Col’s Rational World

Another new game card – Derek Acorah

This is Sunday’s game card, of UK-based psychic medium Derek Acorah.

Acorah is perhaps best-known for his role as the resident psychic in the ludicrous show ‘Most Haunted’ where he follows around a bunch of credulous D-list TV celebrities and tells them things he read on the Internet, pretending to have learned them from his ‘spirit guide’, a long-dead Ethiopian tribesman called Sam.  No, really.

Acorah was once a footballer, first in the UK and then in Australia.  As soon as his career in sport ended, he realised that he needed another income stream, which is exactly the time that his psychic abilities really began to develop. What a wonderful coincidence.

I have personally seen Acorah live, and whereas he comes across as a reasonably caring individual there’s always the rather painful realisation in the background that, just like all mediums, he’s basically lying to the bereaved about the most extraordinarily painful experiences of their lives.  I can’t help but think that perhaps a trained counsellor would be the best person to help us deal with the agony of loss.

He’s a moderately good cold reader, though made some crashingly poor misses in the event I attended when going for what one might expect were overwhelmingly likely statistical probabilities. I remember a particularly funny moment when, after a dry spell, he picked the fattest woman in the audience and asked her if anyone near her had died of heart disease.  Surprisingly not, apparently. To get something like that wrong really takes talent.

Incidentally, I couldn’t help but notice that there was an extremely statistically significant overabundance of overweight middle-aged women in the event I attended – at a guess I would say that fewer than a third of attendees were male and more than half of the women there were noticably obese. I wonder what a sociologist would make of that?

I gave Acorah a comedy score of 9 partly because of the events surrounding his exit from the Mostly Haunted show, where the resident skeptic (the incessantly bullied and woefully ignored Ciaran O’Keeffe) deliberately told Derek some fake stories about dead inhabitants of the house, only to watch Derek not only contact them but also become possessed by them later on that same day. And who was this long-dead spirit? None other than Kreed Kafer, an anagram of ‘Derek faker’! Oh, how I laughed when I first saw that one…

Derek Acorah

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