"We See Dead People": Living TV's Most Haunted (2002-present) & Ghost Whisperer (2005-present)

Abstract

When the crew are wandering tensely around stygian stone corridors, dusty attics and vaulted cellars, tension is evoked by means of extended close-ups of Fielding's eyes, exaggerated far beyond their usual size by night-vision cameras and framed with spidery black lashes, which one must assume have been coated in some form of light-sensitive mascara. To underline her position as an icon of virtue and sensibility, the programme is punctuated by her constant queries as to whether everyone else is OK.\n With three seasons behind it and a fourth on the way, this has come to include extenuated story arcs about the spirit world, with www.living.co.uk running exclusive online episodes from the "other side" featuring blurred images and wobbly camerawork, which claim to allow us to experience what death is like for the dead.

Although Living TV, a British satellite/cable channel, claims to provide what it calls "women oriented entertainment," it more closely resembles a series of advertising slots for the services of numerous heroic investigator-types. A regular viewer rapidly leams that should she find herself plagued by violent crime, she should seek out a brooding, sombrely dressed man, preferably one who shuns sunlight in case it singes his undead skin, who spends his days in a windowless laboratory, or who only removes his shades when dramatic emphasis requires it. Perhaps less puzzling is the parallel implication that, should one's difficulties stem from the disgruntled dead, a young, good-looking married woman with big eyes and acute hearing is best qualified for the job. Specifically, "reality"-TV behemoth Most Haunted and Ghost Whisperer, a supernatural drama series in the Touched-By-an-Angel vein, both posit women as particularly susceptible to and suitable for what Edith Wharton referred to as "ghost feeling," relying upon time-honoured associations between femininity, the uncanny and the rituals surrounding death. Via these domesticated Sibyls who guide us through the televisual underworld, uncovering long-buried truths and taming unruly spirits, Living offers its viewers vicarious fantasies of impossible agency that do little to unsettle either the audience or traditional gender stereotypes.

There is more to the choice of a female protagonist than audience identification, however. Any show that claims to produce genuine, regular paranormal phenomena leaves itself vulnerable to debunking efforts, and Most Haunted is no exception. The bulwark of its defence against the tide of disbelief comes in the delicate, blonde form of Yvehe Fielding, a former Blue Peter presenter, and the one member of the team who has visibly been around from the beginning. Strongly evoking the ultra-rational environment of Blue Peter, where even sticky-backed plastic and dangerous animals behave themselves, she provides a vital anchor for what would otherwise be literally and laughably incredible. Obviously, television can draw upon vast resources as regards special effects, editing and lighting tricks (for example the "orbs" that supposedly indicated the presence of spectral energy), while mysterious bumps and knocking sounds issuing from darkened comers are ludicrously cheap and easy to produce. Nonetheless, rather than focusing on the potential for simple image manipulation, audiences have instead seized as scapegoats the participating mediums and their incorporeal interlocutors. Wishing desperately for the ghosts to be real and yet (or maybe therefore) determined to unmask an imposter, in 2005, there were some quite successful efforts to expose the then psychic-incumbent, Derek Acorah. In response, the British communication industry's official watchdog Ofcom mied that Most Haunted contains:

a high degree of showmanship that puts it beyond what we believe to be a generally accepted understanding of what comprises a legitimate investigation. On balance, we consider that overall Most Haunted/Most Haunted Live should be taken to be a programme produced for entertainment purposes. This is despite what appear to be occasional assertions by the programme that what viewers are witnessing is real. As such this programme should be seen in the light of shows where techniques are used which mean the audience is not necessarily in full possession of the facts. ( http : //news .bbc. co ,uk/2/hi/entertainment/45 00322, stm )

Indeed, if anything, since 2005 the show (now running to ten seasons, and supplemented by frequent live specials) has actually gone to greater and greater lengths to ensure that the audience is not "in full possession of the facts/' Following the fragmented Gothic format familiar from Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer to Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Most Haunted revels in moments when sound is lost, the camera cannot move quickly enough to capture events and, occasionally, the screen goes completely black. Keeping the viewers literally in the dark was not, however, always central to its modus operandi. Coinciding neatly with the departure of Acorah (he was prepped with false information and then proceeded to "channel" a fabricated ghost), the visual style has altered considerably from that of earlier seasons. Eschewing a mis-en-scène reminiscent of Victorian phantasmagoria, which relied on fancy stage effects, showy lighting, camera tricks and dry ice (significantly, haunted theatres featured prominently in these early episodes), the editors now favour a pared-down, claustrophobic, motion-sickness inducing Blair Witchiness. In particular, the programme is characterised by an almost Manichean chiaroscuro, where the flamboyant use of night-vision photography (a current horror-film staple) clashes with occasional glimpses of strong lights in the background.

