Update - Acorah's psyc-hic jet rant

According to a response from Gwen Johnson to questions from Jon Donnis of BadPsychics, the Sun's story about Acorah being drunk on a flight from Alicante to Gatwick is totally untrue.

I wonder when both the Sun and Jenny Hurley will be appearing in court answering to to a defamation claim by Acorah? After all, according to Gwen Johnson either the former "embellished" the story - in which case, what story?? - or the latter is "is a total liar".

I won't be holding my breath ...

Acorah’s psyc-hic jet rant

By NICK PARKER and VIRGINIA WHEELER

FOUL-mouthed telly medium Derek Acorah spooked jet passengers by guzzling wine and ranting like a drunken plonker.
The psychic, 59, ROWED with his wife, SWORE at a woman with a crying baby and STOOD UP when seatbelt lights came on for the plane's landing at Gatwick.

Shocked Jenny Hurley, 34 said: "He had to be told to sit down, then he went really potty. He shouted, 'F*** Gatwick! What's England got going for it anyway?' "

The millionaire, who claims to talk to spirits on his show Derek Acorah, was on a Monarch flight from Alicante, Spain.

Jenny said: "He didn't seem to know where he was - and appeared drunk even before the plane took off. He started quarrelling with his wife in the row behind me, swearing and shouting. She wasn't pleased at him leering at a stewardess. When a child started crying he shouted, 'Is that your f****** baby?'"

Office manager Jenny, of Weybridge, Surrey, told how at one point his wife Gwen warned him: "Sit down Derek - you'll end up in the newspapers."

The Sky Real Lives star got off the plane "red in the face and unsteady on the feet".

Jenny later spotted him stumbling around the baggage hall. She said: "It was hilarious. For someone who is meant to be a psychic, he couldn't tell which bag was his."

Last night Acorah's agent said: "He was on antibiotics for a chest infection and had four little bottles of red wine. I can only assume that affected him in some way."


Copyright The Sun newspaper
Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/2720015/Medium-Derek-Acorah-spooked-jet-passengers-by-guzzling-wine-and-ranting.html#ixzz0WNnmmP50

Acorah and Michael Jackson - "sick, sick, sick"

Six hundred thousand viewers saw Derek Acorah make the biggest mistake of his career when he tried to make contact with the spirit of Michael Jackson.

The reviews make more fascinating reading than the programme itself.

In a darkened country house in Ireland, a group of people are gathered round a table, staring at a hat.
It's not just any hat, though. It's a hat with residuality, according to Derek Acorah.
It's both a happy hat, and a sad hat, he reckoned, because it's Michael Jackson's old hat.
"Would you like to touch it?" he asked the four Jacko devotees beside him.
And they did. "I can't believe that's his hat," said one.
"It's amazing."
Yup. Incredible. But not quite as incredible as trying to speak to the recently dead on live telly (Michael Jackson: The Live Seance, 10pm, Friday, Sky One).
Sorry, did I say incredible? I meant gobsmackingly crass. I'm always mixing them up.
The hat was there to help summon Jacko's spirit. The hat, and the setting. The whole thing was staged in the house Michael rented to write his last album. The owner said he'd had the bedroom overlooking the playground.
And the fans' passion would help bring him back too, said Derek. Well, they certainly were passionate. Though some might say unhinged.
Anyway it all worked, this mix of residuality and passion. Or at least it did if you believe Acorah, a man thrown off Most Haunted for being possessed by a fictional character made up by one of the crew .
"He's with me," announced Derek, and one fan looked like she was about to levitate with joy.
They must have been quite chuffed in the production room too. In 2005, the late King of Pop couldn't even turn up on time for his trial.
How obliging of him to be punctual for Sky One.
So what did Jacko have to say?
Well, he wanted to be buried alongside Marilyn Monroe, apparently. And he's hanging out with his grandparents. He wanted to someone to say hello to Quincy Jones ("hello Quincy," said one of the fans, hesitantly), and he wished the tabloids would stop being spiteful.
"These journalists they all make lies up, lies up, lies," spat Derek. It wasn't exactly clear if he was being Jacko or himself at that point.
And then it was the fans' chance to speak.
So what did they ask, given a direct link to their idol?
A probing question about the nature of the afterlife, perhaps? Or something that would clear away the mystery surrounding Jackson's death?
No. "Do you realise how much I love you?" asked one chap, between fits of sobs.
"We'll make sure he's okay," promised host June Sarpong. Hmmm.
Easier said than done, June.
And that was pretty much that. Jacko-Derek had a bit of advice for one of the fans who worked as a tribute act ("you're 80% there, he wants you to get to 90%") and then he was gone, unceremoniously shooed backed into the never-neverland because Sky had scheduled Beverly Hills Cop III at 11pm.

