Welcome again to the blogging of Channel 7’s The One – previous odes to joy are found here!
Oh, enthusiasts of the genre, as the intro to this third episode of the show says: you should be prepared for the impossible!
Yes, unlikelihoods such as the master of the mostly-forgotten rock show Countdown from the 80s Molly Meldrum being enthusiastic! Glenn A Baker, Australian music critic, crapping on ad infinitum! And Andrew Daddo, desperately trying to fill in the gaps of woeful performances once again, by the remaining try-hards who are just getting more and more trying…
Bonus performances include judge ‘Let’s Get Metaphysical’ Stacey DeMarco getting dribbly over the notion of ‘accuracy’ whilst Richard ‘BrainsBodyBoth‘ Saunders defines ‘a hit’ as specific as ‘your boss is named David… not the bleeding obvious and no fishing’…
Pfft. You didn’t expect it to be that simple, did you? No, dedicated readers, the impossible would be
following the rules set by the show rather than blagging on about a bunch of other things that the Australia’s Next Top want to be Psychics (ANTPs) pull out of their proverbial rabbit-hats. But never fear. Bloggers of Thinking is Real ilk and myself are keeping tabs on exactly what they claim they can do.
Plus, of course, when they screw it up…and then the whole thing goes out the window as soon as the editors get their sticky hands on the footage!
Yes, it’s appears to be another round of Australia’s Next want to be a Top Psychic, but NO! It’s more about Australia’s Next want to be a Top Haunted Building! It’s chills, spills and a lot of thrills about… well, nothing much really. This episode is probably the most tragic yet, as the contestants grip their hands in anguish as it’s fail, fail, fail – enough to fill a whole blog full of them. Oh look, they have!
But first – how well versed are you on cold… uh, speed reading? Let’s refresh your skills, thanks to the brilliant BBC TV series, Hustle! Here’s how the con artists do it…
Now, I already briefly mentioned Richard Saunders defining what a ‘hit’ is:
It’s not always an easy question to answer; we’re looking for very precise things, like ‘your boss is named David’ – NOT ‘who is David?’ Not the bleeding obvious, like to an elderly person ‘I sense that your parents are deceased.’
Did you pay attention Andrew Daddo? But let’s see how it played out: they’re off and racing!
Spiritual Postman – “Dad”? “Cancer”? Buggers around with claims that this woman will get into studies, some weird stuff about shoes (well, they are all snappy dressers on this show… I’ve never before seen so much leather outside of a car upholstery warehouse…) – it’s fail, fail, fail.
Hang on. He gets a second go, after a TOTAL failure of NOTHING right with their first? Check the image people, see how they are openly only registering the hits by using a counter on the screen? Such a lovely lady and not a single hit. Thankfully for Postman, he is better at the ‘bingo’ second time around and just repeats everything he said previously to the ‘wrong’ woman and… because she was nodding away, he’s able to rack up the points.
Hokey Cokey – damn, once they get into the ’speed’, they are like a tree full of monkeys. She actually narrows down her likelihood by getting THREE up from the audience onto the stage – so the probability of having a ‘it’s not you, it must be her’ is high. With tax time coming up, of course accounts are going to be on the menu… a miserable looking woman gets told she’s sad… then coddled with a bunch of empathy… doesn’t this sound like most of the excuses given as to why people go to psychics? The weird thing is that the ‘hit’ monitor starts cranking up, despite there not being any real hits for that session.
WHAT is it with Poster Girl For Tylenol and headaches and pains?? Essentially it’s all upper-stomach bloating, sharp pains and respiratory problems. One man later goes ‘uh, maybe she was talking about my ankles?’ – oh whatever. We cut to Stacey making excuses about ‘issues of time and directness… it’s the competition’. Uh, then why do the competition if you can’t do it?
