KEY POINTS:
It was a sticky late summer's eve in Wellington and the spirits were out in force.
Don, Roger, Frank, Ivy and a host of others - all jostling for position in the theatre of the old Town Hall - were struggling for the attention of the blond psychic
in sequins on the stage.
"Hold on," the psychic said, pressing her temples and frowning into the cacophony of their calls. "Ah yes, I see, I see. God bless. God bless.
"Tom?" she asked an elderly woman sitting halfway back in the audience. The woman shook her head. Didn't ring a bell. Her dead husband's name was Donald.
Tom, Don. Near enough it seemed. The psychic smiled and took the elderly woman's hand. "You'd better come down on to the stage."
T'was murder to be heard in Spirit World that night. But the occasional nibble was all the living in the seated rows needed.
Teams of ladies from the Hutt, shining with RadiEssence, looked to each other and smiled. This was so much better than sitting at home in front of the 42-inch flat screen.
Earlier the spirit of a young man had managed to make contact. "He passed quite suddenly," the psychic explained to his friend.
"The energy moves me quite suddenly in an arc shape," she said, thrusting herself forward by way of example. The ladies from the Hutt were riveted. A car accident maybe? A terrible fall?
"Can you explain how he passed?"
It was a brain haemorrhage, the friend replied.
"Ah," the psychic smiled. "Now I can explain what a brain haemorrhage feels like."
And at that, about 200 ladies clutched their entrance tickets (about $40 a piece) and sighed.
Wasn't she just amazing?
Television's own medium Jeanette Wilson had come to town and the show was just kicking off.
Out in the foyer her CD of meditations and three books (a guided message from Wilson free with each copy) were for sale along with Trumpets, Frujus and chardonnay.
"I cry a lot during the shows," she had earlier explained. "But also sometimes my nose runs a lot too. It's to do with the energy levels."
In fact it could all be a bit full-on sometimes. That's why these days she only connects with spirits on the fourth level or above - the ones who had learned to feel love.
She didn't enjoy talking to ghosts stuck on the astral plains. All that negativity took its toll.
But if anyone had hoped to offload someone who wouldn't pass on, they needn't worry: Wilson's spunky younger partner Andrew would conjure them up backstage and send them packing from the astrals before the show was over.
Talk about value for money.
But money is not what this is about, Wilson insists the next morning when we meet at the hotel over the road for an interview.
Sure there are the books (all bestsellers), the TV series, the $95 phone consultations, and her new book Backstage with Jeanette due for release this week ($29.99).
And of course there are the (almost weekly) road shows, of which she pumps at least half the proceeds, tax free, into her "Dharmic Trust" - a charity the spirits called her to set up "for the betterment of mankind" which currently funds a private eco school attended by Wilson's two kids and six of their friends.
Obviously, there are some material benefits to being able to commune with the dead. But really this is about a calling, Wilson insists, smiling deep into my eyes and shuffling so close on the couch that the photographer instructs us to separate.
"The shows help people enormously in ways I couldn't possibly imagine. I get letters everyday. They're just amazing." Saying what? "Oh you'd have to read them to see."
It takes courage to do what she does - that's why the spirits chose her - and, she is quick to remind us, it takes sacrifice.
"I earn about half as much as I did when I was a bank manager so I'm not doing it for the money. So why do it? Why would anyone say they talked to dead people if they didn't? They'd be mad."
It's impossible to know how much Wilson really earns.
Yet there's wholesomeness to her, in her sensible black shoes and quest to bring love and peace to the world, that has crowds the length of New Zealand smitten.
She has that butter-wouldn't-melt quality that clearly offers comfort to some who are grieving while at the same time deters the sceptics from asking too many hard questions.
Her calling came 13 years ago when she was a cynical bank manager in the United Kingdom and, she claims, she started seeing dead people.
It soon led to appearances psychic fairs and a healing practice in the town of Matlock, before, much to her surprise, giving rise to stardom on New Zealand television.
That's largely thanks to Andrew, then a young Taranaki panel beater, who walked into her Matlock clinic one day, declared himself her "universal partner" and a few months later brought her, pregnant, back home to New Plymouth.
