TV star casts doubt over medium

TV star casts doubt over medium
Feb 26 2009
By Isaac Ashe
Loughborough Echo

A POPULAR Loughborough medium who delivers messages to loved ones on behalf of their dead relatives has come under fire by Time Team TV personality, Tony Robinson.

Darren Brittain, of Loughborough, was a guest on Tony Robinson’s The Blitz Witch programme for Channel 4 which investigated the paranormal.

During a private reading, Darren, who has been a spiritual medium for the last 18 years, told Tony Robinson details about his family – details later criticised by Mr Robinson and website Bad Psychics.

In the documentary, Tony said: “There was something about the reading that didn’t sit right with me. When he came up with the name Mary I thought ‘wow this is the mum of my kids.’ But then when he came up with her surname as well, it just felt to me like he’d googled some site.”

The site Bad Psychics, which claims to expose fraudulent mediums, says Darren’s work is “cold reading” where he uses vague questions to prompt an answer.

Darren says the programme taught him a lesson about giving private readings to those in the public eye as people will think he has researched them beforehand, but stressed “I didn’t google him.”

He told the Echo: “There was a lot of personal stuff in the meeting that couldn’t be shown. But I don’t get hung up about it. You can’t put God under a microscope in the same way you can’t put mediumship in a lab and get a concrete answer.”

He added: “It’s not very nice to hear but it’s just an opinion. We can’t really win. If we get it very accurate, we are fraudulent. If we are too vague, we are wrong.”