afterlife and the BBC Fake Psychic Podcast
Content warning: death, ghosts, abuse, suicide, mental health, fake psychics.
This post may either mark the final end or a pause in my posts for Seventies TV Season. I actually have another dozen seventies TV shows listed on a post-it on my laptop, but of course I could always keep them for another Seventies TV Season in the future! I haven't written a post of conclusions after the thirteen posts on seventies TV series because I honestly don't have much to conclude except to say that seventies TV obviously needs to be treated with caution but I am particularly pleased to have discovered The Organisation, which I didn't think I would like.
I was turning over the possibility of a series of posts in the run up to the holiday about the legendary BBC series associated with Christmas, appropriately enough called A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971 to 1978 and 2005 onwards), and the show which was their inspiration, Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968), broadcast in the Omnibus series. However I think that these would probably be difficult propositions for a series of posts lasting over weeks, since they have all been chewed over at length and it would be a bit difficult to say anything which hasn't already been said. In point of fact if you haven't seen it, my personal opinion is that the 1968 Whistle and I'll Come to You is head and shoulders above the rest.
Instead this post may be a stand-alone post about afterlife or it may be the first of a number. In fact I can't believe I haven't blogged about this series yet, since it is honestly the best ghostly TV series there is. Perhaps I should make it clear that this post is about the 2005 to 2006 ITV series created by Stephen Volk and starring Andrew Lincoln and Lesley Sharp, and not the 2019 to 2022 Netflix series After Life created by and starring Ricky Gervais, and I really wish people would start copyrighting the titles of their shows. The series stylises its title as afterlife with a lower case a but I doubt I'll remember to do that for a whole post.
The show takes virtually all of the tropes of the classic Victorian ghost story and brings them horrifyingly into the 21st century: ghosts who warn, the angry dead, a ghost who kills her abusive father, the dead who refuse to die, the dead who just won't leave, an apparent ghost which foretells the future, those who've dies by suicide and accident, ghosts who kill people, and so on. Take any of these stories, set them in a nineteenth century castle of cathedral city, and you pretty much have M R James. Stephen Volk is perhaps best known to TV fans for writing the legendary mockumentary Ghostwatch (1992) which was so realistic that there had to be an enquiry into the show's effects as a result of people thinking it was real. That sheer writing ability shows through here in stories which really take hold of you and shock you, even after repeated viewings.
The idea is that Robert Bridge is a university lecturer in psychology who deals a lot with the psychology of belief in the supernatural in his lectures, including taking his students to see a medium, Alison Mundy, and the rest of the show is how Robert and Alison get involved with each other and an exploration of what follows from both their perspectives. Robert starts off deciding to write a book about Alison but ends up more involved than he would like to be. Lincoln actually does an incredibly good job of playing the world's least competent and sensitive psychologist, who has a habit of saying 'No, no, listen to me,' to people, and Sharp absolutely shines as the unwilling medium who is pursued by the dead everywhere she goes but doesn't want to be. I cannot overstate how challenging these roles must have been, especially as both portray incredibly difficult things in both their lives that are revealed in the course of the series.
In line with this the emotional pitch of the series is cranked up to the max. This absolutely is not a criticism: you can't talk about having a dead person trying to kill your baby in a calm tone of voice so it fits perfectly. In fact I would say it is perfect that the whole cast all act at such an extreme emotional pitch because if there was somebody acting normal in the cast it would make the others look completely loopy. I suppose the show didn't really have an option about this because it is a drama rather than a documentary, and so cold, objective description isn't the agenda here.
That notwithstanding, afterlife does not stray away from the terribly difficult life events that are involved here, however always depicts them with sensitivity. Both Robert and Alison face things from their pasts during the course of the series: Alison a train crash, her previous compulsory mental health treatment and issues with her mother, and Robert the death of his son and the break up of his marriage. This show is not light viewing unless you've been burned out by years of psychiatric nursing and stopped feeling emotions as a result.
The series also deals very well (in what I suppose you would call a 'non-denominational' way) with the religious aspects of death and mediumship. The people who invite Alison to medium for them after she moves to Bristol certainly look as if they would be church goers and I think most mediumship in Britain carries on under the aegis of the Spiritualist Church, but no church is mentioned and God barely comes into it except at a funeral. The cosmology Alison describes sounds broadly in the line of modern mediumship: of describing people 'passing over' etc.
If you want a criticism you could say that this highly-layered show covers most of human life and you may think it's a bit ambitious, but of course that's what makes it such an excellent show. Where it doesn't do so well in my opinion is that I don't think it is as sure-handed at dealing with the mental health aspects that come up. For example, there is an episode where a young man called Daniel is troubled by another entity who he calls Daniel 2, and ends up sectioned and diagnosed with schizophrenia but Alison unravels what is actually happening. We don't notice it because Nicholas Shaw does an excellent job of running round half naked, covered in blood and being deranged, but I'm far from happy with Daniel being diagnosed with schizphrenia when he has been the same and seeing the other Daniel for well over a decade. This feels terribly nitpicky, which is a reflection on the quality of this series. My background is in mental health not psychology, but I'm not sure how representative what we see of Robert's teaching would be with undergraduate psychology lectures. I suppose in common with shows featuring nurses or clergymen, the profession is the background, and I still feel really nitpicky. My final criticism, which I think is more reasoned, would be that as depicted in the show Alison is just fair game for any passing spirit. I refuse to believe that if you are a trained medium you wouldn't have ways of defending yourself from just any odd spirits passing you who might wander in. In fact, I know for a fact that these ways exist because Dion Fortune published Psychic Self Defence in 1930 (and incidentally I can highly recommend her novels).
afterlife is one of those shows that you have to watch by order.
On the same subject matter but in a very different vein, I have listened to the BBC's Fake Psychic podcast, and can also recommend that very highly. It is about self-confessed fake psychic Lamar Keene, who was a medium trained by the Spiritualist church and set up his own church. He published a (hotly denied) expose of the tricks he saw used to produce messages from the dead for people, and in fact said that the whole thing was fake. It's a fascinating listen, although again it provides a reflection on human life when he tells the members of his church that he has been cheating them, expecting them all to walk out, but they are all quite happy to stay in the church and continue to be cheated!
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