It's nine years since Freddie Mercury died and his place in rock's hall of fame is still secure. But not because of the music, says Ben Marshall

Dead singers normally have to wait at least 10 years before TV producers see fit to bestow posthumous hagiographic honours upon them. Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story jumps the gun by a year, but then, as Mott The Hoople's Ian Hunter points out, Freddie was always a man in a hurry.

He was hurried off to England in 1964, when his native Zanzibar enjoyed another of its periodic and bloody revolutions. He hurried off to Ealing Art School when a co-worker at a packing plant told him he had women's hands. Fame took a little longer to come, but that had nothing to do with Freddie, and a lot to do with the British public, yet to develop a taste for Queen's kitschy juggernaut of soft metal and ersatz opera.

And when he was finally famous, he hurried, positively hurtled, around the world's gay bars in a long orgiastic one-night stand. Even in his later years, when his cruising and cottaging had matured into a series of relationships with male lovers, he was in each case epically unfaithful. His last lover, Jim Hutton, who's interviewed extensively in this documentary, describes Freddie and the gay scene as fickle, but fickle hardly covers it with Freddie. The clothes, parties, performances and, above all, the sex were all symptoms of an ego that was monstrously out of control.

Most pop stars have a relationship with themselves that is at best tinged with self-doubt and occasionally self-loathing. Freddie fell in love with himself at first sight and it was a passion, indeed the only passion, to which he'd always remain true. His self-love, best expressed in his explicitly masturbatory performances, never went unrequited.

That the world should have fallen for Freddie as hard as Freddie fell for himself is a little tougher to explain. Queen, despite the tearful tributes and sycophantic drivel they've been afforded since the death of their singer, were a truly terrible band, a farrago of inept clichés and mostly meaningless verbiage.

Their most famous song, Bohemian Rhapsody, managed to distil into a mere six minutes every pompous, moronic and vainglorious sin committed against pop in the mid 70s. Only Yes's Brain Salad Surgery achieved a similar feat, but that was a triple album and lasted well over two hours. Bohemian Rhapsody found a perfect home for itself in the back of Wayne and Garth's car in Wayne's World.

Their other work, though never quite matching the nauseating heights of that first big hit, could be both anodyne and offensive, Fat Bottomed Girls for instance, or the camp but oddly thuggish We Are The Champions. It took Freddie to front this pantomime and make it work. Like Elton John, the star he most closely resembled, Freddie took an act that was already grotesque and sent it so far over the top that it had to be huge just to be visible.

And visible it certainly was. With the aid of garish costumery and his permanently penile microphone stand, Freddie turned himself into the icon of über-naff, admirable in the same way that Jeff Koons's giant pornographic porcelain sculptures are admirable. You're simply staggered by the gall.

In July 1985 when Bob Geldof declared that Queen, following their performance at Live Aid, were the best band of the day, the world agreed, and Queen, who until then had failed to crack America, went stratospheric. Live Aid was watched by more than 1.4 billion people across 170 countries. Mercifully the country it was aimed at, starving Ethiopia, was short on TV sets, and even shorter on champions and fat-bottomed girls.

Now Freddie could indulge himself like never before. Mountains of cocaine were shovelled up his aquiline nose. Further mountains were carried about on trays strapped to the heads of dwarves at parties that would have had Caligula raising a disapproving eyebrow. Rent boys were consumed and dispensed with like so much chewing gum. Freddie's 39th birthday party, featuring trolls, ogres, thieves, ballerinas, transsexuals and, naturally, dwarves, was one of the largest and most expensive ever held in rock'n'roll.

According to Trip Khalaf, Queen's sound engineer and by far the most affable and frank of all the interviewees featured in The Untold Story, "It was wretched excess that I'll probably go to hell for."

By this time Freddie's HIV, ignored and not spoken about despite the deaths of two former lovers, had developed into full-blown Aids. His lover Jim Hutton decided to stick with him, but it was only now that they began to practise safe sex. Even then he hurried away from the reality, never referring directly to Aids again.

Before his death he was a skeletal shadow of his former self. The cropped muscular hero of Live Aid was now so thin and ill that when he filmed the video for Great Pretender he needed two layers of thermals beneath his Pierrot costume to give him the illusion of substance. Even then, beneath the hot studio lights, he was freezing.

But he remained a showman to the last. It's worth asking though, given the horror of his circumstances, why he should have chosen to do so. The answer might be that nothing, not even his looming demise, could stand between him and a performance. In the end Freddie's love for Freddie proved stronger than death.

The Untold Story plays out on Only The Good Die Young. Freddie was living, and indeed dying, proof that this is plainly not so.

 Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story, tomorrow, 10.40pm, BBC1