With this new streamlined style, and the absence of the one truly memorable psychic (who has been replaced by a clutch of matronly women with neat bobs and semi-emaciated men with strange accents and modest goatees), it has become increasingly evident that Yvette Fielding, whose on-screen persona vacillates between informed reporteuse and startled woodland creature, is the real star of the show. When the crew are wandering tensely around stygian stone corridors, dusty attics and vaulted cellars, tension is evoked by means of extended close-ups of Fielding's eyes, exaggerated far beyond their usual size by night-vision cameras and framed with spidery black lashes, which one must assume have been coated in some form of light-sensitive mascara. While Acorah and those who come after him may be the ones actually contacting the spirits, what carries the show is Fielding's strongly marked femininity, her gasps, her screams, the imperceptible sounds she claims to hear, and the spectacle of her metamorphosis from an authoritative narratorial voice to a mere cipher for innocence in peril.

What is more, as the numerous interviews with Fielding available on the Living website attest, over the years she has herself become increasingly sensitive to spirits, developing an ability to encourage manifestations and the "knocking" that the show is so devoted to, even in her everyday life. This is a canny move on Living's part - those slippery professional psychics might be lying, but our Yvette? Heaven forefend! To underline her position as an icon of virtue and sensibility, the programme is punctuated by her constant queries as to whether everyone else is OK. Her reified and constantly foregrounded figure is therefore almost Protean in its inclusiveness, encapsulating a petrified Gothic heroine, a natural-bom ghost-feeler, a nurturing mother figure, and a concerned and devoted wife (her husband, Karl Beattie, being both co-creator and co-star, and, somewhat randomly, an honorary Samurai). That the show's depiction of femininity nevertheless rests on a somewhat shaky ideological basis was made clear in a recent live show from Turin - "Satan's City"! - which revolved around that old Gothic dichotomy of benevolent Protestant rationality versus Catholic corruption and sexual violence (think naked women being tied to pillars and whipped by hooded monks). This served to draw perhaps too much attention to the fact that the voyeuristic sadism directed against women all too familiar from the Gothic is never far below the surface of the show (they love their Victorian murderers and Medieval torturers). Arguably, then, Fielding serves as a refinement of Carol J. Clover's "Final Girl," the heroine who, by helping to expose and/or vanquish the murderers of other women, allows the audience conveniently to forget the gloating pleasure they have taken in the others' appalling deaths.

Centring on family conflicts instead of on historical and religious violence, Living's Ghost Whisperer also features a latter-day Gothic heroine who, as she announces smugly at the start of early episodes, is also married. Melinda is played by the pneumatic Jennifer Love Hewitt, whose ample feminine assets are matched only by her melting yet highly observant eyes. Once again, central to the staging of frightened womanhood is this particular part of her physiognomy - fetishised, fringed by fluttering lashes, emphasised with dark eye-shadow and growing ever wider as Melinda gasps, faints, and pants provocatively. Unlike Fielding, however, who may be sensitive but must still rely on others to mediate between her and the spirits, Melinda is quite literally her own medium. While Fielding stares, blinded and trembling, into the darkness, Melinda can see. Essentially a post-mortem family counsellor, in the majority of episodes she acts as a mediator for troubled, restless souls who need messages to be relayed and interpreted to the living, so that they can "cross over' to "the other side". While the Most Haunted crew also engage in this form of neo-religious exorcism, the fictional format of Ghost Whisperer works very much in its favour, permitting the depiction of spirits moving euphorically toward "the light". In almost every episode, once the ornaments have finished shattering and livid spectres cease trying to strangle their nearest and dearest, therefore, we are shown unequivocally that everyone always loves one another and that unity, harmony and understanding will ultimately prevail. Crucially, though, this is only possible with the intercession of the Final Girl from a film that Sarah Michelle Gellar once apparently referred to as I Know What Your Tits Did Last Summer.

