MOST TEDIOUS

Ah, the darlings of Living TV: Yvette Fielding and Karl Beattie. A remarkable pair of human beings, whose deceptively simple idea to run around in the dark and film themselves doing it has earned them obscene amounts of cash. They want you to see dead people, they call it ghosthunting. I don't want to see people who are old enough to know better behaving like teenagers at a slumber party when their parents are away.

They trail around in the pitch darkness with a loud-mouthed so-called "historian" - someone who is not afraid of anyone or anything during the day and who would have no compunction ripping men's b*ll*cks off, but at night mysteriously turns into a screaming, apparently terrified woman - and a medium who can barely pick up any details of the living, never mind the dead.

However, the phrase that strikes the most dread and fear into my own heart is this one: "And now...on Living TV: the first night of Most Haunted Live!!!" This began as a 3 hour experiment as the gang trailed around a castle searching for ghosts, a la Scooby Doo. They even took a dog on one or two of their live investigations, going by the oh-so scientific principle that if it barked, there must be ghost in the place. Cue 3 hours of barking. Which viewers actually watched...

Since then it has evolved into a - sometimes - week-long endurance test of who can take the most: the ghost hunting team who blunder around for 3 hours until midnight every night in the pitch darkness, or the viewers at home, straining their retinas as they stare dry-eyed at the green and white broadcast for signs of death.

(Make up your own mind about that last sentence...)

The show thrives on its Interactive thread, in which moronic half-wits with barely a grasp on reality are encouraged to text in their psychic impressions, e-mail, or even fax in their psychic art. Sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The number of crazy people allowed to live freely in Britain without any sort of home help or permanent medication really is the most frightening aspect of the entire programme.

Is there anybody left in the country who is able to exercise any type of critical thinking at all? Even the skeptics that are employed to give the other side of the argument - that there is no "other side" - are so biased in their opinions that i am surprised that they can walk in a straight line. One of them, who shall remain nameless, is actually scared of the dark. How frickin' scientific.

Don't get me wrong. I love a good mystery. However, the only mystery here is how this show became so popular in the first place. It's like tuning into the potters' wheel for 3 hours, the longest intermission on Earth...