“Places aren’t haunted. People are haunted” mews the terrifyingly insipid Jennifer Love Hewitt in ‘Ghost Whisperer’. Given, Love Hewitt does employ all of her acting prowess: She pouts, a lot. She wears ridiculous outfits that you are most likely to see in a nursing home for retired Dynasty actresses. Close ups of her face seem permanently in soft focus, which makes you question your eyesight after a while. Apart from having deep and meaningfuls with the recently departed (that no ones seems to notice), she also runs an inexplicably sparse antiques store. There is hardly ever a customer in it. Even if there was, I’m not sure what they would buy. I might send ABC a script for next series. I imagine it would be a sad and touching tale, in which the antiques emporium goes out of business due to the ensuing credit crunch. Luxury buys are the first to go, not even the dead can help with that.

Love Hewitt: "I dress like dead people"

Then there’s ‘Medium’, starring the squeaky-voiced Patricia Arquette, arguably the most talented and accomplished of the Arquette clan. OK, not a huge achievement, they aren’t the Baldwins are they? But she is streets again of brother David, who is so still working and is certainly not doing glorified extras work. Episodes predictably unfold with Patricia receiving annoyingly cryptic dream messages from the recently deceased, solving the crime through habitual whining rhetoric, much in the way I presume a miserable old geezer solves the Times crossword puzzle. 

Arquette: "Waiter, I won't be needing that table now, I've made other plans."

So, why the proliferation in living-on-dead action? Personally, I blame M. Night Shyamalan; the guy responsible for the movie-with-a-twist-you-could-never-guess, The Sixth Sense. Everyone remembers the Bruce Willis realisation montage, the part where you went ‘Ahhh, so he’s DEAD!’ Then there’s the ensuing ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, I haven’t seen it yet’ from those yet to view the ‘I totally didn’t see that coming’ moment. This seemed to open the floodgates for dead/non-dead interaction as a recurring theme. Within no time the made-for-TV movie ‘Living with the Dead’ appeared, starring acting behemoths Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. Didn’t see it? Nor did I…