The shows are constructed in a very weird way. They kick off with the usual ‘Spooky Zone’ graphics treatment, and a sexy female voice telling us that JE is for real, as confirmed by university studies (surely a Nobel prize in there somewhere?). 23 minutes later, psychic wonders having been performed on cue, this caption flashes up:

“The Producer has relied heavily on the contribution of John Edward and other third parties in the creation of this program, which has been produced for entertainment purposes only.

The materials and opinions presented in this program by John Edward and other third parties, including statements, predictions, documents, photos and video footage, come solely from their respective third party sources and are not the views, opinions and responsibility of the Producer and are not meant or intended to be a form of advice, instruction, suggestion, counsel or factual statement in any way whatsoever.”

These 93 words appear for 65 frames, or less than 3 seconds of air time. Can anyone read at 31 words per second? Doubt it. So most people might miss the gem at the end: “not intended to be… a factual statement in any way whatsoever”. Putting it another way, as far as the production team are prepared to vouch for the veracity of their own star, JE could tell us Bill Clinton’s a virgin, and they’d broadcast it.

The unfathomable weirdness of spirits

Nothing JE does on these shows is inconsistent with the ‘cold reading’ hypothesis, and he does not seem to differ significantly from many other mediums I have seen over the years. However, let us take JE at his word for the time being.

I always have a hard time understanding how this whole hotline to the heaven thing works. It seems a very perverse affair. For example, the spooks can get common first names through, but they cannot seem to muster a surname. They can describe an old fishtank quite well, or talk about a police badge handed down from father to son, but cannot convey the message ‘My name was Tony SMITH, of 159 Sepulveda Boulevard, I’m here to meet MARGARET, my WIFE, who is sitting in the THIRD ROW’. So they leave the poor schmuck out front to play guessing games with fragments of sounds.

The standard rebuttal to this puzzling perversity involves analogies with bad or crackly phone lines or distant whispers – mediums are tuning in to faint energies and the vibes ain’t always clear, yada yada. This doesn’t hack it for me. You see, no matter how bad the phone line is, if it can carry the message ‘Tina or Tinny’, then it can carry a relevant surname. If it can carry the message ‘Father or older male’ then it can carry ‘Father. George. Died aged 51 from coronary induced by over-exertion with a whore in Nashville’.

Instead, the spirits seem intent on supplying hints sufficiently vague for the results to resemble smart guesswork and snappy cold reading. If I were a medium, I’d find this somewhat annoying.

Grave lies from those lying in graves

Time after blessed time, these spooky voices leave the poor medium hanging out in the wind. They lead him up the garden path. They leave rakes out for him to tread on.

Here’s JE on the ‘Basil the Garage Guy’ tape.

He offers ‘Tina? Female?’. No takers.
‘Father figure?’. Crash.
‘Older male figure?’. Crash, burn.
‘Tony?’. Strike out.
‘Tini?’. At last, for the love of Buddha, someone can meet him half way.

JE asks a question. ‘Has she crossed?’. Now, I would have thought that’s the one piece of information the spirits would be able to get right. So why is he asking the guys and gals in the gallery?

He presses on.

‘Something to do with July?’. Niet.
‘A birthday or anniversary in July?’. Nada.
‘Some connection with the flag. Or some governmental thing.’ The offer has been broadened out flat as Kansas, but still he can’t get a match. Zilch. Those darn ghosts just don’t make life easy, do they?

JE grinds a little further, and gets a hit with a woman further along the row. ‘Did he pass around Veteran’s Day’. Again, I’d imagine the spirits know when they checked into the sky motel, but apparently not – so JE has to do the ‘Millionaire’ thing and ‘Ask the audience’.

Response, ‘No, my mother did’. But JE wasn’t talking about Mom. Shame.

He presses gamely on, trying to turn the sow’s ear dreck offered by the ghosts into silky purse readings.

‘What’s the thing with four men?’. The gallery’s response goes flatline.
’I’m getting these four men’. Nope.
’Four… whatever’. It could be a family of four, four boys, four male friends, four anything. But still no takers from the gallery. Horsemen of the Apocalypse, perchance?

All the ‘July’ and ‘Four men’ stuff just gets left to wither on the vine. According to the rules of mediumship, hits matter and misses do not.

Can you say, ‘Skewed data set’? Can you say, ‘Selective evidence’? Can you say, ‘Not intended to be… a factual statement in any way whatsoever’? The producers can.

Hits and misses

Of course JE does get hits. During a different section of the same show, he asks a direct question, ‘Who had the leg amputated?’. The gallery oblige with someone. ‘Someone died in a war camp?’. Bingo!

