U.K. TV station hosts live Michael Jackson seance

Derek Acorah show was in such bad taste that it couldn't be seen as entertainment on any discernible level

If you were watching Sky One on Saturday night, count yourself lucky - you saw what will easily be remembered as the worst single hour of television produced in 2009. Worse than Babestation. Worse than Channel Five's SuperCasino. Worse than any individual episode of Hotel Babylon. I'm talking, of course, about Michael Jackson: The Live Seance.

I was watching because I thought it'd be funny - a car crash of a show with the added bonus of a slimy-looking medium rolling his eyeballs around inside his bright orange skull and reciting the lyrics to Heal the World in a silly high-pitched voice.Turns out it was a car crash. But it was one of those actual car crashes where real people get hurt and you're not sure that everyone's going to make it out OK and you end up feel like a bit of bastard for even wanting to watch it in the first place.

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This is how Michael Jackson: The Live Seance worked. Derek Acorah - he of Most Haunted and Derek Acorah's Ghost Towns fame - rounded up a group of Michael Jackson fans and took them to a house in Ireland that Jackson had stayed in a few years ago. Once there, he spent 20 minutes doing what he does best: trying to convince everyone that he was being inhabited by the ghost of a dead megastar.

And he was certainly very convincing. Because if you were Michael Jackson and you'd just been gifted an unexpected conduit into the world of the living for the first time since your death, you wouldn't use it as an opportunity to pass on some personal messages to your grieving children, would you? No, the first thing you'd do would be to give a shout out to your man Quincy Jones. Then you'd mutter darkly about journalists before mumbling endless variations of the word "love" a lot too. That definitely sounds like something that Michael Jackson would do. Can't see anything wrong with that.

Derek Acorah's shtick is offensive at the best of times, but the sight of him sitting at a table with four fans - including two who were literally dressed up as Michael Jackson and one who appeared to be on the brink of emotional meltdown throughout the seance - and doing his best to goad them all into crying on live television left an especially bad taste in the mouth. Acorah's manipulation of the vulnerable was in such bad taste that it couldn't be seen as entertainment on any discernible level. It was depressing. That's all it was.

In the coming years, Michael Jackson will be endlessly repackaged and commoditised by people with all kinds of vested financial interests, but I'll be staggered if anything even comes close to Michael Jackson: The Live Seance. That's unless Sky One secures the broadcast rights to Michael Jackson: The Live Corpse-Defiling any time soon. It wouldn't be that much of a leap.