Last Friday night I sat down with several friends in a living room lit by candles to watch TV medium Derek Acorah contact the spirit of recently deceased King of Pop Michael Jackson. Now that sentence reads like the opening splash panel of a Transmetropolitan comic, but that is genuinely what I did with my Friday- my housemates were keen to watch it and I thought it worth it just to remain in their company.
This sort of thing is so far removed from my normal viewing habits that it might as well have been Ricky Tomlinson presenting an episode of America’s Next Top Model where the contestants have to show off jetpack flightsuits designed by chimps. If it isn’t The Wire or Buffy I’m not really interested. I would much rather have watched something else, while secretly hoping that THAT show would be interrupted by an emergency news broadcast detailing the shocking Michael Jackson led outbreak of zombie celebrities. But I had enough cynicism and Pringles to get me through the most painful televisual encounter, so I sucked it up.
I would like to say that I spent the whole two hours indulgently but sarcastically mocking the show and my friends desire to watch it, and well… I did, really. I spent two hours laughing- mostly at the witticisms of my friends but partly at the ludicrous nature of the whole situation. Hearing Acorah mumble his way through an unconvincing séance in his faint Scouse brogue while June Sarpong phoned in surprise was unintentionally hilarious.
When I started planning this blog post in my head, this is about where I began a diatribe against ‘mediums,’ Sky Television for publicising them, and the public for being taken in by their cynical, oily remit.
I got about half way through sketching it out before I noticed a vague feeling itching at my psyche, a sort of toothache of the soul. It wasn’t much to begin with, but the more I planned it out the uneasier I felt. I recognised it quickly, because I’d felt it before, when I was planning another blog post. It was self-disgust.
Ages ago I started to write a blog post about the Jeremy Kyle show, which I had begun to watch occasionally in the company of a female friend. I criticised Kyle, obviously (because he’s a tedious, self-important grief vampire with a gimlet eye and possibly no soul), and then I began to criticise the people who watched the show.
I got quite a long way into it before I realised that my narrative voice had begun to resemble some freakish amalgamation of every Daily Mail commentator ever. This was something of a shock to me, as not only do I prefer The Guardian, I also hate the Daily Mail so much that I occasionally reverse the top copy on the stack in newsagents so that people might be spared the inescapably primal fear inspired by its headlines. Most of the posts on verbal slapstick describe my attempt to draw some pithy life message out of a fairly mundane event, so I was perturbed by how quickly my content devolved into a simple, savage invective against a group of people I knew absolutely sod all about.
I realised I was doing it again with this séance thingy. I was preparing a tirade against a group of people who I considered inferior because they did not share my views: that mediums are either deluded or shameless exploiters of grief and uncertainty, and that there is no afterlife that we can comprehend and that even if there is why the hell would people who had made it there give a crap about a subsection of British society who were watching Sky1 on a Friday night?
My views don’t really matter (although they are, of course, completely correct). I can express them however I want, but it’s not really cricket to criticise those that do not share them, especially in light of the following:
Did anyone that watched the show really believe that Acorah was channelling the spirit of Jackson? Really? That if the ultimate question about life and our existence, that which has baffled scientists and theologians for millennia, had been answered by the appearance of a dead man’s spirit live on national television, and the world’s most popular entertainer and possibly most recognised figure in the history of mankind was communicating with us from the afterlife in front of our very eyes, June Sarpong would interrupt to let us know we had to go to commercials? Was an advert about Stargate Universe and one for a Glade plug-in THAT much more important than the undiscovered country beyond the veil?
Sod it. Maybe people do believe in that sort of afterlife. It’s not like I can construct an argument based on proof to go against theirs. And why shouldn’t they? It’s a cold ol’ world out there. The markets are recovering at a snail’s pace, the planet is heating up, the twins stay on X Factor every week. Whether belief in the afterlife is comforting or not, it certainly brings some extra enjoyment to a Sky1 special.
Everyone has a few guilty pleasures. The séance show turned out to be one of mine. So it seems a little hypocritical to make fun of those that might have enjoyed it for more direct reasons. From now on, no media is safe, but its audience is off limits. I get enough self-disgust from my substance abuse, thank you very much.
1 comment:
I totally agree. It's not fair or right to sneer at people for being taken in by utterly human mistakes of thought. I've been guilty of it before, but I try my best not to do it.
On the other hand, it IS most certainly right to sneer and lampoon those who set out to make money and power off deception. It is also fine, I think, to mock the idea itself, as one of the simplest and most compelling ways to underline stupidity is through humour.
You're a fine chap, Josh. Let the unrighteous taste your salty wrath.
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