The review from The Leicester Mercury raised this comment from an American fan:

"Please let this poor, gentle soul rest in peace. This kind of lunacy makes me sick because its just one more example of an attention seeking nut using MJs' memory. Knock it off! "

The Guardian wrote:

Michael Jackson: The Live Seance was car crash TV in the worst senseDerek Acorah show was in such bad taste that it couldn't be seen as entertainment on any discernible level

If you were watching Sky One on Saturday night, count yourself lucky - you saw what will easily be remembered as the worst single hour of television produced in 2009. Worse than Babestation. Worse than Channel Five's SuperCasino. Worse than any individual episode of Hotel Babylon. I'm talking, of course, about Michael Jackson: The Live Seance.

I was watching because I thought it'd be funny - a car crash of a show with the added bonus of a slimy-looking medium rolling his eyeballs around inside his bright orange skull and reciting the lyrics to Heal the World in a silly high-pitched voice.Turns out it was a car crash. But it was one of those actual car crashes where real people get hurt and you're not sure that everyone's going to make it out OK and you end up feel like a bit of bastard for even wanting to watch it in the first place.

This is how Michael Jackson: The Live Seance worked. Derek Acorah - he of Most Haunted and Derek Acorah's Ghost Towns fame - rounded up a group of Michael Jackson fans and took them to a house in Ireland that Jackson had stayed in a few years ago. Once there, he spent 20 minutes doing what he does best: trying to convince everyone that he was being inhabited by the ghost of a dead megastar.

And he was certainly very convincing. Because if you were Michael Jackson and you'd just been gifted an unexpected conduit into the world of the living for the first time since your death, you wouldn't use it as an opportunity to pass on some personal messages to your grieving children, would you? No, the first thing you'd do would be to give a shout out to your man Quincy Jones. Then you'd mutter darkly about journalists before mumbling endless variations of the word "love" a lot too. That definitely sounds like something that Michael Jackson would do. Can't see anything wrong with that.

Derek Acorah's shtick is offensive at the best of times, but the sight of him sitting at a table with four fans - including two who were literally dressed up as Michael Jackson and one who appeared to be on the brink of emotional meltdown throughout the seance - and doing his best to goad them all into crying on live television left an especially bad taste in the mouth. Acorah's manipulation of the vulnerable was in such bad taste that it couldn't be seen as entertainment on any discernible level. It was depressing. That's all it was.

In the coming years, Michael Jackson will be endlessly repackaged and commoditised by people with all kinds of vested financial interests, but I'll be staggered if anything even comes close to Michael Jackson: The Live Seance. That's unless Sky One secures the broadcast rights to Michael Jackson: The Live Corpse-Defiling any time soon. It wouldn't be that much of a leap.

It seems the show went down like a lead balloon, which is hardly surprising given the calibre of the 'medium'.

Articles copyright to their respective authors and publications

D-Day approaches for fraudulent mediums

The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) was adopted three years ago today, on 11 May 2005. Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations implementing the Directive in the UK will come in to force on 26 May 2008.

The Directive:

. harmonises unfair trading laws in all EU Member States;

. introduces a general prohibition on traders not to treat consumers unfairly. This prohibition is intended to act as safety-net consumer protection legislation.

In particular, the Directive will oblige businesses not to mislead consumers through acts or omissions; or subject them to aggressive commercial practices such as high pressure selling techniques. The Directive also provides additional protections for vulnerable consumers who are often the target of unscrupulous traders.

The Directive's wide scope - it applies to all business sectors - and flexible provisions means that it will plug gaps in existing EU and UK consumer protection legislation; and set standards against which new practices will automatically be judged.

Implementation of this Directive should help ensure the UK has a consumer regime amongst the level of the best in the world.

The Directive's broad scope means that it overlaps with with many existing laws. In addition, because the UCPD is a maximum harmonisation Directive (ie setting out the maximum level of restriction permissible in respect of unfair commercial practices which harm consumers' economic interests) a supplementary objective in transposing the Directive is to achieve, where possible, some regulatory simplification. The Consumer Protection from Unfair trading Regulations repeal provisions in a number of overlapping laws, including most of the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 and Part 3 of the Consumer Protection Act 1987 (misleading price indications).

