Derek Acorah
TV psychic whose shows included ‘Most Haunted’ and ‘The Antiques Ghost Show’
DEREK Acorah, who has passed over to the other side aged 69, was Britain’s top television psychic and medium.
In the best traditions of his calling, facts about Acorah’s life and abilities were scant, not least because he fell out with the ghostwriter of his books. By his own account, however, he first encountered the spirit realm at the age of six, when he met a large man he had never seen before while coming down the stairs for his tea at his grandmother’s home in Liverpool, where he lived.
The man ruffled his hair and called him a “young tyke”. By the time young Derek had asked his mother and grandmother who the person was, there was no one to be seen.
His grandmother realised that it was the shade of his grandfather, who had died in an accident at sea before Derek was born. Adept of the tea leaves herself, she then predicted that the boy would inherit her gifts and “work for the spirit”.
Derek went on instead to a career of sorts in football, but when this came to an end in the mid-1980s, he met a tall, dark handsome stranger. This was Sam, his spirit guide, whom he had previously known 2,038 years earlier when they had both lived in Ethiopia.
Sam was an oracle and had saved Derek’s previous incarnation from marauding invaders. They had travelled together, and now would do so again. It was Sam who reassured Acorah that all would go well when he was first invited to appear on television in 1996 by the magazine programme Livetime, broadcast by the satellite channel Granada Breeze.
Acorah’s subsequent rise to prominence owed much to the growth of multichannel television. In need of eye-catching content that was cheap to make, production companies were quick to cross his palm with silver.
After five years with Livetime, by which time he had a reputation as “the sexiest man in spiritualism”, albeit with a breezy Liverpudlian style more reminiscent of a Paul McCartney than of Madame Arcati, he began to make what became the series Most Haunted.
While Granada Breeze shut down in unforeseen circumstances, the programme was sold to Living, Britain’s self-styled “sixth channel”. Produced and co-presented by Yvette Fielding, the former Blue Peter host, Most Haunted purported to investigate Britain’s most ghost-infested places. Audiences were told that Acorah did not know where he was, yet he would frequently tap into the spirits of historical figures thought to have lived there centuries before.
In 2005, however, Acorah left the show after apparently becoming possessed on screen at Bodmin jail in Cornwall by the spirit of one Kreed Kafer. An anagram of “Derek Faker”, the name had been deliberately fed to him as a sceptical test of his skills by the programme’s resident parapsychologist, Ciaran O’Keeffe.
“We tell people everything is real, then it turns out he was a fake, so he had to go,” observed Yvette Fielding. Asked to look into the affair, the watchdog Ofcom ruled that there had been no violation of the broadcasting code since it was clear the programme was billed as entertainment rather than as serious scrutiny of the world beyond.
Popular opinion about Acorah was nonetheless divided. While many, especially those busy online, appeared to regard him as a charlatan who should be charged under the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 (since repealed), others admired his chutzpah.
Certainly, those who came to see his appearances at civic venues from Paignton to Southport — “there’s healing, elation and an uplifting night of mediumship” — seemed to regard it all as just a bit of fun.
And although Acorah was forced in 2012 to make an apology to the parents of Madeleine McCann — after claiming he had an intuition that their missing daughter had died but would shortly be reincarnated — television companies continued to favour him.
His other programmes included The Antiques Ghost Show (2002), Derek Acorah’s Quest for Guy Fawkes (2005) and a cameo in the Doctor Who episode ‘Army of Ghosts’ (2008).
The following year he tried making contact with the spirit of the late singer Michael Jackson during a seance broadcast live on television.
Acorah, who maintained consulting rooms in Liverpool, subsequently became a regular guest on panel game shows, and in 2017 was voted into fourth place in the 20th series of Celebrity Big Brother.
The youngest of three children, Acorah was born Derek Francis Johnson at Bootle in Liverpool in 1950. He later changed his surname to what he claimed was the maiden name of his grandmother, though this was disputed.
His father, a cook in the Merchant Navy, was often away and the family lived with his grandmother near Liverpool’s port.
Derek Acorah is survived by his wife Gwen and by a son from a previous marriage.
Derek Acorah, born on January 27, 1950, died on January 4, 2020.