The Kurgan – blows it with an old lady who has none of the stereotypical ‘knitting’ or hip problems. Finally, with a guess that a young teen must have had heart-ache or depression at one point, he gets a hit. Oh, come on, these are his ‘educated guesses’ as he puts it?
I think with Headless Chook, the studio went haywire with the counter and starts chucking up hits without really reflecting what was going on – since the requirements were specifics, she missed with a mother dying of cancer (died other condition); it wasn’t clear whether the kids were linked to the ‘birthday’ mentioned nor the names of Wendy or just how specific are you to claim an older female relative wore glasses and had lighter hair than the mark? There were few specific direct hits and a lot of guesses that got some vague nods but nothing elaborated. How much work did the editors put into this to eliminate the misses?
Right – how many of you admire cop-killers? Thugs? Criminals put to death? Well, let’s see if the ‘legend’ of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly stands up to having a bunch of people run around the building where his remains were found and tell us where they ended up!
Star of the show – “Australia’s Most Haunted Building“! Hang on, isn’t that half a dozen buildings throughout Australia? Ooops. Old Melbourne Gaol should do something about that…
Beautiful shadow work, lots of overhead shots, great – oh that’s right, there’s a bunch of people wreaking all the antique atmosphere by galloping about as if they are Doctors Stanz, Venkman and Spengler, minus the proton energy packs. Guys, don’t cross the streams. And please, just stop with the ‘ooh gosh – spoooooooookkkyyyy’ attitude, you come across as dorks. Uh, too late.
First – it’s the State Library of Victoria, as they smudge their noses hopefully on the glass cases containing his death mask, gun, helmet and assorted paraphernalia. I’ve seen these whilst on tour, they’re kind of cool to check out. But the ANTPs crap on about ‘not being his time’ and ‘only hurt a bit’ and ‘injustice’. Sorry, some Australians are a bit weird about hero-worshiping a tried and hanged criminal. But don’t let that get in the way of enjoying some of their responses to the chase for Neddy’s bones!
Woooh, there’s cells! Oooooh, there’s atmosphere… energy energy energy and ‘yuckiness’! Woah, there’s a lot of wandering around with their eyes shut – people, please, think of the furnishings, having you go arse over tit down a stairwell don’t make good footage. Much.
Poster Girl for Tylenol – needs painkillers, STAT! Yep, she’s not only choking on the scene where she thinks Neddy was hanged – she’s choking with this challenge. Lots of anguished over-dramatic retching as the rest of us roll on the floor with laughter as she gamely responds to the ‘essence’ of Ned carking it. DOES she respond to every sodding spot in every city where someone has died?? I’m surprised she can get out of the house every day, with this performance.
Quote of the night:
Richard Saunders – Quite frankly, we’re seeing a lot of people let their imaginations run away with them.
By the end, we have a bunch of quotes by consultant historian Alex McDermott which only confirm hits that the ANTPs were coming up with – but none of the misses. If Headless Chook did oddly talk about a gold-watch, it’s nothing that she couldn’t easily Google ahead of time.
Okay Daddo. Hang on. He admits that the bones ‘COULD’ have been Ned Kelly’s that were at the site – in fact, news reports said ’strongly suggested’ – were they or 
weren’t they?
He said historical evidence strongly suggested the remains of about 32 executed prisoners, including Ned Kelly, were exhumed from the Old Melbourne Gaol and re-interred at Pentridge in 1929.
Mr Smith said the identification of individuals might prove difficult because of decomposition and the mingling of remains. “Ned Kelly’s remains were . . . not handled with a great degree of care,” Mr Smith said. Mr Smith said it was possible Kelly’s skull and other body parts had been stolen immediately following his execution.
What was actually the point of doing all the ‘getting in touch’ if it might not actually be his… oh whatever. Let’s look at the results for dem bones, dem bones.
The ANTPs hang around the Pentridge Prison building site where bones were discovered in March, 2008. Not too difficult to Google, as I said. Want to get an idea of how close they really get?
