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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Most Haunted

11:53 / 09.08.05

I searched for a thread on this but couldn't find one, so apologies if I'm going over old ground; I'm quite new to this show and I'm totally hooked.

It broadcasts on Living TV but if you've got a set-top Freeview box you can get (pretty randomly) repeated episodes on FTN at 9pm on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Produced and presented by former Blue Peter poppet Yvette Fielding, the show visits an allegedly haunted premises every week and stakes out the spooks for a 24 hour period, armed with cameras, EMF detectors and lots of jumpy work experience-type people.

It's absolute class. You get Yvette, generally in a Matrix-style outfit, doing the links and giving you the background to the ghosts, interviews with the owner of the property and/or "witnesses", and some roaming around the property in daylight.

Then they bring in the star of the show - spiritualist medium Derek Acorah. A nicely-spoken Scouser, Derek is either the best and most convincing medium in the entire world, or a total fake. There can be no middle ground.

Derek, aided by his spirit guide, Sam, "chats" to some of the spirits present and often has a little possessed moment.

When darkness falls, the team turns off all the lights, get the night vision cameras on and basically make each other jumpy by leaping out of their skins at the slightest creak.

Mostly, the only paranormal experiences captured on camera are "light anomolies" - little dots which are, apparently, the first signs of a spooky manifestation, and the occaisonal door swinging shut. Which is strange, as Derek usually speaks to about half a dozen ghosts before the proper filming session starts.

But... brilliant. Anyone else?

12:45 / 09.08.05

I saw one where they were in a hotel where somebody had been murdered.
You had the usual light anomalies, but the best bit was where they showed a speeded-up, six-minute time lapse of the furniture rearranging itself.

13:15 / 09.08.05

I tried to watch one of these but the shrieking of Yvette Fielding was too much. Surely tehy could have found someone better?

They should give Derek his own show.

13:57 / 09.08.05

my SO is utterly addicted, I have enjoyed shows in the past although it does become a little repetative:

Typical show
Derek meets good ghost (a child, someone murdered, lost soul etc) who is scared of the bad ghost (mass murdering lord of the manner). Derek says he's coming or he's here and then gets possessed by the bad ghost- making derek snap/ lunge at Yvette- before needing to 'rest'.
Then they do the night watch in which the fat sound bloke gets put in a cellar at the bottom of the house on his own with the lights off- and shits it when the building creeks...

I do like the show and have been frightened/ startled by it- although the formula is starting get get a little tedious. However the theatre episode when a generator started on its own the other week was pant pissing terrifying

20:39 / 27.04.07

*bump*

I love this show. Not as much as I love 'Ghost Hunters' on SciFi, but it's love nonetheless. I can't take it entirely seriously (Derek's spirit possessions, esp., just look contrived as hell), but then I'll see an episode like the one in the brewery, where the beer barrel comes rattling down the track when THERE'S NO ONE ELSE IN THE BASEMENT or the scene in the clock tower where THE CLOCK STOPS AND STARTS ON CUE. I mean, it's TV so you've got to expect some trickery. But getting into it and enjoying the moment...ah, what larks.

Surely tehy could have found someone better?

Belatedly, I tell you there is no one better to host this show. There just isn't. Yvette makes the show, shrieks and jumpiness and all.

They should give Derek his own show.

Also belatedly, they did. It was awful. Not just everyday awful either. AWFUL awful. I could only stomach two episodes of the six that ran: The first ep. and the one in Northampton which I only sat through in the vague, vain hope that Alan Moore would toddle across a scene in the background and give two fingers up to Derek. He didn't.

The whole premise of the thing was that Derek would go to a different town each week and talk to people's ghosts or something. Freed of the 'Most Hauted' crew, Derek seemed free to indulge every passing whim and suspicion. "They were murdered," dropped from his mouth approximately every two and a half minutes. I'm glad they cancelled it and brought Derek back into the MH fold (he took a break from MH while his show was running).

It's on tonight. Runs at 10pm on the Travel Channel over here. A little bit more of Friday night to look forward too.

Oh and that theme music! Best.

20:52 / 27.04.07

A mate of mine who works in PR was hired to drum up publicity for a local brewery. He got in touch with the Most Haunted team and lo and behold instant free publicity.

He talks at length about what a brazen charlaten Acorah was.

Co-incidentally I recieved a text from said mate inviting me round to watch the upcoming celebrity Most Haunted. When it's screened we'll gather round to watch the Most Haunted A-Team cast celebrity special.

20:59 / 27.04.07

I was mildly obsessed with this show for a few weeks. It's really addictive. Best bit overall was some dodgy old medium very possibly hammered, channeling a little girl skipping and dancing about the top of some old castle, and then with a flair unparalleled, mimes her spinning, spinning, dancing, spinning, and plop, off the side of the castle wall and down to her death.

It was like watching Roddy McDowell do 'Mommy Dearest' with an age-regressed child-Crawford.

Pseudo-Ghostbuster plumber and electrician types never quite get to that level.

21:39 / 27.04.07

I loved, and still love this show from time to time. It's late night cheese-tastic.

I tried to watch one of these but the shrieking of Yvette Fielding was too much. Surely tehy could have found someone better?

But that's the best part! Watching a grown adult shit out their own skeleton in fright.

That and Derek Acorah, fellow scouser and the gabby man's medium. A medium so in-tune with the spirit world that not only has he seen a ghost gorilla (I shit you nay) but possessed by spirits who, lacking a stage in the afterlife one presumes, proceed to ham it the fuck up when they take Derek's white-clad frame for a joyride. To this day my brother and I can reduce each other to tears by bellowing, "I AM! GODFREY PARKS! THIS HOUSE! BELONGS! TO ME!".

