The Jacksons Are Coming

The family stroll along Instow beach

The giraffe was called Kabbar. He was named after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the basketball player. He used to wander around the garden. We had a llama, too – but I don’t remember the llama’s name.”

Yes, it can only be The Jacksons Are Coming! – the documentary that chronicles those surreal weeks back in the summer when the Jackson family – as in Michael, Jermaine, Tito, Janet – were planning to move to Appledore, in Devon.

At the time, I just presumed it was some complex practical joke – an Ashton Kutcher stunt for Punk’d, say; or maybe the best ever stunt for Children in Need. But no, here is footage of Tito really wandering around rainy, grey Devon in his trademark bowler hat, squiring a girlfriend who looks like a Pussycat Doll, and trying to get his head around fish’n'chips, the bone-chilling cold, and how denuded of giraffes and llamas poky British lawns are.

You have to watch this documentary. You have to watch any documentary about the Jacksons, really, don’t you? Every 0.2 degree of their oddness is fascinating – although there’s nothing here as amazing as that Channel 4 documentary on Michael Jackson a few years ago, which revealed that he mixes red wine with Coke and calls it “Jesus Juice”. “Jesus Juice” has been my cocktail of choice ever since. In that film, Michael also spent $200,000 in 20 minutes in a shop that sold life-size china leopards with eyes made of diamond-dust. You just don’t get documentaries like that every day.

The amazingness of this one is much, much more low-key – pretty much peaking with a shot of Tito’s boxer shorts, which he lays out to dry on a bench in the garden. The camera pans across them, lovingly.

“That’s Tito Jackson’s pants!” you say to yourself. “When the Jackson 5 sang “Tito’s gonna teach you/How to get an ‘A’” they clearly meant “in handwashing your pants in the sink, and then taking advantage of the fine weather”. Have I said this documentary is amazing? It’s amazing.”

It has to be said that throughout this film Tito Jackson comes across as a calm, dignified and sane man – the last evident in the fact that after six weeks in Devon he realises it isn’t a patch on his gigantic family estate in lovely, warm California, and swiftly returns. Why he ever came to Devon in the first place is the centre of this neatly packed and inexplicably candid documentary – which chronicles Tito’s unlikely and ultimately doomed friendship with a local “multimillionaire bodyguard” called Matt Fiddes. Fiddes – a yokel-type with a pony-tail – installs Tito, a couple of Jackson nephews and Michael Jackson’s mother in a rental home in Devon (view holiday cottage), then starts playing odd games with the press. This culminates in an agonising week during which he arranges a “Jackson Convention” – at which Tito has to sit through a fat, white Michael Jackson impersonator doing Smooth Criminal – and a publicity stunt for Fiddes’s martial arts centre, where he makes Tito take part in a lesson, and insists he calls him “Sir”.

Like I say, you have to watch it. It’s a documentary about some Jacksons. It can’t not be amazing.

The Jacksons Are Coming!, Thur, Channel 4, 9pm

Article, courtesy of The Times