Five things we learned from the ***** ticket scrum
What does it take to guarantee the best seats for Michael Jackson's London residency? We find out in this dispatch from the front line of the O2 arena queue
Not a Greenwich shanty town, but the queue for Michael Jackson tickets. Photograph: Mark Beaumont/guardian.co.uk
Fifty dates, a million tickets on sale, yet barely half of the demand covered. The hype generated around
Michael Jackson's O2 arena residency – the pre-announced setlist of wall-to-wall classics, the whimpered promise of "my last shows in London" designed to provoke a rush to the ticket booths (while not ruling out another 50 dates in Newport Pagnell, if demand continues) – has made it the biggest ticket scramble in living memory. So just how determined do you have to be to get a ticket? What sort of person tries to guarantee themselves a seat within backside-waggling distance of ***** himself? I found myself shivering outside the O2 arena at 5am this morning in an attempt to find out …
1/ The laws of the ticket queue are draconian, but fragile
"We got here at 5am yesterday," says 52-year-old Pauline Binet, tenth in line alongside her seven months pregnant daughter Victoria. "We've had a few hiccups where people have pushed in. We've told security and they've removed them."
"If you don't know who your neighbour is," agrees 24-year-old Sarah Vanderpuije, a close friend of the Binet's since they met in the queue 24 hours ago, "they pick them out."
Behind them stretches a makeshift shanty town of around 1,000 souls; camp beds, inflatable mattresses, tents and cooking utensils stretch all the way to North Greenwich tube station. Yet at 6am, Pauline's rules of queue enforcement are swiftly ignored. Someone takes too long packing away their sleeping bag and the person behind them slips past. Five kids sneak in halfway down the line. Suddenly it's a frantic free-for-all with hundreds of desperate queue jumpers racing between barriers, clawing past each other like some kind of tout Olympics. Your overnight companion is suddenly your arch enemy; bloodshed is only narrowly avoided.
2/ Michael Jackson lookalikes are not among his biggest fans
There's certainly none of them here, at any rate. At least not at the front, where you'd expect to find 50 moonwalking, Thriller-jacketed freaks eee-heeing into their fedoras. Instead, there's only a clutch of modestly attired young girls and dodgy-looking geezers dialling the ticket line on five mobiles each. And not all of the overnight campers seem to be avid Jackophiles. "These guys have everything!" yelps Ava Jackson (no relation), 17, from Eltham. "They've come with a TV, an X Box, a cooker, a microwave, a poker table …" Her friend Ayesha Obi, 19, from Lewisham chips in. "I feel like they've done this before."
Have you spotted any profiteers?
"Yeah," Ava nods. "Calling him the usual, slating him."
3/ To be sure of seeing the gig, you can't have much of a life
Ava and Ayesha, the first people in the queue, have been here since Wednesday evening, a full 36 hours ago. "The first night was a bit damp but it was OK," says Ayesha with the thousand-yard stare of a Japanese soldier emerging from the jungle 40 years after the war ended. "We brought enough stuff to be comfortable. I've waited a long time to see him live and I want to get the best seats possible."
4/ Being a diehard Michael Jackson fan requires a lot of self-delusion
"I saw him at the press conference last week and he looks great, healthy, confident," says Murtaza Arif, 33, from Enfield. "He's the 21st-century pop icon, there's no one like him. People are still going to talk about him a century later, like Handel and Beethoven."
What about the rumours he might be miming the whole set?
"He wouldn't," says Ayesha. "And even if he does I'm still happy to pay to see him live." "He's magical," Ava adds, "so whatever he does is gonna be fantastic."
5/ Michael Jackson tickets are better than drugs
There is an en masse countdown to 7am, like we're seeing in the Chinese Year Of The *****. As the box office clerks lift the booth shutters they are greeted with hysterical screams, as if Jackson himself was dishing out tickets. The first 50 in the queue are led inside the O2 to be sold the front-row seats, their frostbitten fingers barely capable of tapping in their pins. Ayesha, the first person to buy a ticket, is suddenly deluged by TV and radio crews, her 15 minutes well and truly underway. All around, fans are weeping or yelping euphorically while clutching their tickets as if they're tokens of immortality. Owning a ***** ticket brings not only intense elation but also the envy of your peers and national celebrity. Which is far more than any drugs ever did for me. For some minutes I seriously consider joining the four-hour queue. Hype, it seems, is infectious.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/mar/13/michael-jackson-o2-arena-ticket-scrum
speak for themselves. 
Telegraph.co.uk