Another baby later and Jeanette Wilson, UK Psychic Medium was soon on the road - the only travelling psychic medium on the New Zealand circuit, connecting the dead to the living for the cost of an ever-increasing entrance fee.
A couple of books followed and Wilson quickly came to the attention of TV3 who sent a documentary team to Taranaki to try to "catch her out" (as she puts it) but instead ended up offering her her own show.
Dare to Believe was born. And soon real people's real personal tragedies were beamed into our living rooms for our viewing pleasure.
TV3 will have to answer its conscience about whether it was innocent prime time entertainment or an abuse of the grieving and vulnerable. Or maybe it won't: The show didn't rate that well and will not be repeated, the channel insists, in odd contradiction with Wilson who says another series is planned.
Either way, Wilson's career was given the leg up.
It's a frighteningly powerful position for a person to be in, I suggest. She doesn't need to dare her clients to believe, they're desperate to.
But should they?
Either she's talking to the dead or she is not. And logic would have it, I suggest, that she's not.
Wilson starts to look concerned. "The only way you can discern it is by feeling. You can't discern it through mind. We're looking for something that's non-physical so you have to discern it with a non-physical sense. Your intuitive sense."
For example, she says, if scientists dissected a seed they would find the chemicals that it was made up of but not how it knew to grow into a plant.
"All that information is held someplace else. It's held on an energy level. I'm working on that energy level. And that energy level has to be, like, intuited."
That might come as news to botanists. But what I'm really after is proof.
A friend had urged me before last night's show to maintain an open mind. I did. But keeping it open too long in the face of a near constant stream of misses would have been silly.
Misses? She's frowning. "You'd be surprised. Other people's reaction was that it was a really good show."
So how does she propose we tell the difference between the con men and her?
She pauses. "It's your feelings."
But encouraging vulnerable, grieving people to go along with what their feeling doesn't seem like protection enough.
"No. Your feelings are what's going to guide you through life. Your feelings are in here." She clutches at her chest.
And that, she clearly reckons, is proof enough.
In the meantime there has been no training, no certification to quality her as a medium. She is "entirely spirit taught". They showed her the ropes and guided her in the writing of her four published books.
Her latest, Backstage with Jeanette, is probably the most controversial. It deals with death by suicide and murder, and proposes that each of them - each of us - chooses the moment and means of death.
And while some might find that disturbing, Wilson is adamant nothing happens by chance.
Take the son of the middle-aged couple whose tragedy capped off last night's show, for example.
"How often do two motorbikes hit head on? How often is the other driver your best mate? [She found that out talking to his parents later] That's not an accident and if you can understand that, and that there's a higher power, you know that they're all right."
Besides, his parents were "totally blown away" by making contact with their son.
To be honest, my friend and I were almost brought to tears by that episode too.
It was the part of the show where the audience held out pieces of jewellery, which Wilson uses to connect to the spirit world.
The couple sat in a small group halfway up the theatre. She: reposed in her belief. He: red eyed and crumpled by raw, recent grief, and clutching a young man's digital watch.
Soon after bringing them to the stage, Wilson was describing feeling squashed.
"Was this your son?" Tears began dribbling down the father's face. The mother nodded stoically. Yes.
The audience gasped. Wilson nodded too. She was feeling "concertinaed", she said.
Well, it was a head-on crash, said the mother.
"It wasn't long ago," Wilson added, looking to the father.
Three months, said the mother.
The audience was positively squirming in its seats.
Then Wilson relayed how some sort of special cloth went into his coffin (a T-shirt, his mum said), that guitar music was played at his funeral, that there was "something about his front teeth" and something to do with a rolling tyre.
The fact that most young men who die suffer significant physical trauma in an accident and have guitar music played at their funeral seemed to escape the notice of many.
Perhaps the couple feel better now.
Either way they provided Wilson's piece de resistance: The desperately needed climax to finish the show.
Remember, Wilson urged the crowd, it was "mathematically impossible" to have been as accurate as she had been.
"I am talking with your loved ones," she smiled, exiting stage left.
At which the ladies began queuing at the book counter and the spirits, who had earlier struggled to accurately convey a name, quietly shuffled away to begin working on her new book.
* Backstage with Jeanette. Random House. $29.95 Available from April 5.
