Sally Morgan: Star Psychic...

The world may be heading towards financial meltdown and the omens for a speedy recovery may not be good, but ITV can always be relied upon to cheer up a discontented nation... or alternatively heap yet more schlock and misery on an unsuspecting public with its latest attempt at creating a she's-one-of-us, real-life, salt-of-the-earth D-List telly star like that old thing off Driving School.

Welcome to the world of Sally Morgan: Star Psychic...

The basic premise of the show is that celebrity psychic Morgan, a bubbly, fiftysomething with a body shape like an enlarged Ewok, meets and greets various celebs and other punters for the 'first time' and displays her pyschic gifts to all and sundry by delving into their pasts to reveal astonishing facts and helping guide their futures.

Interestingly the show opens by claiming that Morgan was a trusted confidant and psychic reader for the late Princess Di, like that alone means we should implicitly trust and believe in her. But once you delve beyond the surface of that little fact it's not exactly a ringing endorsement as our Sally didn't have any visions of a car crashing in a Paris subway to help protect her star client.

In the main body of the show Sally uses her psychic gift to astonish and bewilder various D-List celebrities (the Cheeky Girls, a couple of Page 3 stunnas, that bird off the Scottish Widow adverts, Jennie Falconer), before she then gets to grips with members of the public.

Some of the former celeb-bilge is bizarre because Morgan throws so many keywords and guesses out that when one of the celebs latches onto something it's like the Red Sea has opened. It's miracle time! The fact that Morgan is all enthusiastic machine-gun delivery and touchy-feely with people is also quite a clever ruse as viewers accept her as a chatty old girl who always talks a lot so they conveniently forget the bits of guess work and loaded phrases leading up to the miracle moment that were wide of the mark or ignored. And conveniently viewers don't see the bits that were edited out either.

But it's in the latter non-celeb section where it gets quite intriguing because it ventures into the arena of emotional pornography where vulnerable and needy members of the public lay themselves open to be hoodwinked by more fishing and digging until one of the guesses gets lucky.
'I'm seeing man... He's very close to you... Have you had a man who's passed over to the other side? He's very proud of you...'
'Yes. My dad/brother/uncle/brother* passed away...'
'Did he have a favourite coat?'
'Yes...'
'It was a dark coat, wasn't it?'

Sadly some of it is quite clever and I must confess I don't know how she does all of it.

For example she knew pretty early on that one the Page 3 girls was pregnant but a decent cold reader would have spotted the hands on the stomach in a protective guard immediately. It's also well chronicled how other psychics use intricate networks of information so they can prep up on psychic tourists who've visited other psychics before and it wouldn't take a genius to figure out how facts about 'surprise' guests could be leaked ahead of schedules through a helpful TV production bodkin.

Remember: just because you can't see the strings it doesn't mean there aren't any.

As far as I could tell Morgan is a coldreader par excellence in the guise of Blanche from Coronation Street voiced by the cast of Loose Women. All of the cast of Loose Women.

But in essence it's end-of-the-pier and bottom-of-the-barrel stuff which has none of the style or presentation of Derren Brown and, even more dangerously, purports to be the real thing rather than trickery whose method is exposed at the end.

It's shocking that ITV puts this bilge on TV. If they want to do something genuinely interesting in this area then bring Phillips in and subject her to proper scientifically controlled conditions with people she can't previously research or cold read and not publicity-hungry celebs who are booked months in advance.

Sadly, of course, that wouldn't be interesting or good telly. But then again neither is this – unless you're Morgan, of course, whose business (£1.50 per minute with one of her hand-picked team of psychics or £30 for 20 minutes via credit card) is probably booming as more needy and gullible folk flock to her website...