With the furore around Sally Morgan, Simon Sing, Ears, Radios and Libel action that’s got both the psychic and skeptic communities pretty riled up right now, a lot of attention has been brought to the ‘for entertainment purposes only’ stage shows that happen each week up and down the country.
I won’t bother to summaries the situation more here – if you are interested Derren Brown has given the most balanced and reasonable insights I’ve read so far – but I’ve been thinking about these performances and what it would take to make a successful psychic show and it occurred to me; why are all of these paranormalists also showmen/women?’
Why is it that all psychics/mediums who fill arenas with their supernatural shows just so happen to also be showmen/women who leverage a large amount of charisma, charm and personality to impress their audience and they are also extremely media savvy with their own USP to boot?
But why? Why the interaction with the audience at all? Why all the questions? Why the pictures? Why all the SHOWmanship?
Why do we never see the shy and shivering types with little social skills who are scared to the point of death at the prospect they are really talking to the dead? Dead, who of course have somehow managed to survive their own deaths and remain somewhere in the ether eager to talk through these mediums to their living relatives about vague, generalised Barnum-like statements.
My problem is not that they should be shy or poor showmen/women but it seems strange that the only people who ‘have the gift’ of mediumship are the same type of people who could bluff it if they really weren’t . Who could ride out the storm of a bad show by relying on their wit, character and charisma if, lets say, they found the dead to be less than enthusiastic to chat.
What I am getting at is that there is no reason why the stage show should be a performance at all if real mediumship is taking place. A genuine medium would be a real spectacle to behold and the unique insight from the dead would be interesting and important information. Of course genuine information from the dead would instantly show itself to be genuine. In fact, a genuine medium would probably be in the permanent employ of the police, solving murders by asking the deceased victims to simply tell them who killed them etc.
For this type of gift there would be no need for a ‘performance’, the information would be so engrossing that a socially-inept, stammering teenager cowering on a stool in the center of a stage passing genuine and accurate information to the audience would be revolutionary and BETTER than any showmen/women.
In answer to my own question; their performance seems likely to be making up for the lack of genuine psychic ability as well as serving as cover while they forage the undergrowth for tid-bits of cold-reading data.
