I had a day off work recently. Shuffling around in my duvet, waiting for the Tweenies to come on, I noticed that Richard and Judy (the golden couple of daytime TV or a self-satisfied, sanctimonious twat married to his granny, depending on who you ask) had a medium on the show. Now this obviously wasn't going to be a sceptical, or even unbiased, view of the craft by any means: most daytime TV presenters struggle to follow an autocue, never mind think for themselves.

Richard and Judy are worse than most in this respect. He wouldn't recognise a rational thought if it jumped up and chewed his scrawny arse off, whilst she couldn't spot a logical fallacy if it grabbed her by the wattles and slapped her till she split. They uncritically lap up 'unsolved' mysteries and tales of the paranormal like crack whores sucking spilled methadone from a filthy carpet. This, of course, makes it essential Happy Sceptic viewing. I girded my loins and sat down to watch...

Interestingly, the medium did the reading without first meeting or communicating with the subject (allegedly - we have no record of what went on in the studio before the reading). This is quite unusual, because most such mediums rely upon cold reading to elicit information. The reading was then read back to the subject who commented upon it, with R & J adding their own two-penn'orth.

"She did very well seeing as she only had ten minutes!" gushed Richard. So just how well did she do? The main points of the reading are summarised and compared against the subject's comments:

So not very good at all, Richard, is it? Even two of the three 'hits' are dodgy generalisms and standard medium fare. Now, let's put things into perspective and pretend that the reading was done for me:

Uncanny! A hit rate of over 25%. I take it back - that is just too spooky to be guesswork!

But of course that's exactly what it is, as the results show. With no cold reading to beef up the apparent hit rate - or to extract specifics such as names - the 'reading' is just a sad hodgepodge of truisms, formulaic generalisations and blatant guesses. As for Richard's comments about how good it was for the time taken - how long do you need to speak to a dead person? Do they have to do telepathic limbering exercises first? Do they speak really slowly because their vocal cords are a bit stiff?

And why can't you get a straight answer from the buggers? Why did the spirits give the medium in this case the name Harold and the house number 31, when this was meaningless? Are all ghosts as thick as pigshit? Or are they just taking the piss, goaded on by their spectral mates: "Go on, tell her his grandfather had grey hair - he died when he was 35! Hahahaha!!". The afterlife must be a bit dull if this is how they have to get their kicks.

Why can't a dead person tell a medium, just once, something like: "Your subject had a granddad named Frank; he was a quality assurance manager for Oxton Metal; he died aged 83 when he was hit by a falling chimney; he had three kids - Dave, Joe and Tarquin; he drank too much and was unfaithful to his wife; most of his 'friends' actually hated him. Oh yes - next week's Lottery numbers will be 4,16,34,35,37,49". And be right. It's not much to ask of a friendly, omniscient spirit, is it? (And why is the 'afterlife' always nice? I'm personally looking forward to the day when a medium tells a subject "Your dad's in hell and is in eternal torment and pain. You granny is there too, being buggered senseless by an army of shrieking incubi".)

Richard and Judy continued at length with their bogus analyses and with their effusive praise for what was so obviously just a tired old lady making bad guesses about strangers' lives. And all this accepted as fact by the majority of viewers. Millions of Prozac-raddled housewives lolling on sofas, drooling mouths agape, hungrily soaking up these latest 'truths' from R & J like incontinence pants soak up piss. It was all too much for me: I switched off, lay back and waited for the sense and the sanity of the Tweenies.