This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 2, from 2012.
I must admit that I could not help grinning when I heard from Brian Dunning a few months ago that he and Michael Shermer had been fooled by none other than the UK’s own Shirley Ghostman. Just to add insult to injury for Brian, he knew that he came within a gnat’s whisker of avoiding being hoaxed, but fate had not been on his side at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas in 2008.
Fate had not been on my side at that meeting either. Despite great efforts to ensure that everything would run smoothly, I had had serious technical problems with my PowerPoint presentation which had pretty much ruined my talk to the audience of several hundred people. I at least wanted to give them something to smile about so I managed, after a lot of effort, to show them the clip of my own confrontation with Shirley, first recorded and broadcast back in 2005. That seemed to go down pretty well. As Brian reminded me, he was on just after my presentation but was so engrossed in getting things set up for his own talk that he failed to pay any attention to mine – a decision he was going to live to regret!
For any of you who are not aware of who Shirley Ghostman is, I should provide a little background detail. Shirley is one of the comic creations of actor Marc Wootton. This particular manifestation is a totally over-the-top and extremely camp ‘psychic’ who caricatures the world of mediumship by combining supreme self-confidence with a breathtaking lack of anything that even vaguely resembles psychic ability. He was the central character in a series broadcast on BBC3 called High Spirits, in which he was filmed giving individual readings (often in extremely bad taste), performing live in front of bemused audiences, selecting students for his ‘Spirit Academy’ (a kind of XFactor for wannabe psychics), and, most relevant here, challenging ‘the skeptics’.
In my opinion, the level of humour in the series ranged from the sublime to the embarrassingly puerile. It would have made a great one-hour special, but the good stuff was spread too thinly over an entire series. Without wishing to be immodest, I now think that my own confrontation with Shirley was extremely funny – although I certainly did not think so at the time!
Both Wendy Grossman, founding editor of and regular columnist for The Skeptic, and Nick Pullar, who successfully ran the London branch of Skeptics in the Pub for many years, were also filmed ‘confronting’ Shirley and both have written excellent accounts of this bizarre experience (see Wendy’s account and Nick’s account, respectively).
My own involvement in this programme began in a pretty unremarkable way. I was contacted by a ‘researcher’ who informed me that his TV company were “making a documentary about spirituality in modern Britain” and asked if I would be willing to be filmed having a conversation with a psychic for the programme. So, along I went to University College London for the filming.
With the benefit of hindsight, there were a few things that were a little bit odd about the set up that perhaps should have alerted me to the fact that everything was not quite as it seemed. For example, I was only informed that the (male) psychic’s name was Shirley just before I went in to meet him. “Fair enough,” I thought, “It’s a free country.” It was also odd that the cameras were already rolling as I entered the room for our ‘confrontation’. But the last possibility on my mind was that this entire set-up was a spoof!
You can get some idea of what my meeting with Shirley was like by watching a clip that, at the time of writing, is available on YouTube.
But even if you’ve seen the full broadcast version of my encounter, you would still only have seen a fraction of the hour or so that I spent in conversation with him. It was the most bizarre experience of my life ever (and in my line of work bizarre experiences are not exactly rare!).
In retrospect, it is clear that much of what Shirley said was deliberately intended to disorient me. None of the really sick stuff ever made it to your TV screen. This presented me with something of a dilemma. I confess that I did not realize that the whole thing was a spoof and I therefore assumed that I was dealing with someone who had serious mental problems. Although the classic Monty Python line “You’re a loony” was running through my head throughout, as a professional psychologist, there was no way I could actually give voice to such a view.
At the end of the ‘reading’, I was convinced that Shirley had just wasted everybody’s time and that nothing had been recorded that could ever be broadcast. It was only as I heard from the other sceptics who had had their encounters with Shirley after mine that I realized that we’d all been put through essentially the same process meaning that that was what the programme makers must have wanted all along.
It took me days to convince my fellow sceptics that the whole thing must have been a spoof. They took some convincing, mainly because none of us could really see why anyone would go to such trouble to spoof us – we just weren’t important enough. Of course, what we did not know was that the confrontations with sceptics were just one thread in a much more ambitious comedy project.
The end result is, I feel, a pretty good advert for scepticism – a flawed, but at times brilliant, parody of paranormal programming in the UK.
