Television: Haunting television

Haunted Homes strikes fear into our hearts with its clichéd attempts to scare while Up for the Match is frightening for viewers, guests and presenters alike

The recipe is quite simple. Find a scared family in an old house. Find a psychic medium. Find a cynic. Cram them all in at night in a heightened atmosphere of anticipation. Add in a pitch-dark cellar and some night-vision cameras. Allow to simmer and serve to the public when the screams start.

This is the format that almost every television programme about the supernatural follows.

There are exceptions. Last year, RTÉ's Would You Believe made a programme about rational people in Dublin who believed that their homes had an unexplained presence or resonance. By avoiding gimmicky camerawork and all the other cliches, it came across as relatively intelligent. However, such pussyfooting around doesn't make for great mass-market television, which is why Haunted Homes cuts to the chase by not refusing any cliché available.

Mediums, it seems, are not called mediums anymore. Haunted Homes instead gives us a "paranormal consultant". This paranormal consultant seemed very good at her job, but some of her observations were, well, rather obvious. When first entering the bedroom of the "haunted house", she felt that someone has been physically scared in that room. Upon entering the cellar, she noted that she got a great sense of death down there and that it contained something left over from a long time ago.

These observations were undoubtedly insightful and sincere, but, to be honest, if I were a plumber called to a house that I knew to be haunted, I might well proffer the same opinions myself. Needless to say, she wound up down in the utterly dark cellar at night with the lady of the house, both psyching each other out with pertinent observations like "It was dark and now it has got darker", until a sudden noise (in reality the torch belonging to one of them getting knocked over) sent them scurrying for safety. It was time for the cynic to wander down to the cellar and enjoy 20 blissfully minutes twiddling his thumbs in the dark, undisturbed by any noise except the slight creaks, which, as he noted, you would expect in any 250-year old house. I don't know what he gets paid, but it strikes me as one of the easier jobs on television.

Naturally of course all television about the supernatural doesn't need to use such clichés, which is why the nicely shot supernatural drama Afterlife was so radically different. Afterlife, you see, features a psychic medium and a deeply sceptical cynic.

There must have been a time when somebody in RTÉ thought that Up for the Match was a good idea. The format is simple – invite loads of guests who have a connection to the All-Ireland finalists and have two gallant but vaguely embarrassed looking hosts, Des Cahill and Mary Kennedy, trying to look fascinated by humorous anecdotes that sound remarkably like the humorous anecdotes trotted out last year and the year before. It has all the feel of an awkward family gathering where everyone will gainfully go through the motions of having the "craic" or else die smiling. The problem with family gatherings, as someone in RTÉ discovered around 25 years ago, is that if you have one this year, you're struck with having one in every year to come. Of course, they could always tweak the format slightly next year and bring on a physic medium and a cynic.