TELEVISION

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

“Alcatraz” reads the X-Filestypeface title of another episode of Mystery Quest (Blaze). Cue monochrome shots of peaked-capped guards wandering corridors to the echoes of shrieking from the solitarily confined. This barren island in San Francisco Bay, we’re told (somewhat superfluously), “was not a destination designed to inspire joy in its inmates”, with the almost inevitable addition that “hundreds of years ago, Native American tradition held that it was inhabited by evil spirits.” They always are. Over to Susan Sloate, author of The Secrets of Alcatraz, her face lit from below like a child up late holding a torch to its chin in order to tell a ghost story. She says reports started to emerge soon after the opening of the dreaded solitary confinement area and the subsequent suicides there: shrieks, groans and, intriguingly, the sound of Al Capone playing the banjo.

“We’re going to Alcatraz” we’re informed, which is probably for the best if we’re going to see the Paranormal Team, led by the doughty Tom Netzband, investigating the hauntings with the usual tried and tested methods: trying

“Native American tradition held it was inhabited by evil spirits”

to record sound, wandering around in low light pointing electronics at things and saying, “I just heard a voice!” Meanwhile, the Expedition Team are asking whether the three famous fugitives, as portrayed by Clint Eastwood and co., really did manage to Escape From Alcatraz, the route they must have taken, whether or not they’d survive, and what they would look like today (hint: older versions of themselves). Over to Frank Erne, skip tracer – “he finds people who don’t want to be found” – strolling up and down a nearby beach, who tells us that the escapees would have headed for land. He knows what he’s doing.

“June 11, 1962,” says the voiceover, as they follow Morris and the Anglin brothers’ trajectory through the Gormenghast architecture and out onto the rocks. But where did they go from there? Flicking between the two scenarios – the paranormal and the escape – means there’s an awful lot of recap involved.

Back to the Paranormal Team and their equipment – the Ovilus (which looks like the late 1970s toy ‘Merlin’) and the Paranormal Puck, both of which apparently convert paranormal activity into speech – as they process along the dingy corridor calling out to departed inmates . (“Hey Al Capone! I hear you play a mean banjo!”). They nab some EVP and later a chap in a tie looks at a laptop and says it’s not a sound that a human being could possibly make. We expect nothing less.

Back to the beach. Erne says that last year there was a report of a mysterious boat in the area on the night of the escape, and that this may be connected; he believes they got away, possibly to Brazil. The credits start running over the voiceover “Our teams have turned up important data!” Maybe, but no plucking Capone.