Bitter Queen vs King of Pop

Despite their reputation for flakiness, celebrities are usually a reliable bunch. For instance, Britney will always be a trashy, inarticulate mess, Jordan will always find something excruciatingly private to discuss with a paying publication, and Rupert Everett will always say something shockingly ill-advised whenever he has a new product to plug. Unfortunately though, Rupert seems to work less than Victoria Beckham's smile muscles, and so we don't hear from him nearly enough.

Thankfully, with new Channel 4 show The Scandalous Adventures Of Lord Byron to promote, Rupert's crawled out from under a plastic surgeon to speak bluntly about anything that takes his fancy. This time around it's Michael Jackson and the very notion of celebrity that bear the brunt.

Having already labelled Jackson a freak, Rupert added that "He looked like a character from Shrek. He was a black to white minstrel." Pointedly ignoring the medical issues affecting Jackson's skin-colour, Everett's rapidly derailing train of thought elaborated on the racial issue, commenting that "He personified the pain and anxiety of a black man in a slave country." If anyone can claim to be an expert on the complexities of race relations in 21st Century USA, it's bound to be an ex-rent boy whose last role of note was that of a comical headmistress.

But according to Rupert, Jackson's death heralds a bigger event - the end of celebrity culture as we know it. Comparing the extremes of modern celebrity to the last days of Versailles, he wonders how much more bullshit we can take about celebrities. Well, I don't know about him, but I can handle plenty more. Which should be good news, since at least it means there'll still be an audience the next time he wants to talk publicly about his time as a junkie, or perhaps slate service men and woman for always "whining about the dangers of being killed."

Then again, it shouldn't really come as a surprise that he spends so much time talking out of his arse, since he's had so much plastic surgery that it's practically next to his mouth anyway.