Sam says, "it's top stuff, la".

21:42 / 27.04.07

Also belatedly, they did.

It was not only car crash bad for the reasons Monk goes into but also for the end-show drive-by seances. Really. Derek would drive round whatever location he was in this week, Bill Bixby style and call at a random person's house to perform a reading. All orchestrated by the spirits and, probably, just spirits.

07:24 / 28.04.07

I liked the light anomalies. They don't seem to notice them anymore. I once saw a light anomaly just above my toes in the bath, but it may have been fluff. Freaked me out good and proper.

Now they have 'knocking' and David Medium.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:41 / 28.04.07

I preferred the episode of South Park with 'the biggest douche in the universe'.

Has anyone actually found that mediums program that Charlie 'Screenwipe' Brooker was going on about, where the three of them 'solve crimes', a la 'Waking the Dead' crossed with 'Most Haunted'?

08:55 / 28.04.07

Of course. It used to follow MH on Living. It always ended with a statement like 'The police are grateful for the new evidence and are continuing their enquiries'. The show was OK:

I can see a car...it's brown, a brown Cadillac...he's tall, with a green shirt...and a beard...and he's putting her in the trunk and driving past a farm with a tree next to it and past a river and over a bridge and...[sigh]...she's dead, now...[sad sigh] and she's buried...somewhere else...

15:57 / 30.04.07

I was mildly obsessed with this show for a few weeks. It's really addictive. Best bit overall was some dodgy old medium very possibly hammered, channeling a little girl skipping and dancing about the top of some old castle, and then with a flair unparalleled, mimes her spinning, spinning, dancing, spinning, and plop, off the side of the castle wall and down to her death.

That's our Derek alright.

"I AM! GODFREY PARKS! THIS HOUSE! BELONGS! TO ME!".

Best. Possession. EvAr!

16:08 / 30.04.07

What I like is that none of the houses are ever *not* haunted. Which seems odd, because you'd expect at least one of them to just be hysteria really.

16:31 / 30.04.07

Well, you know, the fat-faced dork with the faux-hawk screens them all pretty carefully.

The missus and I both loooove this show. Total guilty pleasure. We call it "Blair Witch Project: The Series."

Can't stand David, though. He's a big wet, and all his ghosties are basically lovely people bound here by feelings of unresolved affection and trying to get to The Light. Give me Derek and his naaahsty spiddit pairsons any day.

Derek is pretty much how I always pictured John Constantine, right down to the earring and the accent—not the scruff-with-a-heart-of-gold he's been turned into, but the sharp-creased wideboy spiv as created by Alan Moore.

I imagine that there's a lot of intra-crew shagging that goes on back at the hotel, after the vigil; all the stress and exhaustion and crazy adrenaline rushes setting off all kinds of weird hormonal surges; it starts with oh-I'm-so-scared-please-hold-me and ends in crazed weasel-like rutting.

Also how blatant is Yvette's dominatrix garb?

17:30 / 30.04.07

Oh Derek, how could you?

18:22 / 30.04.07

The man's clearly so powerful he can see fictional ghosts.

Anyone who has a problem with that should think first about what the fictional ghosts might've seen them up to last Thursday.

19:13 / 30.04.07

More like, "Oh Ciaran, how could you". That fauxhawked little mugwump broke the magician's Code of Silence, man.

And the ego! "I was brought onto the show to add some credibility"—oh, how you wish, you sad little man.

17:20 / 03.05.07

Derek Acorah is a con-artist. Nobody should defend him.
He plays on the emotions of the bereaved. I have listened to him on the radio and seen him on TV and the man is a joke. As for his 'possessions' they are just laughable.

18:08 / 03.05.07

Well, there is that.

18:15 / 03.05.07

Wait, was that a proposition for a new show? Most Obvious?

18:30 / 03.05.07

I preferred the episode of South Park with 'the biggest douche in the universe'.

That would be, I believe, J*hn Edw*rd, and he irritates me on a truly cosmic level, somehow.

Wait, was that a proposition for a new show? Most Obvious?

Be nice - although you're goodly and right there.

Janean Patience

16:50 / 04.05.07

Derek is pretty much how I always pictured John Constantine, right down to the earring and the accent—not the scruff-with-a-heart-of-gold he's been turned into, but the sharp-creased wideboy spiv as created by Alan Moore.

That's exactly what Constantine should be doing, cruelly defrauding the credulous on TV. Giving them the contact from beyond the veil they deserve, not the platitudes they want.

I imagine that there's a lot of intra-crew shagging that goes on back at the hotel, after the vigil; all the stress and exhaustion and crazy adrenaline rushes setting off all kinds of weird hormonal surges; it starts with oh-I'm-so-scared-please-hold-me and ends in crazed weasel-like rutting.

My own imaginings of Yvette and her producer husband Karl's personal life are less lurid. In my mind she's screaming like a banshee whenever a mobile rings, cowering and whimpering "Did you see that? I saw it move on its own, is someone playing a joke?" when the automatic doors open at the supermarket, being reduced to tears by the disembodied voice of the tannoy. Spending whole weekends silent and shaking in a dark corner of the spare bedroom staring at the blinking light of the boiler, biting deep into her own pale hand when the gas turns on. Everything in this modern century of ours is terrifying to Yvette, born into the simpler world of 1210 AD, and her husband exploits that for money.