Here’s the map, showing where bones were found in red. Now, have a look at Poster Girl For Tylenol in this shot – where you can see the green in the background – which is where they were supposedly found. She walks about another meter or two in that direction she’s currently heading in and stops. 
NO, don’t look at her bright pink stockinged legs and bright blue boots. This is not Australia’s Next Top Model, this is Australia’s Next To Make You Go Colour Blind Due To Contestant’s Dress Sense. Good.
Now, you can actually get a better idea of how far away she was when she chose her spot. Fairly far. ‘Within twenty meters’ is what Stacey later gets gushy about. But let’s face it – she isn’t close. Hell, she didn’t even go up the slight incline to the embankment to check out the spot.
Poster Girl and Headless are probably the two that get within ‘able to see where it is’ distance – Postman is further off, Hokey Cokey fell down a rabbit hole and The Kurgan was off thinking about fighting The Highlanders and ended up in Scotland, I think.
Richard, naturally, is unimpressed – this is what you’d get ‘if I got five different people and to wander around aimlesslessly.’
Yet Stacey tries to play Devil’s Advocate with a babble about “within twenty meters of a target within four thousand square meters” – Stacey, Stacey – that’s sixty by sixty meters. A circle that was 20m in radius would be about 12 hundred square meters in area. SO, they have just barely narrowed it down to about a seventy percent reduction? And if you see from the picture of the area here – it’s hardly a thing. It’s barely the length of a semi-trailer, how far they were!
Thinking is Real Blog has a nice illustration, but admittedly it’s not the right shape of the area, but of a circle and I would argue that the area was further restricted by the building enclosures. But it’s an excellent demonstration of just how It’s. Still. A. Freaking. Miss. They were meant to FIND the spot. They found mud. Glorious mud.
And that’s where I’ll leave it tonight, with the very talented cold-reader Derren Brown reminding you just again how it is done. Pay attention, ANTPs… this is how you get both respect and a good show…
![[Valid RSS]](http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/9879/validrsscf0.png "Validate my RSS feed")
{ 4 comments }
I thought Glenn A. was a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness or something. Are they supposed to be daddling in occult??????
As watching I googled “ned kelly fobwatch” on my phone and the Wikipedia reference came up second result or something. If it’s on Wiki I don’t think we can call it obscure. Anyone want to argue none of them would have just goggled NK in the weeks leading up to the “challenge” Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
The map was teh bollocks.
The woman with depression was at a number of the tapings. She sat next to Rachael and I for one and was really very lovely but absolutely desperate for a reading (she had one of her items up there during the psychometry they did in the last ep but didn’t get picked). I can but wonder whether she was shuffled forward by the audience wranglers, and who knows what else was said.
I wish they’d shown the cold readings in full, all five minutes of them, and had two scores, one for hits and one for misses. It would be completely boring television, but a clear example of how worthless these people are. Assuming they were making random guesses at the same rates shown during the 30 seconds or so when the hits occurred, they’d end up with score sheets something like 97 misses, 3 hits (assuming average 3 hits and 20 guesses per minute). Or 3% accurate. That all really rather puts it in context.
I missed this episode. Can you you feel my disappointment LOL
I also Googled the watch with the same result – “Stringy Bark Creek” exactly as the expert mentioned. However, if we assume these really are Australia’s best cold readers then we should also assume they are among Australia’s best statisticians and therefore probably very well read, especially in areas of Australian History.
Although I know almost nothing about Kelly, when I read the wiki quote “What’s the use of a watch to a dead man?”, I recalled that I had heard the story before. It’s not the sort of information I retain which is why you should never include me on your quiz night table.
My daughter commented that she had been told at school of Kelly’s fixation with his mother. So even if they had no access to Google, the chances that two of them would be aware of these things isn’t truly surprising.
Thanks for the Derren Brown vid. I’d seen the name before but never actually seen what all the fuss was about. Classic stuff.
Comments on this entry are closed.