A contribution to our culture we can be less proud of is the overuse of plucking strings and arch voiceovers in our documentaries. There must be another way for the London-centric media to communicate its disdain for the funny provincial folk who don’t understand how editing works. In My Psychic Life (C4) the subjects are clairvoyants and mediums (the difference is never explained) who live in the north of England. Why they have chosen this territory is unclear, but I’m going to assume that there’s a high concentration of mediums there and producers didn’t just see the Phoenix Nights potential in folk from the north lands talking about t’supernatural in their amusing accents.
Depending on your point of view, you might say that people who claim to communicate with the dead are easy targets. But the interviews here are unchallenging, letting the subjects flow freely while all the judgmental ridicule is saved for the edit. No one making the show asks the question: is this all made up, a load of hooey, wish fulfilment at best? Yes, your interviewees might be fame-hungry types who host psychic evenings in hotel lounges, hovering somewhere between showbiz and doing real emotional damage to the vulnerable. But the relationship between the programme makers and their subjects is always uncomfortably patrician v pleb. It is perfectly summed up in a scene featuring the hairdresser and psychic David Traynor.
He comes to London to meet a talent agent and we watch as he sits in a Soho office opposite two smirking urbanites and tries to cold-read them. While I’d usually be on the side of anyone who tries to debunk a self-proclaimed spook, the relationship is so heavily stacked against the show’s subjects, I ended up feeling sorry for him.
Shellie Mcguirke, from Leeds, is so keen to please the programme makers she lets them film her talking to ghost children on town centre benches and even follow her on a date. The “they know what they’re getting into” argument doesn’t wash no matter how many times it’s wheeled out, because the fall-out from appearing in one of these shows can be unforeseen (ironically) and very unpleasant. Yes, they might put “As seen on Channel 4” on their flyers but try telling the subjects of the first Benefits Street (also C4) that they can use the exposure, when they have to move house and take their children out of school because of the abuse they suffer.
And still pluck, pluck, pluck go the strings. There must be a better way to tell these stories.
