Judges Richard Saunders & Stacey Demarco
Hosted by Andrew Daddo (who can himself barely contain his skepticism), The One pits 10 psychics, mediums and other spiritual guides against each other in a number of challenges to test their supernatural-communicating abilities. Each challenge has a time limit to ensure it’s not just a case of random completion-by-luck, and there are a number of “cold reading” audience challenges to further test each contestant’s ability to channel their guides.
All the while the contestants are being judged by Stacey Demarco & Richard Saunders. Stacey is a renown psychic & communicator in Australia, and Richard is the president of the Australian Skeptics. This leads to some fun interchanges between the two as they discus the method and progress of the contestants during and after the challenges. From the 2nd episode they additionally have the responsibility of chosing a contestant they believe has performed the worst – thus proving they are not The One.
It’s an interesting series, and skeptics and believers alike will draw what they want from the show. As an example the first challenge has all 10 contestants dropped one by one in a large pine tree plantation with the task of finding a helicopter, being given a map of the area showing the boundaries and a personal item from the pilot, in 15 minutes. There’s some (but not a lot) of success. Draw your own conclusions from that. Over the course of the series you’ll also see live psychic readings, trying to identify a “thief” on a train inside 7 minutes after having only their backpack, and diagnosing medical conditions of people they’ve never met.
As a very smart move on the part of the producers, they’ve had each psychic make a prediction as to the final 3 in the competition, and these predicitions are opened as that contestant is evicted from the series. Did they predict who will make the final three correctly? If they’ve listed themselves at that point, they’re clearly wrong. Besides – if these 10 spiritual channellers are so good, why not ask them up front who would win and be done with the series? I suspect Daddo would have preferred it (but a gig’s a gig).
The One – Wed 7:30pm, Ch7.
What this show needs is a ‘mole’ – a skeptic with cold reading skills posing as a ‘psychic’. It would be wonderful at the end to have the skeptic win only to reveal, “I’m not a psychic – I’m a cold reader and illusionist. Everything I did was due to perfectly natural learned skills – nothing psychic about it.”
Here’s hoping Richard Saunders is far less heavily edited in the new series.