When it all comes down to it, it's a gang of paramedics hammering on the chest of someone who's collapsed in their home.

The tape of the 911 call made from the house Michael Jackson was renting in Bel Air really was no different to millions of others — apart from the media frenzy that attached to it afterwards.

There is something appalling about such recordings. They bring us all very close to the intimate shock of the event itself, right in to a family home with the dinner plates and the TV still on, to the extent that we can, we think, trace the tremors in the voices as they betray the growing panic, the tape replaying the soundtrack of the last critical moments over and over and over and over. But the result is the same.

Cue the paramedics and their genuinely heroic efforts.

It's funny that even the most fabulously wealthy individuals, with retinues and entourages and personal trainers and fitness gurus and even medical staff on hand day and daily, and with access to the most up-to-date medical technology and with hospitals — especially in the US — ready to clear their wards and operation schedules to accommodate their every cosmetic whim, ultimately rely for their very survival on technical professionals who earn the tiniest fraction of their income.

People who'd rather be on their way home; who've already worked longer hours than they should have; who never receive the thanks and certainly not the recompense that should be their due.

Maybe it's just me, but out of all the furore around Jacko's demise, it's the quiet efficiency of the paramedics and the record of the long period spent trying to resuscitate that “50-year-old man” lying on the floor, which will leave the deepest impression.

The cult of ‘celebrity' has debased the phenomenon of the Star.

Really, it's only when tragedy strikes that it's possible to tell the difference any more, or even if there is one, between the true personality of historic or popular significance and a flibbertigibbet, fly-by-night, puffball sparkler (no harm to them).

Jackson certainly wasn't one of the latter. And if it's the case that the allegations levelled against the ‘King of Pop' in the last decades of his life would have been enough instantly to terminate the careers and erase the place in the popular heart of characters of lesser magnitude, then that's just tough.

Because it's one of the characteristics of stardom that it isn't about fairness or equality or even justice. You only have to go to Youtube and watch a Jackson performance to realise exactly why he was a star.

The news that the Jackson family have requested an independent autopsy on the body of their son and brother to ascertain the circumstances surrounding the lead-up to his collapse will surprise no one familiar with Hollywood wars and the blame culture which surrounds the untimely death of popular figures — it's been the same since Valentino.

But that will be as nothing to the hundreds of post-mortems which will soon be underway on Michael Jackson — the Legacy. And I don't mean just The Will.

Whatever about the quality of Michael Jackson's private life and what he did in it — the facts are known, the damage done and the judgement on it is in other hands now — there is no doubting the impact he made on popular culture the world over. It was clear, even in the teeth of the most recent allegations and his eventual acquittal on those serious charges, played out in full and humiliating view of the international media, that his worldwide following would brook no query on his innocence or his value as a human being and an artist.

It's not often one comes across a case where death, although it's obviously not to be recommended, is not the worst that could happen to an artist.

There is no doubt, having faced down charges of child abuse, that as a musician, personality and artist, Jackson had already survived a fate worse than it.