But then it all goes pear-shaped. ‘Is this on your father’s side?’. No. Crash, burn. ‘What’s the connection with Russia?’. Direct question, and yes, there’s an Uncle who died there.

‘Is there something about changing names, or papers to do with names?’ asks JE.

At this point I could have wept for him. A fairly clear picture has emerged of a family with European ancestry blighted by war casualties. There darn well ought to be something to do with immigration, and with naturalisation of the family’s weird East European name. Yet answer came there… ‘No’.

And so the spirits go on, teasing JE with duff mis-information. It’s almost as if they were bribed by a rival network.

Here’s another far from atypical exchange:

‘Who is Hilda?’. Nothing.
’Helen?’. Zilch city.
’An ‘H’ somewhere’. When top-drawer psychic mediumship can’t do better than ‘Find me a letter ‘H’ somewhere in your entire family tree’, then it’s time to pull the plug on the studio lights. Hell, it may be awesome psychic power, but it SOUNDS like a wild-assed guessing game. The gallery can muster someone called ‘Hedwig’. Got there in the end.

Same old same old

This is the problem with mediumship – the spirits keep getting things wrong in a way which is very hard to account for. On the same show, here is JE doing his mightiest to make sense of the spooky messages siphoning into his head (should that be psy-phoning… I bet if I worked on that for an hour I could get a damned good pun out of it, but who can be bothered at 6am in the morning?).

‘Was there something to do with leukaemia?’. No.
‘Or a blood disease?’. No.
‘They’re moving me down… here’. Different section of the gallery, same Buster Keaton stone-face response. Nobody is buying blood diseases today, thank you very much.

‘Leukaemia?’ he tries again. Crash.
‘AIDS?’. Crash and burn.
‘An overdose of some kind. Toxins in the body’. The ghosts are sounding pretty desperate now, as they frantically try to work out what the hell it was they died of. And still no takers.

JE offers ‘Sister… cousin… female’. He’s good at covering over 50% of the possible family tree in about half a second of machine-gun patter. He offers ‘Linda’. Nothing. ‘D? Dorothy? Dior?’. The crowd can muster up a Dorothy! But she’s alive, darn it. And no disease. Just what are these spirits playing at?

Map means ‘not a map’ and older means ‘younger’

One might imagine this psychic hotline, be it ever so crackly and misty, could at least get the simple stuff right. But apparently not. Here’s a beautiful section from the other tape I watched in detail, featuring Peter Dobson (a gentleman whose exquisite fame and gawping talent has not, thus far, reached the damp little rock I call home).

JE is strutting his stuff with two women in the gallery.

He has gone for ‘Some sort of brother figure’, which is a hit. He offers ‘cancer’, but no takers, so this is left to wither on the vine.

Next he asks for a link with ‘an Al name, Albert, Allen, Alice’. So now any name, male or female, featuring the ‘Al’ syllable will do? How crackly can a phone line be? The women come up with the dead guy’s mother’s father, Albert.

I’ll bet Great Grandpa Albert is pleased he was confused with an ‘Alice’. Maybe he walked funny.

Next, JE offers a ‘big room, like a basement, with a map in it’. No for basement, no for map, but they do have a family tree hanging up. Close enough.

‘Is someone working on it?’ asks John, and from his intonation it’s clear he thinks he will get a ‘Yes’. Wrong.

Direct question, ‘Do you have a son?’. ‘Two’. JE tells us that the dead guy is acknowledging the older one. He is quite definite about this: the older one. He offers that the son’s middle name is the same as his father’s first name. (Which is very common in some families.) ‘No’, comes the reply, ‘it’s the other son’. ‘Okay’ says JE without missing a beat, ‘so he’s acknowledging them both’. Another fumbled pass from the spooks. They were sure they meant ‘older’ just a moment or two ago…

Who’s being selective now?

So far I have made only passing reference to the hits that JE gets, and I have focused on the misses. This might seem like a self-serving bias, but wait a moment. You see, it’s the misses that are actually informative. Let me expand on this.

So JE comes up with some great hits. Does this tell us he’s a gifted medium? Nice if it did, but it doesn’t. First point, it’s not a demonstration under controlled conditions, so it’s effectively useless in terms of arriving at any valid conclusion. I’ve been on TV more than a few times, and I know only too well how much slippage can occur between what’s really going on and what ends up on the the broadcast tape – and that’s without invoking intentional fraud.

Secondly, the mediums always come up with the same argument, namely that the clients’ satisfaction with the accuracy of their work is all the proof one could need, and all that matters.

