What does a star need? A great lawyer, a good publicist, a silent plastic surgeon on speed dial – and fans, lots of them. Since the rise of OnlyFans, the word ‘fans’ has gained unpleasant associations but it was originally a 19th-century baseball term to describe the most ardent spectators – though its provenance was far earlier, from the Latin ‘fanaticus’, meaning insanely but divinely inspired.

I thought of this on reading that the new Michael Jackson film has had the highest-grossing opening weekend for a biopic of all time. It’s fair to say that the fans will have made this happen: it’s not really the kind of flick someone casually picks after perusing the options. (‘Darling, do you fancy The Mummy, The Devil Wears Prada 2 or a slavish whitewashing of a man accused of the most gruesome sexual assaults on children?’) The accusations against Jackson – of which he was acquitted, though the pay-offs to the families of the children are believed to have run into the tens of millions of dollars – were so horrible that I doubt many people are on the fence. His fans, however, must be the most fanatical around, as was in evidence when three Michael Jackson fan clubs used the French defamation laws which make it an offence to sully the image of a dead person in order to sue two of his alleged victims after they appeared in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland. The lawyer who acted for them, Emmanuel Ludot, previously sued Jackson’s doctor, Conrad Murray, for the pain he had........

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