The closest I’ve come to seeing a ghost was a few months ago when we went to stay in a haunted house.
The closest I’ve come to seeing a ghost was a few months ago when we went to stay in a haunted house. We had a deeply uncomfortable night during which it was cold and hard to sleep, and in the small hours my wife was awoken by a mysterious pressure on her chest, almost as if she was suffocating, and which may have been the tortured spirit of whoever it was who had died horribly there or which might have been the heavy quilt. Dunno. Couldn’t say. I’m itching to have a 100 per cent, cast-iron ‘Yes I saw a ghost and it was definitely a ghost’ experience, but this wasn’t it. Otherwise, this intro would have been more exciting.
Why do I so want to see a ghost? Well a) obviously so that I can write about it and tell people about it at dinner and b) because the longer I live under the extended Blair/Brown/Cameron nightmare the more reluctant I am to accept that this life is all there is. There are lots of people out there like me and they’re the reason Liverpudlian Joe Power is able to earn a living. Power sees dead people and for a small consideration of £40 (for a private consultation) or a tenner a head for one of his hotel events will communicate their messages from beyond the grave to their loved ones.
Being dead is great, apparently. Not one of the dearly departed consulted by Power has ever been heard to scream, ‘Aiiiieeee! They’re spooling my entrails on a wheel, while tiny devils jab my eyeballs with pitchforks of fiery acid!’ or ‘I am soooo lonely and saaaad. Why did I have to die sooo young?’ Always they are calm and smiling, and the messages they bring are full of joy. ‘Eh, eh, we’re well proud, yer Nan and me, of ’ow you and Daz are gettin’ on and ’ow the kids are turning out. Everything up ’ere in ’Eaven’s great’ kind of thing.
Unfortunately, what dead people are really crap at is giving useful advice. Power speaks to dozens of them every week, yet not one of them managed to impart the message he really needed to hear: ‘Doon’t dooo the show they call Derren Brown Investigates’ (Channel 4, Monday).
I love Derren Brown. Like University Challenge, his show is one of the things I’ll always watch no matter what else is on. He’s not a psychic or a medium (concepts of which, as we shall see, he is highly sceptical) but an illusionist, sceptic and arch-manipulator. In his last series, he got a young woman to go into Hamleys and secretly choose a completely random present for a friend. At the end, he correctly told her what she’d chosen (a toy giraffe) and even the nickname she’d chosen for it.
To the young woman and the viewer alike, the trick looked astoundingly impressive, almost as if Brown has a supernatural gift. But then he showed us how he’d done it. As the woman made her way round the store, Brown had arranged for her to be bombarded with all sorts of subliminal messages — pictures of giraffe spots, etc. — as well as making giraffe shapes as he spoke to her in his preliminary chat. Suddenly, it all made one rather nervous about the power of advertising.
Anyway, a professional mythbuster like Brown, you might think, is not the kind of person you’d agree to have investigate your burgeoning Liverpool psychic practice. Why Power did it we shall never know, but the signals I’m getting from the other side tell me he’s a bit of a cocky so-and-so who simply couldn’t resist the lure of a challenge.
This was especially noticeable during the bravura scene where, to test Power’s psychic powers, Brown arranged for Power to ‘read’ the cast of Hollyoaks. This he did quite well, astounding one by ‘revealing’ he’d recently had a parking ticket and another by ‘revealing’ that his late Nan was standing right behind him and was really proud of what he’d achieved. But then Brown ruined everything by having a go himself and doing miles better, even guessing correctly that the unhappy holiday the actress had had before splitting up with her boyfriend was in the Maldives. Not to be outdone, Power stepped in. ‘Have you ever owned a Mini?’ he hazarded. ‘I’ve got one now!’ said the actress, clearly spooked. Power smiled at Brown triumphantly.
Then it all got rather messy. So messy, indeed, that I had to spend chunks of the programme watching through my fingers, writhing and going, ‘Noooo!’ We learnt from Brown’s driver that probably the reason Power knew about the Mini was that, just before filming had started, the actress had driven past in her Mini. And that the reason he’d managed to give that spookily accurate reading we saw at the beginning of the programme may have been that the random stranger featured was, in fact, the next-door neighbour of his sister. As you’d expect, Power didn’t like having truth spoken to him. But it was cracking TV.
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