HEAVEN KNOWS I’M MISERABLE NOW

STEVEN PATRICK MORRISSEY, the aristocratic, aloof, Mancunian singing star and lookalike for a Gerry Anderson marionette, has apparently survived his embarrassing collapse on stage in Wiltshire, and will now not be joining the ranks of the recently fallen popular entertainers, much to the irritation of the vultures in the media, who have been circling the story for a short time. The irritation for Morrissey, however, is that those of us who had happily forgotten about him and judged him dead now realise that he is playing concerts in such venues as “The Oasis”, Swindon, wearing, according to the local newspaper, a dark open-necked shirt, and looking “relaxed”.

STARK, IMPECCABLY-DRESSED Morrissey may soon be wishing he had stayed onstage with a spleen splint and a minute-by-minute morphine splish up his bloodstream rather than be carried off to let the local yokel photographic press slip into the cottage hospital and snap him in his smalls; but, with his lifestyle, I imagine that Morrissey understands he has it coming to him, if he pardons me the pun.

IN THE MEANTIME we have had the release of the new Michael Joseph Jackson movie “This is it”, shown simultaneously in all the major cities in our world, and no doubt on several of the planets from which Jackson’s fans come. On the tail of this story, as they now seem to say on the television, The Times has published the list of the most successful “dead franchise brands”, as a large number of famous people are called today. I was expecting Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders to be included in this list, but was disappointed to see that the only names I recognised in the “top five” besides all-singing, all-dancing Jackson, were Elvis Presley, the famous Dixieland jazz singer, and Yves Saint Laurent, the well-known dead African tailor.

WHATEVER THEIR HUMBLE BACKGROUNDS, death has been good to their bank accounts, certainly showing, as Morrissey appears to have always known, that misery is an earthly quality, and that Warhol could have said about Pop culture that “if you want to get ahead, get dead.”