Well, we were off last night to the Derek Acorah spiritualist medium show at the Royal Concert Hall. Say what you might about the man’s abilities to see into another realm of existence, he certainly has pulling power because the place was absolutely full. Prophet? Maybe, maybe not. Profit? Absolutely.
I mean, have a look at the place (apologies again for the image quality, it was poor light in the hall and my phone camera isn’t the best):
Packed, I tell you, packed! Think of the money. Show me the money, Derek. Show me. And don’t worry, the blue hazy lights around the stage are meant to be there, they’re not manifestations of spirits that my crap camera has managed to capture.
The audience, I couldn’t help but notice, were predominantly female and definitely towards the older end of the spectrum. He certainly seemed to know his demographic and aimed to hit it, combining the usual “I’m getting the name Jean/Jim/Arthur” etc with some tame Dick Emery-esque camp humour which put me in mind of those people who are on the godforsaken daytime TV circuit and depend on the blue rinse brigade to keep their careers going. Which is not, in all fairness, to say he was dull – the show was certainly entertaining and made me laugh enough that the time didn’t drag by. He did his turn and did it well – picking people out of the audience, chatting with them for 5 minutes or so, and passing on a message “from the beyond” from loved ones.
However, a strange thing started to happen during the show, and I am a little embarassed to even commit it to type here. I started wishing that he would pick me out of the audience. You see, in the past few years I have lost two of my grandparents and what stays with me and what I deeply regret more than anything else was that the last conversations I had with each of them were so damn ordinary. It was like “chat chat chat, see you later, watch yourself, bye!” and then *boom*, they were dead and that was that. And let’s face it, it’s hard to keep chatting and catching up with one another after that happening without people looking at me funny and making sure I’m not standing too close. I mean, of course I wasn’t to know they were going to die, but it still leaves me with the sense of things being left unsaid.
So what did I want to happen last night? For him to pick out my grandparent’s names and point to me? Tell me that they were okay? Assure me that they were happy? Was I looking for evidence of things unseen or was I just feeling guilt about not saying things to my grandparents when they were alive? Was I looking for some means of assuaging that guilt by getting some message from them or being convinced that they were somehow able to hear me?
I don’t really believe in spirits from the afterlife floating about on earth moving about tables and making lights appear in grainy camera film. With that in mind, why did I want a man who might or might not be a charlatan to pick me out? Was it to challenge my point of view, confound it, or confirm it? What would I have done if he had picked me out? What would I be talking about now, how it was a load of rubbish or how it changed my entire worldview?
It’s a question (or a series of questions) I have wrestled with all through the night and I’ll probably continue to do so for some time to come. The cynic and sceptic in me all point to my going to a show with a medium and – not unnaturally – thinking of people in my life who have recently died. This means, the cynic points out, that I was thinking of things I regretted and might have been looking for a means to ease those regrets a little. And in the main, I agree, but there is still this tiny little bit of me asking “what if?” and I am afraid there is no real answer to that one, or at least not one I can think of. The background of the set for the show had something written on it: “To the believer, no proof is necessary. To the non-believer, no proof is possible.” It’s as good an example of sophistry as I am ever likely to find, but it’s still niggling at me now, a day after the show.
One entertaining point of the show – at the end old Acorah threw the show open to questions from the audience. I’m sure you know the form – if you need any advice, have any questions etc, just ask me and I’ll see what I can get from the “other side” to help you. Turns out he has quite the rabid fan following and when one woman got the microphone and said “Derek, I have two questions for you.” I heard a woman behind me and to the left mutter with genuine venom and anger in her tone, “You’re only supposed to get one fucking question!” which I couldn’t stop laughing at. I wonder if Mister Acorah foresaw the potential riot building, because he ended the show pretty quickly after that.