George Michael knows more about hard work more than anyone else who has ever lived, so it's only to be expected that occasionally his work-frazzled brain will shut down completely, leaving him slumped over the wheel of his car at midnight.
That's more or less what George Michael admitted earlier today in court as he pleaded guilty to a charge of driving while unfit through drugs. Somehow, however, George Michael managed to make it sound like he passed out at the wheel of a car at a junction in Cricklewood because he works too bloody hard all the time and not because he'd been busy throwing prescription drugs down his gobhole like Pac-Man at an all-night rave. And quite right too – putting out a string of underperforming singles for a decade can really take it out of a man, you know.
Put George Michael in a car and all hell tends to break loose, albeit really slow hell breaking loose in a needlessly dull way. Early last year George Michael was found slumped at the wheel of his car near Hyde Park and managed to laugh the incident off through gritted teeth.
Chances are that George Michael would have managed to laugh it off the next time he was found slumped at the wheel of his car in Cricklewood in October too, but between the two identical incidents George Michael's fury was sparked thanks to the way that he was treated after he was caught fondling a van driver in a bush. So, after losing his temper and threatening to sue everyone for reporting the bush fumble, the second car snooze arrest saw George Michael in a more combative mood.
As well as loudly declaring that he didn't have a drug problem, George Michael promptly marched off to court to plead not guilty to driving while unfit through drugs. That's the same charge that he pleaded guilty to today, you'll notice, which must make him feel a weeny bit silly, even if Michael blamed "tiredness and prescribed drugs" for his arrest rather than the stuff he smokes whenever he's on TV. The Washington Post reports:
"I am perfectly aware that I did something very wrong and got into my car when I was unfit to drive," Michael told the court. "I was not in my normal physical state and I'm perfectly prepared to accept the correct punishment for that and I would have accepted it a long time ago. It was fairly predictable considering how much work I had done that week," he said.
And it's true. By consulting our – admittedly entirely fabricated – George Michael work-log, we can see that George Michael spent the week of his arrest rushed off his feet, with work duties including writing a mid-tempo jazz-bar ballad about how sexy his baby is, phoning up three daytime TV shows to be outraged about stuff that only he cares about and mumbling a handful of songs for a wealthy Russian oligarch.
Now that George Michael is officially guilty of being unfit to drive through drugs, he has to wait until the end of the month for sentencing. Although the chances of a Paris Hilton-style imprisonment are slim, a jail term would mean that thousands of people will miss George Michael's concert at the new Wembley Stadium. Let's hope the judge does the right thing.
That means throwing him in jail. That's the right thing.
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