The Living Channel has a history of putting pseudoscientific rubbish on television. Many of us will know Most Haunted a television programme where they bring a group of emotional idiots together, tell them a ghost story and then stick them in an old building at night. The programme then goes through the laborious routine of acting surprised when this primed group overreact to a few noises and a draft.

So it came as no shock to see that of all channels The Living Channel have signed up ‘Psychic’ Sally Morgan for an eight part series in which we follow Sally as she goes around the country performing her routine in front of large audiences.

Psychics rely on a method called cold reading, which is a bit like taking an educated guess, these guesses can sometimes seem incredibly insightful but all the psychic is doing is playing percentages. Television is a format that is perfect for psychics because, much like our memory, it can edit out the misses and recall or promote the hits. Here is a great video from Mark Edward illustrating this very point;

The thing that makes these sort of programmes so frustrating to me is the amount material already out there that debunks this rubbish. Just off the top of my head I can think of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit!, Derren Brown’s Messiah, Mark Edward and South Park. Unless Living can provide objective evidence that Sally can read minds or speak to the dead then I think there is a genuine argument to be made that Living are complicit in misleading the general public.

Living have been accused of doing this very thing with Most Haunted, on that occasion Ofcom cleared them on the grounds that Most Haunted was an entertainment programme not a serious investigation into the paranormal and so should not be taken seriously. This would be fine but I’m not so sure I agree with the ruling. Reading over the report (page 16) Ofcom basically state that because this is an overdramatised show presented on an entertainment channel and so people will only treat it is entertainment. I think that is a bold assumption to make and I would be interested to see a questionnaire done with Living’s viewers to see if this is indeed how they perceived the show. I would be interested to hear anyone else’s thoughts on this.

I am not saying that Living are intended in misleading the public with their Psychic Sally show, but they are promoting an art form (so to speak) that does mislead people. I’m not so sure the defence that ‘this is just entertainment’ is acceptable.

If you are unfamiliar with the technique of cold reading I suggest you check out the excellent entry at The Skeptic’s Dictionary which provides links to further reading material.