Talking a load of crystal balls

A lazy tale of ESP-enhanced children leaves common sense far behind
Cutting Edge: my kid's psychic Channel 4

Television has become awfully worried about our children. When Jamie Oliver is not delivering them from Turkey Twizzlers, Supernanny is whacking them with tough love. With all but the final of Young Musician of the Year now shunted off on to BBC4, it would normally be encouraging to see a documentary celebrating their special talents. When these talents, however, include the ability to see the dead, read tarot cards and perform reiki healing, it is time to get depressed again.

Cutting Edge (7 August, 9pm) got itself mixed up in a New Age movement that believes mankind is currently taking a huge evolutionary leap and, in a single generation, producing ESP-enhanced kids, otherwise known as Indigo and Crystal children. It identified Britain's pushiest mother, Nikki Harwood, a flame-haired regular on one of the digital channels devoted to selling live psychic readings. She was desperately keen for her unexceptionable daughter Heather to do nothing less than "heal the earth" (and earn some pocket money doing psychic readings at the local town hall).

One doesn't want to be too hard on Harwood who, we were told, has had seven miscarriages. Since she believes these seven foetuses are alive and well and experiencing a happy parallel childhood as spirits in the very house in which she lives, she is clearly suffering some form of not very sophisticated denial. Nor does one want to castigate 15-year-old Heather for trying to please her mum. I am more inclined to call in the social services to give a stern lecture to the Cutting Edge producer Vivianne Howard, who apparently did not think it her duty as a responsible citizen to let us know that Heather and Nikki were talking crystal balls.

Admittedly, the evidence was all there for us - or rather not there. Anxious for independent verification of her child's powers, Nikki sent Heather and her best friend Sarah off to a senior New Ager. "Telepathy is like a broadband stream," said Ms Green, comparing Heather's ESP with the dial-up brain most of us get by on and instructing her to practise telepathy on Sarah. The girls stared at each other, giggled, and got a feeling that the other one was saying: "Hi, this is fun." Next, Heather was asked to stand up and receive the broadband from the Other Side. She looked embarrassed for 30 seconds, then said she had picked up the word "good". Ms Green declared this a great result, although she said Heather had missed the little detail that Rosabelle, her dead twin, had been the one saying "good". In the corner, Nikki wept tears of pride and joy. By the end of the summer, her prodigy was tarot-trained and "licensed" as a reiki healer. "She's all up and legal," she boasted.

Sadder, because it lacked the showbiz element, was the tale of Simone Banks, whose eight-year-old son Oliver has been diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Turning on the real broadband, she found an alternative on the internet: that Oliver was Indigo, too. This confirmed suspicions she had had when he was three and had shouted "train" at an empty field where once there had been a railway line. Oliver now made a habit of seeing things that were not there. During the big set-piece interview, however, he could not explain the difference between the dead people he saw and the living ones. Simone, torn between believing and wanting her kid cured, was at her wits' end.

After 40 minutes of this cheerless nonsense, I was looking for a teacher, a doctor, or sociologist to provide some context. Instead, the only criticism came from an internet truth-teller who reduced Nikki to tears by telling her: "It's all Hollywood, my dear", and from her son Christopher, who, after enduring a local "Children of the Soul" meeting, confided that he thought his mum was making it all up because of her mid-life crisis.

Some documentaries are made in the cutting room. This one was lost in it. It should not have been left to a surly teenager and random e-mailer to modify its lazy, lazy stance of "Me, I'm just here to report, not judge".

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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