GHOSTMAN

By

John G. Sutton

Imagine, if you can, a TV comedy show featuring a phoney Roman Catholic priest administering The Eucharist using dog biscuits, whilst at the same time verbally insulting the congregation. There would no doubt be an outcry from the Christian church community and potentially complaints. On 1^st March BBC 3 TV broadcast the first of a new series titled ‘High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman’. The series opened with the following statement: ‘All participants in this programme, including the audience, believe that Shirley Ghostman is real’.  In other words the people taking part were not advised that the man claiming to be a medium was, in fact, a comedy actor playing a part. The programme commenced with the comedian Marc Wootton, dressed up like Liberace on acid with a blonde wig, mincing onto a stage within a disused church and being announced by the sepulchral voice of Patrick Stewart  as 'The Psychic-Medium Shirley Ghostman’. He then introduced an invisible creature he called Sheba, his spirit guide dog.  The Ghostman character next pretended to give the audience messages that he said were passed to him from the dead. But these were not messages of love and hope, they were more like abuse from the very vulgar Northern comedian Bernard Manning. To one man he said ‘You like a drink, but you will not like waking up on the bathroom floor with a black eye and shit in your pants’.  Obviously the production company Tiger Aspect Productions Ltd. have hired in some top scriptwriters.

The show  also included a spoof on reality TV show ‘Pop Idol’  with wannabe  psychic-superstars queuing up to have their paranormal powers tested by Ghostman. They believed that they were going to be featured on some serious programme called ‘Spirit Academy’. One of the tests these deluded so-called-psychics had to try involved being handed a blue teapot and asked by Ghostman what they believed this was used for. The obvious answer ‘making tea’ seemed to elude them, at least in the edited version we were shown. Then Ghostman offered to clear the chakra’s of one young man by having him lie down on top of him as he shuffled suggestively beneath.  The point is that the participants all believed that Ghostman (Wootton) really was a medium and therefore they trusted him, he abused that trust, exploiting and ridiculing them in the name of ‘comedy’.

  Another character played in this show by Marc Wootton was supposed to be a psychic-investigator called ‘Ian Jackson’. The scene involved a lady claiming to practice ‘Rumpology’ i.e. supposedly reading the future from peoples bare backsides. This involved an innocent elderly lady having her naked rear end exposed whilst Wootton, as the Jackson character, prodded it and pretended to pluck a hair from her rectum. We, the public, were invited to applaud the insult to this lady’s dignity and laugh at her stupidity for believing in such obvious nonsense.  Marc Wootton, in his role as Ghostman, is openly exploiting his victims, sneering at their gullibility and creating a new form of television for sadistic psychopaths.  

  The ultimate insult came at the end of the first Ghostman programme when the spoof medium faked trance and pretended to be possessed by the spirit of Lady Diana muttering the kind of gibberish popularised by the team at SKY Living TV’s laughable paranormal investigation show ‘Most Haunted’. In a subsequent show, number 5, the Ghostman character shouted insults about  three of Living TV's Psychic Mediums referring to Derek Acorah, Colin Fry and Tony Stockwell as 'charlatans' claiming that he, Ghostman, channels the spirits of the  dead famous. On Tuesday the 5th April in the 6th of the series of High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman Mark Wootton, as the eponymous Ghostman, was pretending to channel the spirit of the late, dead famous, Frank Sinatra and said to the audience that Acorah of Most Haunted was 'a prick....a stinking piece of shite....an oilslick' and used a well known expletive to underline his observations. This opinion of Derek Acorah may offend those that believe in him but he can really only blame himself. His tom-foolery on Most Haunted begs parody and his trances are such obvious fakes that it is no wonder a comedy show that appears to be based on his pseudo psychic- mediumship has been created to ridicule the nonsense. 

Derek Acorah

  I checked out Tiger Aspect Productions Ltd. and on their website they have this to say about the series: ‘Shirley Ghostman is in contact with the famous and infamous of the spirit world. Acting as a mouthpiece for the dead here on earth, Shirley’s stage show includes psychic healing, readings, live communication with the dead, and of course a song’.   

I then contacted the producers and interviewed the production company’s appointed spokeswoman, a bubbly and obviously amused lady calling herself  Sam. Now where have I heard that name before?

PW: Do the producers of  ‘High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman’ know that Spiritualism is a recognised religion and that mediums act as ministers of this religion?

Sam: Yes they do understand that Spiritualism is a religion but the show is just a comedy and not aimed at insulting the religious beliefs of Spiritualists.

PW: What is the aim of the programme, is it an attempt to debunk psychics?

Sam: The show is simply a satire, a comedy.

PW: As the audience in the programme did not know that Ghostman was a fake do the producers not feel that they abused the trust of these innocent members of the public?

Sam: The audience were told that this was entertainment and there were notices around the building stating that Shirley Ghostman would not be contacting the spirits of dead relatives.

PW: The Ghostman character is a parody, is this based on any particular individual?

Sam: No, Marc Wootton the comedian based the character on TV psychics generally both in the UK and the USA.

PW: Do the producers accept that the programme may give offence to members of the Spiritualist religion?

Sam: Comedy can offend and this is cutting edge stuff. The intention is to make fun of the obviously phoney psychics.

PW: How did you recruit the wannabe psychic-superstars for the Spirit Academy spoof?

Sam: I believe the producers advertised for psychics in the national press. Those that responded all signed release documents. They did believe that they were taking part in a selection process to test their psychic powers.

So there you have it.  Spiritualism is now openly ridiculed, reduced to  a comedy show and psychic-mediums are depicted as camp fraudsters having a laugh at the gullible public. But really what can we expect when so-called real psychic-mediums go onto television openly faking trance and possession, pulling funny faces, gibbering utter nonsense and generally making a laughing stock of centuries of serious study and sincere Spiritualist beliefs. 

Read THE INDEPENDANT'S review of HIGH SPIRITS with Shirley Ghostman: http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=631548 Click that link.

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