TELEVISION

FT’s very own couch potato, STU NEVILLE, casts an eye over the small screen’s current fortean offerings

Paranormal Caught On Camera

Blaze

As has been noted before in these pages, one of the inevitable results of so many people carrying phones capable of capturing unconvincing fortean footage is a proliferation of programmes that aggregate such clips and present them with varying degrees of criticality. Paranormal Caught On Camera exemplifies this approach, hitting every motif we’ve come to expect: “From poltergeist activity to lights in the sky, these first-hand accounts just might turn sceptics into believers!”; or, in some cases, the reverse, but this isn’t really considered. The individual episodes are resolutely cookie-cutter in format: starting with the nowclassic portentous intro: “Does

The photo shows a blurry grey thing sticking out of blurry blue water

THIS shocking footage really show A DEMONIC ATTACK?” – just think of the mileage Shatner would get from that line – complete with highlights from the forthcoming episode in the manner of Gerry Anderson productions, albeit less well-acted.

With admirable earnestness, the graphic announces, “Case ID: The Cabin from Hell”, and it wastes no time in zooming in, satellite-style, on a beeping dot, as often as not somewhere in the American mid-West, and the voiceover booms back in: “Herberderbertsville,

Ohio” followed by a potted history of the location, and the tale of how the poor, hardworking labourer and his family of 11 inadvertently built a log-cabin in the midst – inevitably – of a sacred First Nation graveyard.

All manner of unsettling occurrences later, they fled, as has everyone else who has tried to make a home in it. The real mystery here, of course, is why anyone wants to live in a haunted shed in the middle of nowhere; but sadly the programme has no time for such philosophical debates, concentrating instead on the low-light antics of people in baseball caps shrieking and the kind of footage Most Haunted fans know and love. Meters ping, people get mysterious scratches, things fall over. Being Stateside, there’s lots of talk of demons, as opposed to common or garden ghosts, and soon enough PCOC’s regular experts appear to give their verdict: “If this is real, then it could be a ghost” – well, gee, thanks.

A bit of calm, and crediting the audience with critical thought and an attention span, would work wonders, but there’s weirdness to cram in. Later in the same episode we’re treated to footage of an alleged Almasty chasing a carful of Russian teens – cue a Lada full of adolescent shrieks as the creature moves in, rather endearingly, with the same gait as the eponymous Robot Monster from the 1953 B-movie (sadly sans diving helmet). Then we get skytrumpets; a clip of a misty figure apparently opening a suburban front door and, on a similar theme, an old FT favourite, the fire-dooropening (and closing) ghost of Hampton Court. “Is this a victim of HenryVIII’s wrath?” Well, given that its costume looks to date from at least 100 years later, it appears to be wearing a Skeletor mask and it can open and close fire doors that didn’t exist in the 16th century, I’d hazard not; but this doesn’t put the experts off either.

As a time-passer it’s good enough, but this can be done far better, and in next issue’s review I’ll look at an example that shows how.