I See Dead People

It’s been an unusual week in my world of media. I have had several meetings with a lovely woman who can see dead people. It is completely normal for me to produce television programmes in which I have little belief but this is in extremis.

It began, as it so often does, with the telephone call. “Monty, I have an idea for a TV show and I’d like you to come and watch someone”. “Watching” someone can cover a ludicrously large number of bases from voyeurism to jumping on a helicopter and flying to Moscow to watch Phil Collins, so I cautiously agreed to meet him outside London’s Shaw Theatre. It was here that I discovered I’d come to see a Medium. I have a healthy disregard for all things spiritual and particularly where they concern “the other side”, so it was with heavy heart that I went inside.

The audience numbered around 300 and the burden of tragedy and depression hung like a an old family blanket across the auditorium. These were people who breathed desperation in their desire to communicate with their dead loved ones. I could feel the bile rise in the back of my throat in anticipation of the emotional exploitation that was to follow. I chastened myself; I was here to see if the Medium whose name I know discovered was TJ Higgs could cut it on the small screen.

I awaited either a mumsy homely woman or an exotic creature in the guise of a gypsy to appear, but it was neither. A buxom sexy cockney sparrow appeared on stage in a full length evening dress followed a diminutive little camp man called Colin Fry. I hade been briefed that it was his show and TJ was the support act but what followed blew that out of the water.

After ten minute of overworked comedy, they began to summon the spirits and we were off on a ghostly adventure. It made for great entertainment as the two mediums guessed and juggled their way through through a plethera of names and places and facts. Some came uncomfortably close to the truth and rattled the sides of my cage of certainty and others flew out over the heads of the audience. TJ was mesmeric – spitting out information in a fast East London style that gripped the Londoner’s attention.

I went into the experience, solid in my belief that it was all nonsense – no – worse than that – it was making money out of people’s loneliness. I think I still think that, I’m just not sure that I think that. Whatever I do still think, I know that I am looking forward to meeting her again during the filming in 2010.