The premise of the show High Spirits is a psychic named Shirley Ghostman goes around doing what psychics do: readings, making predictions, talking to pets, holding contests for the next big psychic celebrity and channeling the dead. Shirley is not a woman, but rather an effeminate, psychic stereotype--the kind of man you think might be stereotypically gay but are not sure because as a heterosexual you're uncertain as to whether the stereotypes are true. Regardless, in the first episode we start with spooky mansion angled camera shots reminding us of ABC Family's Scariest Places or the Travel Channel's Most Haunted and hear Patrick Stewart's voice introducing Shirley. Patrick Stewart--Jean Luc Picard--taking a back seat to a ditzy psychic? You know something's up unless the former captain was assimilated by the Borg again.

The audience applauds as we go inside and Shirley comes out dressed like a TV evangelist in white with a bad hairdo. He begins to do readings to the audience and receives an indication from the spirits that someone in the audience has been hit or impacted by a hippo. Now you know something's up.

Shirley Ghostman of course is a comedian playing a psychic and spoofing all that we've come to know about psychics--poorly done cold readings, messing with people's personal lives, and buying into ridiculous reading techniques such as rumpology. But in this show the audience is not aware that Shirley Ghostman is a fraud, or rather playing a fraud as is my personal opinion of most psychics. When a woman in the audience is told that there is a picture in her house of an ugly woman with a piggish nose she realizes Shirley is talking about her and she has been in a psychic, roundabout way insulted. In several instances I saw audience members smiling when Shirley chose to give them a reading and when the reading was over their jaws dropped. They were expecting something positive, something meaningful, and instead Shirley gave them something dreadful or what felt like an unintentional insult.

And that's unfortunately why I can't recommend this show. It is painful to watch. The humor is based on embarrassment and humor that just isn't entertaining. Shirley Ghostman doesn't come off as funny, he comes off almost like a real psychic that you want to punch out. I felt bad for the people in the audience who were given a reading. Hopefully they'll learn from the experience. The audience did start to catch on after awhile, especially after Shirley channeled the spirit of Princess Diana. But amazingly some people did not. As "Diana" talked, the camera took one or two shots of people crying. Crying because they were hearing their beloved Diana speaking to them from beyond the grave, and also saying some rather horrid things about Camilla. Even with what was an obvious comedic hoax people were still wanting to believe that this was real.

At the end of the show when Shirley channels the spirit of Roy Orbison to sing a previously unpublished song, it looked like most of the audience "got it". That this was one big gag. I wonder how many in the audience did not.

The show is also interspersed with other exploits of Shirley and another odd identity that he plays, kind of a mentally deficient wannabe psychic, when he visits a rumpologist. Rumpology was not part of the comedy. It's an actual practice where people pay a psychic to read their ASS! As much as I didn't like this comedian, this rumpologist deserved all the ill treatment she got. Wake the hell up. When someone is telling your future based on your ASS it means your brain has been pooped out of it and flushed.

As far as I've read, Britain has far less religiosity than the USA, but the void has been filled in by psychic superstition to the point where it is considered religion itself. Thus the reason this comedian felt it would make a good show. I predict this show won't last long on BBC America. It has kind of an Mtv JackAss mentality that honestly isn't funny and if you're going to offend supernatural believers you're going to have to be especially clever. I can't stand psychics and I didn't like the show. So unless my sense of humor is not in step with modern times than that may be a pretty good indication that the show fails to amuse--it's more like a car wreck that you take a glance at and then speed up because you're holding up traffic. British humor is very different than American humor and I could be wrong, but being that I'm a big fan of British shows such as The Office and Ed vs Spencer I would guess that most American viewers will agree with me.

yours sincerley

Chris