Why marital status should be so vital to media portrayals of mediumship (it also features prominently in Medium, staring Patricia Arquette) becomes clear in the Season 3 episode "Unhappy Medium" (2007) which pits the formidable Miranda against a flashy, professional, Acorah-esque psychic. The craze for spiritualism in the mid- and late 1800s, which inevitably involved a lot more razzmatazz in America than in the UK, created a division between public mediums (generally young, single, lower-class girls who displayed their talents in large public theatres) and private mediums - respectable middle-class ladies, often married, who "performed" only for select audiences in the comfort of their own or their clients' homes. Melinda is definitely of this second species, generally encountering ghosts in her own or other peoples' immaculate houses, and highly critical of the manipulative showman Carey, who eventually and predictably leams that telling the truth is far more important than impressing or even comforting people. Interestingly, the programme's multimedia apparatus is similarly concerned with a dual ideology that upholds both a sort of sanctified privacy and a commitment to revealing the truth. A quick trawl through Google and Wikipedia reveals a bewildering world of spin-off websites, including secret sites

Why marital status should be so vital to media portrayals of mediumship (it also features prominently in Medium, staring Patricia Arquette) becomes clear in the Season 3 episode "Unhappy Medium" (2007) which pits the formidable Miranda against a flashy, professional, Acorah-esque psychic. The craze for spiritualism in the mid- and late 1800s, which inevitably involved a lot more razzmatazz in America than in the UK, created a division between public mediums (generally young, single, lower-class girls who displayed their talents in large public theatres) and private mediums - respectable middle-class ladies, often married, who "performed" only for select audiences in the comfort of their own or their clients' homes. Melinda is definitely of this second species, generally encountering ghosts in her own or other peoples' immaculate houses, and highly critical of the manipulative showman Carey, who eventually and predictably leams that telling the truth is far more important than impressing or even comforting people. Interestingly, the programme's multimedia apparatus is similarly concerned with a dual ideology that upholds both a sort of sanctified privacy and a commitment to revealing the truth. A quick trawl through Google and Wikipedia reveals a bewildering world of spin-off websites, including secret sites that can only be accessed through other web pages, which will furnish those who find them with privileged information about the programme and its increasingly convoluted mythology. With three seasons behind it and a fourth on the way, this has come to include extenuated story arcs about the spirit world, with www.living.co.uk running exclusive online episodes from the "other side" featuring blurred images and wobbly camerawork, which claim to allow us to experience what death is like for the dead. Living's decision to confine these slightly more disturbing and visually innovative episodes to the web suggests an uneasy attitude towards frightening images, which are generally only permitted a few seconds of screen-time in the programme itself. Indeed, its post -Ring flickering revenants produce nothing even vaguely akin to numinous dread, a situation not exactly improved by its repeated assertion that the evil dead can be transformed into the faithful departed by a perceptive young lady administering a psychic talking cure. For all its labyrinthine invocations of the mysteries of the grave, then, it would seem that the show's exploitation of Gothic iconography functions as little more than edgy window dressing.

Much the same can be said of Most Haunted, the Living TV website of which includes discussion forums, interviews, behind-the-scenes clips and even a page that allows viewers to send "white noise" messages to their friends that, allegedly, accurately test psychic ability. While this apparently limitless surplus of information and comment flickering across the computer screen heightens the sense that there is so much more going on than the audience can ever fully comprehend, it also serves a more reassuring purpose, suggesting that information (and, by extension, the "truth") will always be at our fingertips. Indeed, despite attempts to expose it as the fake it quite obviously is, Most Haunted remains a potential source of comfort, assuring its devoted audience that there is some sort of existence after death. What is more, the cosiness of the format, flipping as the live version does between a warm, well-lit studio and embedded shots of underground tunnels, reminds the viewer of his or her comparative safety while distracting from any real problems that might be lurking in the darkness surrounding the television set. And if this doesn't work, they can always log onto the website and get beauty tips, relationship advice and celebrity gossip while leaving forum posts about how scary last night's programme was.

Ultimately therefore both programmes disappoint. While a female protagonist permits an exploration of cultural unease that is rarely attached to male characters in similarly popular productions such as Supernatural or Moonlight, in which muscles and decisiveness are very much to the fore, there is little sense that either show is concerned with addressing what fear and death mean in the Western world in the early twenty first century. I am beginning to suspect, however, that this is rather the point.

DARA DOWNEY