Unfortunately, client satisfaction can’t sort fact from con artistry. I have given readings, under far more stringent conditions than the readings JE gives in his studio, and have been labelled as “99.9%” accurate. You can find other examples in my book. I went on ‘Leeza’, and four women all concluded I was a clairvoyant – and I hadn’t been allowed to exchange a single word with any of them! In the case of one woman, I successfully identified the very unusual job she had done 26 years previously. She was mighty impressed. Sorry, but validation via client satisfaction is a non-starter.

So, let us leave the hits to one side. The misses are far more intriguing, from an analytical point of view. It is very hard to frame a working hypothesis for mediumistic contact which can account for the errors that mediums make, and the things they do not know. Try it. You can invoke all the ‘bad connection’ and ‘hazy fog of detail’ scenarios you like, and it still doesn’t quite fit. How can ‘T for Tony’ get through, but not much more useful syllables such as the spook’s former surname, or former address, their precise age at the time of passing, and so on? How can tortuous syllables like ‘leukaemia’ get through, but not ‘My name is Jack Smith’? How can the concept of ‘map’ come through when what is intended is ‘family tree’ – the two things don’t sound the same, they don’t look the same. How can spirits get very specific about ‘older’ brother, and then give information which pertains to the younger one?

All of this is very, very hard to account for within the ‘mediumship’ hypothesis. The ‘cold reading’ hypothesis, on the other hand, fits it like a tailored glove.

Exploring alternatives

Some cynical folk might suggest Mr Edward uses cold reading. I do not venture an opinion as to whether he does or not. What is certain is that there are many similarities between the content of the TV shows and the techniques in my book. To labour the point to death, this does not prove or imply that JE even knows about cold reading, let alone uses it.

The interview with Peter Dobson is interesting in this regard. Towards the end of the session, JE makes reference to ‘something like a fishtank, or a big, wide structure, like glass’. This is offered devoid of context. It could be a fishtank or something ese. Past or present. To do with Dobson, or the deceased under discussion, or someone else.

Dobson supplies the detail: he used to have a big fishtank when he was younger.

So far, so good. Earlier in the reading, Dobson has stated that he had theatrical ambitions from an early age. JE ventures a statement about the young Dobson’s bedroom: ‘I see some sort of, like, memorabilia… you know, Monroe, Warhol, Presley, some sort of thing’. The ‘some sort of thing’ is a little clumsy, but the general gist is not unlikely for someone we know had acting ambitions as a kid.

As it turns out, the fishtank used to have a purple neon Elvis sign over it.

In his review of the session, Dobson says that the one, sole thing that blew him away was the fact that JE had ‘nailed’ the fishtank and the Elvis sign. Dobson is clearly under the impression that JE scored a direct hit, right out of the blue. But anyone can rewind the tape and check that it just didn’t happen like that. JE didn’t say ‘You had a big fishtank in your room as a kid, with a purple Elvis sign over it’. He offered some vague stuff. Dobson shaped the fuzz into something specific.

This whole process is described in my book in some detail: ‘The Fuzzy Fact’, ‘The Good Chance Guess’, ‘The Direct Question’, ‘The Russian Doll’, ‘Providing blank space’, ‘Reprising with gold paint’. It’s all there in black and white, in a book I published in September 1998, before I had ever heard of JE.

Other issues…

Another weird thing about JE’s shows is the striking lack of any actual messages from the dead people. In the ‘Basil the Garage Guy’ sequence, we are invited to be astounded at a spirit’s formidable determination to reach through to Basil, even though he works in the parking lot next to the TV studio. Yet having gone to these extraordinary lengths, what does the dead guy actually want to tell Basil? Nothing. Just the usual bland any-old-message stuff, ‘I’m okay’, ‘Take care’.

Curtain down

JE says he is a genuine psychic medium, and who’s to say otherwise? If so, then it is fair to conclude that either psychic vibrations are appallingly unreliable, to the point where guesswork operates just as effectively, or that the spirits play nasty tricks on him all the time, misleading him so he ends up looking like an opportunistic guesser.

On the other hand, if it’s pacy cold-reading, then I admire some parts of his technique but not others. Good marks for: confidence, charm, rapid and clear delivery, the telegenic flair, the inability to be fazed by anything that happens, the plausible look and feel… all this I can admire.

Not so good: way too much reliance on direct questions. A tendency to re-cycle the same lines (‘February or the second of the month’, ‘someone with a missing leg’, ‘a ‘T’ sound sort of name’, ‘congestive heart failure or circulatory problem’). A delivery that is sometimes too quick for its own good, and actually confuses the poor schmuck in the audience. Some self-inflicated wounds on his plausibility through a lack of internal consistency – is he ‘seeing’ the name or ‘hearing it’? (This makes a difference to the sort of ‘errors’ one can accept as part of the process.) A shortage of good ‘outs’ for when the trail goes cold. And so on.

OK, I shall be merciful and stop typing. Over and out.