Derek Acorah is one of the most successful crooks currently still not only living a life outside of prison, but regularly appearing on your television screens in Most Haunted, and touring the country with his stage act. Acorah is one of a growing sector of the entertainment industry who claims he can contact your dead relatives for you (often for a small fee, thirty quid or so). Obviously he can't, but y'know. Spiritualism has a rich history in the Western world, but it's one that mostly died out at the turn of the 20th Century and everybody started getting a lot more sane and less prone to whacking out the Ouija board at parties. Modern-day clairvoyants are about as accurate as those who held seances in their back room in the early 1900s, and with about as many scruples. When Derek Acorah, or John Edward, or whoever claims to be contacting the spirit of a dead loved one who coincidentally has a relative in the audience with whom they'd very much like to speak, they're practising something called cold reading, which is effectively a con artist's trick of figuring out the names of people's loved ones through blind guesses, groping for common acquaintances and the like. The worst thing about clairvoyants is that, despite being a hoax that's long since been proven untrue, they're still allowed to prey on the weak, those seeking closure after the death of a loved one and the like. Less funny than Alien Autopsy, anyway.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/