Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.” Thus spoke Oliver Cromwell to the celebrated society portrait artist, Peter Lely, and it is Lely’s picture by which the great revolutionary is now remembered. Diana, Princess of Wales, achieved something similar when she chose Martin Bashir to paint her in interview in the depths of her despair: with no question off-limits, it was claimed. Our posthumous picture of the Princess owes much to buried memory of those images.

Now Michael Jackson and his minders are hoping that Martin Bashir’s video-portrait of our epoch’s most famous monster will help in the immortalisation of another human legend. And it will. But don’t believe Tonight’s claims that this picture will be warts-and-all. Celebrity interviewers are the new court portrait artists. No less than Lely, who knew very well how to fashion his pictures to his subjects’ tastes, Martin Bashir knows what is expected of him. No limits on how he should probe need have been discussed: they are understood. He knows, as does Jackson, that a portrait will not convince if the tricky bits are simply ignored.

So it will all be there — the surgery, the skin-lightening, the sex allegations . . . And the interview will make some claim to candour. But it will not be completely candid. If that were called for, Jackson would not have chosen Bashir.

Mr Bashir is not in the business of betrayal. The Princess, Louise Woodward, Michael Barrymore, the Stephen Lawrence suspects . . . these have been his stepping-stones, each conquest a step towards the next. As he talks with Jackson, who knows where his mind is tending? Bashir specialises in notoriety and victimhood: famous people who feel that they have been misunderstood. Today Barrymore, tomorrow Baghdad. Whom a Great Name chooses to interview him says as much about his self-confidence (or self-pity) and the image he seeks to project as anything he may say in the interview.

I admire Bashir. He understands that in broadcasting the word “interview” describes not a single format but a family of formats of which the most obvious feature — one person appearing to ask another person questions — is, in fact, the only feature they have in common. James Naughtie asking Geoff Hoon questions, and Martin Bashir asking Michael Jackson questions, are not the same animal at all. Michael Parkinson asking Nicole Kidman questions is a different beast again, halfway between the two.

For the truth is that like any Florentine nobleman, the 21st- century celeb desirous of commissioning his own portrait has a range of artists to choose from, the difference being that today they paint in VT rather than oils. Each artist has his style. John Freeman in his Sixties Face to Face series was a pioneer of subtle brutalism. Brian Walden became a sort of Expressionist, Parkinson something of a realist, the Dimblebys J. or D. a choice between the spikier or the more magnificent interpretation, and Louis Theroux a Post-Surrealist.

Instead of a Singer-Sargent or a Lavery on the wall, the famous are now proud to have a Frost or a Parkinson in the videocabinet. The day may be coming when a celebrity interviewer’s show not only ceases to offer payment to a guest, but solicits a fee itself. Indeed, but for what remains of professional ethics, I think it would have arrived. Tonight insists that it has paid Jackson nothing. Who can now doubt that were the boss of Harrods anxious to show the real Mohammed Al-Fayed behind the media caricature, the only fee worth discussing would be Tonight’s?

CV: Celebrity interviewers

Beginnings
John Freeman’s forthright talks in the Fifties and Sixties. Adam Faith shocked the nation when he admitted to having pre-marital sex

Modern masters
David Letterman, king of American chat shows since 1980, and Michael Parkinson, still essential viewing for British audiences

New blood
Graham Norton, Patrick Kielty, Louis Theroux

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