Remembering the ecstatic chaos of Most Haunted—the jewel in the crown of early reality TV

A broken heart—I learnt in 2010—can make some quite odd demands. That year, I found myself dumped, back at home with my parents, and binge-watching Most Haunted with my older brother. My uni finals were fast approaching, but the only activity permitted by my mind and body was lying in a foetal position on the sofa, watching Yvette Fielding running around in the dark chased by a camera crew, as her dilated pupils glowed with pure, animal fear.

Most Haunted was a significant (if underrated) part of British reality TV’s golden age. It aired between 2002 and 2010 on what was then LivingTV at a time where the reality genre was new, trashy beyond all imagining, and utterly compelling. There were the early seasons of Big Brother with their manufactured heroes and villains; Come Dine With Me, with its snide commentary on the idiosyncrasies of middle England; and high-stakes competition shows like Pop Idol and X Factor. The common thread in all of these was intense, unscripted interpersonal drama. But Most Haunted was the only one in which that drama might play out between, say, a 400-year-dead viscount and a self-styled “psychic medium” from Bootle.

Ghosts aside, the interplay between said medium, Derek Acorah, and permanently-startled former Blue Peter presenter Yvette Fielding was nothing short of balletic. The former died on the 4^th of January, and will undoubtedly be missed by aficionados of the reality/paranormal genre like me. In the histrionic style of an evangelical preacher, Acorah would channel vengeful spirits with inexplicable accents, which would—more often than not—send the increasingly wide-eyed Fielding several steps further down the path to a full-on nervous breakdown. The premise of Most Haunted is one of the simplest in all of reality TV: Fielding and co travel to different supposedly haunted locations in the UK, stay the night, switch off the lights and see what happens. The genius being in the fact that almost nothing ever happens, and yet when it does—say, something vaguely goes “bump”—the reaction is total emotional chaos, all heightened by flashing eyes and green tint of the night vision footage.

Acorah was dropped from Most Haunted in 2006, after “psychically” coming up with the name “Rik Eedles,” during the filming of an episode. It turned out the name had been fed to him beforehand, and was an anagram of “Derek Lies.” At this point, Fielding herself denounced him as a fraud.

To give Acorah some kind of benefit of the doubt, perhaps one woman’s con artist is another’s performance artist. Either way, in its Acorah-led heyday, Most Haunted was essentially an adult version of a kids’ sleepover where, hopped up on sugar and adrenaline, group hysteria takes hold. Acorah is the equivalent of a hammy, stage school kid called Florence who—bored with the game of Truth or Dare—whips the other girls into a frenzy by half-pretending she saw the Candyman reflected in her glass of Ribena. Which makes Yvette Fielding the overly-sensitive kid who everyone deliberately tries to goad into losing her mind. This kind of ecstatic fear is, I put it to every fan of programmes like Most Haunted, something we crave as adults. Perversely, it’s comforting. It’s fun to watch someone like Fielding scared out of her mind while knowing full well, deep down. that she’s perfectly safe. And that’s exactly what my 20-year-old, heartbroken brain craved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUvKFWl6nKE

Derek Acorah is "possessed" in a 2004 episode.

The sleepover feel was exacerbated by a live Halloween episode in 2004, set around Pendle Hill in Lancashire. This was the site of a 1612 witch trial—part of the wider Lancashire witch trials—in which nine women and two men were hanged. Throughout the episode, which took place over three whole days, viewers were encouraged to text in any spooky observations. These messages were scrolled out over the live footage. Early on in the show, while Acorah claims to hear “Scottish voices” at a ruined castle, the following text animates along the bottom of the screen:

“Kitty from Bolton felt her room go completely cold as soon as the show started even though her heating is on full”.

This episode, watched by over half a million people, was basically a nationwide sleepover, in which Kitty from Bolton was one of the first to crumble under all the excitement.

“Move the table. Come on bitch, let’s see what you can do,” says a severely amped-up Fielding, during a table tipping séance in a derelict cottage. The table duly falls over completely, and one of its legs comes off.

(“It wasn’t the most sturdy of tables,” says the token sceptic, back in the studio.)

“Peg,” rasps Acorah, later in the same location, closing his eyes and appearing to channel… “Peg”, “Peg, Peg, Peg, Peg,” he continues. He urges the spirit to say more.

“Pego,” he says, “Pego?”

Fielding watches on in absorbed silence, like someone listening to an elderly relative tell a slightly outlandish story about rationing.

The thing is with Most Haunted though, in spite of its abject silliness, a small, embarrassing part of you wonders and hopes if a tiny bit of it might be real, like the mewling George Galloways and collapsed pavlovas of its television genre-mates. There’s an earnestness to it that’s slightly contagious.

What if there really was a Pego?