of Jesusing going on here.
-Macauley Culkin makes his way to the podium, and fiendishly informs the attendees that at last, the spotlight is his now, and he has set up a series of devilish traps using everyday items to prevent anyone removing him until he has had his say about a number of issues. A sniper quickly dispatches him so we can continue.
-Old black guy who invented Motown. He really enunciates his T sounds. He has a style of narration that makes me wish Morgan Freeman was talking us through this.
-Michael Jackson sure had a lot of black friends for a white guy.
-”Michael Jackson went into orbit and never came down”.... You said it, Berry.
-Everybody loves a montage!
-Random images include Jacko putting the world back together, Jacko with a giant cheque, Zombie!Jacko, Blackjack, Whitejack and everything-in-between-Jack and ewwww, shirtless Jacko.
-Stevie Wonder! Obvious blindness joke here. “Michael, why didn't you stay????” he laments while tinkling the ivories of sadness.
-Athletes take to the stage. Sky's captions assure us that they are basketball legends. I understand Kobe Bryant has been accused of rape in the past. It's nice that he and Michael had something in common. Magic Johnson shares a story about eating fried chicken with MJ. What, no watermelon?
-Jesus H. Jackson, Jennifer Hudson is MASSIVE. She apes Mariah Carey in repeatedly looking skywards to show she's thinking fondly of Michael. The coffin is in front of you, not stuck to the ceiling. Its almost like she has some nonsensical belief that dead people are found in the clouds. MJ voiceover plays during Jen's performance.
-Al Sharpton. This will surely be a speech of dignity and restraint, free from hyperbole.
-Al tells us that Michael Jackson taught the world to love. And brought Blacks and Whites and Asians and Latinos together. He fed the world. And in a quantum leap of logic, Michael is apparently responsible for Barack Obama being president of the USA by making people comfortable with black people. Michael never stopped! Michael never stopped! Michael never stopped! Thank ya Michael! Thank ya Michael! Thank ya Michael! If Rev Sharpton were stationery, he'd definitely be triplicate paper.
-The crowd chant for Michael. I fear it may be in vain.
-John Meyer takes to the stage for some guitar-work as an image of a levitating Jackson firing out a rainbow of colour is projected on-stage. Meyer appears to be deriving sexual pleasure from his string-plucking.
-Brooke Shields! For those of you waiting for the first showing of tears to drink, now is the time to down the vodka.
-Sky News really wants us to watch this in SkyHD, which is so crystal clear that you can actually see the front row reflected in the tears of Brooke Shields.
-Oh, poor choice of words. “His heart would just burst out of his chest when he laughed!”
-Jermaine Jackson performs “Smile” in The Moment Designed To Draw Tears From Stones™. He is one-gloved. He is being drowned out by the music. This is not how to draw tears, AEG.
-Luther Kings. They don't have the same rhythmically dolourous tones as Berry Gordy, and I am bored by them. Clearly that speechifying power has been diluted across the generations.
-Kay Burley interrupts proceedings to tell us that Sky will have a medium in-studio afterwards attempting to contact the spirit of Michael Jackson to discuss the MP's expenses row, in addition to asking for his thoughts on tomorrow's newspapers.
-Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee! Woo! She is here to laud the American Story that is Michael Jackson. She namechecks the children. Well, two of them. Whoops. Poor Blanket.
-The US Congress has agreed to declare Michael Jackson the King of Pop forever and ever and to imprison anyone who would question that. Or something.
-Usher looking like a fucking tit and hamming it up even more than Mariah Carey was. “We love you Michael” * deep sigh * He whimpers. He whines. He looks pained. Can we just get him an Oscar so he'll leave the stage?
-Smokey Robinson! Kinda boring. Next!
-Hundreds of Uighurs could be dead or dying in China at the moment. But this has been on Sky, without adverts, for 4 hours now.
-Fat kid with weird name from Britain's Got Talent. I bet Susan Boyle is fit to kill at the prospect of being upstaged by one of her cohorts.
-Kenny Ortega tells us that “we were here, with Michael, less than a week ago”. He died 12 days ago. Something you want to tell us, Kenny?
-I don't know who any of these people singing We Are The World, perhaps the first of MJ's many mawkish songs about coming together as one and feeling the power of our hearts and being childlike and peaceful and save the world and end war and animals are lovely and cloudbeams of rainbowfart.
-Here's Heal The World, another of MJ's many mawkish songs about coming together as one and feeling the power of our hearts and being childlike and peaceful and save the world and end war and animals are lovely and cloudbeams of rainbowfart.
-Al Sharpton only joins in the group arm-waving when he realises he's on camera.
-Jackson 1 of 4 tells us he was Michael's backbone. Jackson 2 of 4 laments Jackson leaving after such a short visit to Earth.
-The Jackson children are onstage. They are mysteriously not blonde any more. I bet he wasn't happy with their look and had them recast.
-New! Paris speaks up. Old Paris never would have been given a speaking role. She really sells it emotionally.
-The Jackson coffin, or Jackophagus, is taken away to be cryogenically frozen, as Pastor Luscious returns.
-The memorial ends as the zombified corpse of Jackson rises from his cryselephantine housing to lead a group of the undead in a bloody rampage through the mourners. Joe Jackson is viciously torn limb from limb as a desperate Janet hacks at her brother with a machete. Clearly she knew this turn of events was a possibility and came prepared. Alas, her efforts are futile as she is overcome by a horde of nightstalkers hungry for warm blood. When all seems lost, and the floor of the stadium is awash with blood, entrails, and the twitching limbs of the soon to be reanimated bodies of the recently eaten, hope manifests itself, as a determined looking Elizabeth Taylor appears. She bears a flamethrower in one hand, and stands assertively with an expensive though not gaudy handbag over her shoulder, filled with ancient tomes on voodoo and curses; the only chance the City of Angels has in the face of this marauding darkness.
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