So what has that to do with fraudulent mediums? Everything. Mediums are among those who managed to escape prosecution under the convoluted Fraudulent Mediums Act, and are now well and truly in the firing line.

Mediums already shown to be faking are frantically trying to play the religion card. Derek Acorah, publicly exposed by Dr Ciaran O'Keeffe and Yvette Fielding of Most Haunted as having faked several 'possessions', has adopted the mantle of righteousness in a recent interview.

Entitled 'How I would beat phonies' he makes ridiculous claims.

“If this government bill is passed then could have a serious effect on religion.

“What we do is a religion like any other and the government should not be getting involved."

The Government has not "got involved in religion". Nothing in the Act interferes with an individual's right to his or her beliefs. Nothing in the Act prevents them from attending a religious service in a spiritualist church. Nothing in the Act stops anyone from giving what they might call 'a reading' to those present at such a service.

What the Act does do is protect anyone who pays money to visit a theatre, club, pub, hotel suite, or indeed any other venue including their own home, to see a medium perform.

It's interesting that those who are protesting the loudest about the new Act are those who have made the most money out of the public. The only interests they are protecting are their own!

How many religions require you to buy a ticket for, say, £20, to see their 'religious leader' perform? I'm not aware of any in the United Kingdom. Yet Acorah is trying to persuade people that he is on a par with someone like the Archbishop of Canterbury. He isn't!

Acorah also falsely claims:

“Every spiritual medium is tried and tested under the Spiritualist Church. I’m not perturbed at all, I’ve been working as a spiritual medium for 30 odd years.”

What's false about his claims?

Firstly, there are several Spiritualist Churches, and "every spiritual medium" is not tried or tested by them.

Secondly, Acorah has never been a member of any Spiritualist Church, nor was he trained by one, according to those Spiritualist Churches. Yes, he's performed in one or two on a few occasions, but he has never been accredited by any of them. He used to describe himself as a Spiritualist Medium until I first pointed out this awkward fact; now he calls himself a Spiritual Medium...

... except, of course, for his stage shows where he's suddenly not a Spiritual Medium, but reinvents himself as a Psychic Clairvoyant, the modern-day Merlin! The fact that his act is precisely that of a 'spiritual medium' is obviously not important to him. But then, he's so often shown himself to be less than truthful.

However, Acorah's claims that this Act will damage 'his religion' are blown out of the water by those who do hold regular religious services in Spiritualist churches across the country. They are quoted recently:

SNU spokesman Minister Steven Upton said, "We are quite happy with the Act being repealed. We have no problems with the new legislation and think it will be good news for spiritualists."

The same article throws light on how these con men and women might try to evade the new law:

Lawyers have advised that mediums can avoid the problem of having to prove their psychic abilities in court by describing their services as entertainment or even scientific experiments.

So will Acorah at last be forced to admit that what he does is for entertainment purposes only if it means he can protect his cash cow? I'm watching with bated breath!

Mediums and Psychics beware!

In 1951 The Fraudulent Mediums Act replaced The Witchcraft Act in British Law. Since then only seven people are known to have been presecuted under the FMA, despite glaring frauds and fakery being exposed.

Responding to a petition on the 10 Downing Street website, requesting that the FMA be revised in order to make more prosecutions possible, the Government has issued this response:

The Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 will be repealed from April 2008 by the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2007 (CPRs) which implement the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD).

The CPRs include rules prohibiting conduct which misleads the average consumer and thereby causes, or is likely to cause him to take a transactional decision he would not have taken otherwise.

Although the average consumer would arguably not be misled by a person who claims he is able to contact the dead, such conduct would still be unfair under the CPRs if it deceives the average member of (i) the group to which it is directed, or (ii) a clearly identifiable group of consumers who are particularly vulnerable to this type of practice.

Unlike the Act, there is no requirement in the CPRs to prove an "intent to deceive". This means that where practices are aimed at vulnerable consumers or average members of particular groups, it should be easier to take action against fraudulent mediums than under the Act.

The CPRs will be enforced by both civil (injunctive) action and criminal sanctions.

From April 2008, mediums, psychics, tarot-readers, etc., who charge for their services, will all be liable under The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD). Regulations implementing the Directive in the UK will come into force by April 2008.

Will we see some of our most notorious fakers retiring in March 2008? I hope not, as they have made a very handsome living out of conning the public, and I would like to see them get their just reward for their years of lying and cheating.