The saddest thing about Michael Jackson’s death wasn’t the messy custody vacuum it left for his kids.

No. And it wasn’t the way that it’s still pretty much impossible to find a radio station that doesn’t only play Michael Jackson records, although that is very sad. The saddest thing about Michael Jackson’s death is that nobody will see what he was planning for his big comeback shows.

But that ends now – we’ve got video footage of Michael Jackson’s last rehearsal right here, and if you like watching middle-aged men walking around a stage very slowly, you’re in for a treat.

Now that the main focus of Michael Jackson’s death is the gargantuan tangle that he left his personal affairs in, it’s a relief to finally be able to shift away an concentrate on something he was actually good at. No, not being sued or dressing up as a lady or being accused of wanton cruelty to giraffes, we’re talking something that Michael Jackson was really good at – performing.

This summer, close to a million people were set to watch Michael Jackson’s glorious comeback at London’s O2. Or, if you want to be realistic about it, probably about 200,000 people were set to watch Michael Jackson’s glorious comeback at London’s O2, with all the others getting refunds when Michael inevitably started cancelling entire swathes of shows for no clear reason. But none of that matters now – he’s dead, so nobody’s going to see anything now.

Except they might. Earlier this week we reported that Concert promoters AEG had taped one of Michael Jackson’s last rehearsals in HD, and was planning to sell it to fans in a heartbreaking Bullseye-style ‘here’s what you could have won’ moment that wasn’t at all about cynically cashing in.

But having read some of the accounts of Michael Jackson’s last few days, that didn’t sound entirely appealing – who’d pay to see a bald, anorexic drug addict with half a face wheeze and shuffle along to watered-down karaoke version of his best-loved songs?

Happily, though, AEG has released a 90-second video of Michael Jackson’s final rehearsal proving that Michael Jackson still had a bit of life left in his tank. Here it is…

Yes, there are a lot of fairly depressing things about the video – such as the fact that Michael Jackson’s most elaborate dance move in the sequence involved sort of marching up and down the stage with his friends, the fact that he’s miming throughout, the fact that Michael Jackson and his choreographers still appear to think that it’s 1986 and the fact that, despite his enviable back catalogue, Michael Jackson was still planning to do They Don’t Care About Us – but at least the final footage of him alive shows him doing something he excelled at, rather than being another gruesome reminder of how rubbish everything else about his life was.

But don’t worry, we’ll get back to that next week. Diana Ross, for crying out loud. What was he thinking?

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We’ve had a weekend to process Michael Jackson’s death, mainly by hearing Uri Gellar babble on witlessly about it forever.

So now what? Well, now we all deal with Michael Jackson’s death however we can. The coroners will continue to investigate what killed Michael Jackson and the newspapers will continue to not decide if they should celebrate Michael Jackson’s life or just go ahead and tell everyone what a freaky drug-obliterated nutter he was as lasciviously as possible.

And Michael Jackson’s London concert promoter AEG? It’s apparently bundling together a cash-in DVD of Michael Jackson’s last-ever concert rehearsal. Sounds tasteful.

When it comes to celebrating Michael Jackson’s life, it’s important that you pick the right time of his life to celebrate. Going back at least 20 years seems to be the best bet, because then you’ll be remembering the insanely talented young man who had all the best songs, all the best dance moves and all of popular culture in an iron-grip headlock.

Whereas if you stray any closer to the present, you’ll obviously end up remembering a terrifying hermit with a warped Edvard Munch face, a fondness for dangling his children from balconies, a tendency to be constantly accused of child molestation and an unironic painting of himself as Jesus with Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein as his disciples. And then you’ll start getting confused. And then you might cry.

So, yes, when it comes to Michael Jackson it’s best to completely ignore anything that happened to him in the last few years. For instance, you certainly wouldn’t want to watch a DVD of Michael Jackson’s final concert rehearsal, would you? Because what’s the point? Why would anyone want to sit through a depressingly hollow spectacle where a middle-aged shell of a man less than 24 hours away from death hesitantly shuffles backwards and forwards while an army of dancers exhausts itself desperately trying to divert everyone’s attention away from the impossibly tragic figure that the main attraction has become?

What’s that? Concert promoter AEG plans to release that exact thing? Oh. Fair enough. The New York Daily News reports:

Jackson… was there for an “electric” full rehearsal on the night before his death. The rehearsal included dancers, musicians and aerial performers. Three people close to the production said it had been captured by multiple cameras, and the audio was digitally recorded in a manner that could be used to produce surround-sound DVD and audio products.

Perfect. Everyone’s a winner here. AEG gets to recoup some of the money it lost when Michael Jackson died, and the ticket-holders who had been looking forward to seeing Michael Jackson perform this summer will now get a taste of what they’ve missed – and in high-definition too, so it’ll be like Michael Jackson is right there in your living room, scaring your children and pets with his nightmarish deathmask of a face.

As for us, we’re going to avoid this Michael Jackson DVD like the plague. To us the DVD not only reeks of cynical commercial opportunism, but it’s also profoundly disrespectful to the memory of a genuine megastar like Michael Jackson.

No, we’re going to pay tribute to the great man the right way – by going on the internet and buying a hopelessly amateurish embroidery of Michael Jackson as an angel flying up to heaven with that monkey thing he used to own sitting on a cloud next to him playing a harp.

Incidentally, can you hurry up and start selling these please, eBay? You should be all over this shit by now.

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