I recently went to to see the 'psychic to the stars' Sally Morgan at Middlesbrough town hall, and if there was one word I could use to describe my night it would be 'boring'. First off I feel I have to say that I personally don't believe that psychics exist so, as you can imagine, I find people like Sally distasteful. This, however, was not the reason why I found the night boring as I do love this kind of thing and was genuinely excited to not only see her, but to gauge the audiences reaction to her show. The reason that it was boring was because the audience did not respond well to her after relatively early on in her performance, she showed the level of her psychic abilities.

For those who don't know, psychic Sally Morgan is a British television and stage artist who claims to have (you guessed it...) psychic abilities. She believes that she inherited her abilities from her Grandmother who was affectionately known locally as the witch of Fulham. She has been the star of her own show and has an extensive list of clients including celebrities and royalty, and is currently on the road showing off her psychic abilities.

Sally came to Middlesbrough on Friday night and her show started off very well. Even though she was getting the vast majority of what she was saying wrong the audience did not seem to mind and seemed to be having a good time. The point at which the audience became disillusioned with the performance was quite specific. One aspect of the show is that audience members can submit photographs of dead loved ones, in the hope that Sally will select theirs, and give a psychic reading from it. Sally pulled out of a box on stage one of these pictures. She held the picture up to the camera and it was projected on the large screen behind her. The picture was of a middle-aged woman and by the clothes she was wearing and the quality of the image, I guessed it was taken some time in the 1990s. Sally immediately began to get communications from beyond the grave from a man holding a baby named Annabel……or was it Becky. Noticing that no one in the audience was responding, Sally asked the person who submitted the photo to stand up. A rather small chunky woman at the centre of the hall stood up and Sally once again began to get messages from the afterlife. She was informed that this man and baby were somehow linked to the lady in the picture. However the woman in the audience (who was now also projected behind Sally) disagreed and started to look increasingly confused as, presumably, nothing Sally was saying made any sense to her. Sally then decided to flat out ask her if the woman in the picture had any children who passed and, when informed that that she hadn’t, responded by saying “I will leave that then”.

Sally then became in direct contact with the woman in the photo who began to tell her that there was a lot of confusion around her death and that she felt it was very very quick. She later went on to say that the day Wednesday has a specific link to her death and that she either died on a Wednesday or was taken ill that day. As the woman in the audience was not responding to any thing Sally was saying, she decided to ask how the woman in the photo was related to her. It turns out the woman in the audience got the whole concept of submitting a picture of someone you wanted to talk to from the afterlife completely wrong – and for some unknown reason submitted a younger picture of herself.

The hall erupted in laughter, which quickly changed into disapproving mumbles that lasted the rest of the night. No matter how hard Sally tried, she was unable to get the audience back, who were becoming increasingly disgruntled with the number of ‘misses’ she was getting. Not only that, but the audience seemed to become more restrained when Sally was asking them questions. I also don’t think that they reacted well to some of the particularly offensive scenarios Sally was recreating. One involved her re-enacting a dead man flushing narcotics down a toilet to his immediate family, whilst repeatedly saying “flush it down”. Another was when she was talking to a teenage girl whose boyfriend had recently committed suicide by hanging himself. Sally told the girl that she can feel him hitting her leg and that he was, infact, re-enacting swinging against a door as he was committing suicide.

I now think that the vast majority of people who walked out of Middlesbrough town hall that night feel as i do – that someone who is psychic should know if the person they are talking to is dead or not and that it’s quite a messed up thing for a person to pretend that they are in contact with a dead family member.