This is Halloween.

It’s Halloween ladies and gentlemen, the best holiday ever. Or not. There’s about as much point to Halloween as there is to a scented candle in a cesspit. If you haven’t noticed it’s Halloween, where have you been? You’ve clearly been indoors all week, and you definitely haven’t been on Facebook where you will find several photos of people dressed as zombies and Beetlejuice again for your viewing pleasure.

Okay, so I don’t like Halloween but it is naturally more appealing to kids. The very same kids you’ll find knocking on your doors later asking you for some food or something. Now, I don’t mind trick or treaters, in fact I think it’s great. For kids to do. Not spotty teenagers with their broken voices and a gormless laughs. Having young kids dress up as scary beasts and monsters go round with their parents is cool. It’s not cool for a group of chavs, with one can of Stella between seven, to come knocking on your door asking for sweets. Get a job!

Speaking of Chavs, this week I’ve been unable to walk into the local convenience store or visit a cash machine without falling over some scally sat cross-legged on the floor with some dummy made out of a broken stick and an old reebok jumper. Penny for the guy? It’s a broken ironing board wearing a sweater you little moron! Shouldn’t he be in school anyway? The kid not the ironing board but I suppose by today’s standards you might as well send an ironing board to school.

So yes to escape the Halloween shenanigans I decided to head out on Saturday night, but that wasn’t as successful a night as it should have been as I’ve never seen so many sixteen year olds wandering the streets dressed as Scooby Doo acting drunk in all my life. Naturally you’d think that upon arriving home everything would be fine again. But I was stupid enough to turn on the television, and someone had left it on Living.

Living. You don’t get a more lacklustre channel than that. And to be honest, I don’t see why it’s even called Living. It should be called Dead, because every single show on the sodding thing has got something to do with death in one form or another. Their flagship shows: Ghost Whisperer, Medium and Drop Dead Diva. Those psychic shows like Psychic Sally, 6ixth Sense with Colin Fry and Crossing Over with John Edward (which is about crossing over into the spirit world, not a show where John Edward helps old ladies across busy streets). But the show that put Living on the map really was Most Haunted.

The basic concept of Most Haunted was basically to just to send a frightened woman into a dark eerie house, turn the lights of and scare the living hell out of her. This woman went by the name of Yvette Fielding and she was at times genuinely entrancing to watch. Whether she was acting or not the way she jumps seven feet in the air after mistakenly touching a crew member’s arm is hilarious. Okay, the show did look pretty fake, especially when Derek Acorah was on the show, but it was still entertaining to watch.

Derek is a self-proclaimed medium but an everyone else-proclaimed actor. Every time I caught him on the show he was being possessed by some evil being. The guy cant go down the road for a loaf of bread without getting possessed by a passing bakery ghoul. I was on a plane with the guy once, luckily there were no spirits in transit else it would have been a very long flight.

So when I turned on the TV and found Living I thought I’d found Most Haunted. But instead I found Paranormal Investigation Live. The difference? Nothing really apart from a few more bells and whistles thrown onto it.

The show consists of two teams: Team Impact and Team GPS. These teams search the insides of a selected haunted house for anything out of the ordinary. The house in question isn’t so much a house but a Castle. Castle Menzies in the Scottish highlands, home to plenty of spirits, ghosts and of course Sir Ming Campbell. Not really but that would be pretty frightening, I’m sure you’d agree.

We’re introduced to the two teams with the usual juddering camera angles and eerie slow-playing piano in the background. Impact introduce themselves first as Paul, Anthony, Ola and Chloe. They search haunted venues across the UK in their spare time. GPS (named after a sat-nav presumably) are the same in every way, except their names are Barri, Phil, Laura and Matt and they use all this fashionable equipment.

The major difference to this show though is that there’s no Yvette. Instead we have Naga Munchetti presenting the show, and she doesn’t go in the house with the investigators. Instead she stays outside in a random sports centre erected just for the purpose of watching the two teams wander aimlessly around the interior of the castle.

Watching with her are two ‘experts’ which I mean in the loosest sense of the word. Expert number one is Ashley Cowie, a historian. We’re introduced to him in a short video where he introduces himself while we get to watch him caress a stone wall and read a small archaic book in slow-motion. Why in slow-motion? I don’t know probably to make it more spooky I suppose but there’s only so much you can do with an upper-class male, a book and a library. Expert number two and probably the most pointless of them both is Dr Rebecca Knibb of Derby University. She plays the role of psychologist, commenting on the reactions of the individual team members and all that malarkey. Again we get an introductory video showing her sat at a desk writing as if she were a GP, which she isn’t, she’s a doctor in something completely different. Of course there’s the background piano making it all seem a bit suspenseful. Maybe.

Anyway, the two teams show up in their overly large vans. Impact emerge dressed as some sort of army marines while GPS look like they’ve come as Sam Fisher from the Splinter Cell series. After that we head back to the sports centre to hear the experts talk about myths and legends, including a dragon and such. I got bored and went in search of refreshments.

After making a brew and returning, I found the two teams are in the house. Impact are the first team to get the limelight as they ramble round the kitchen trying to get spirits to come out. And of course, they do all this in night-vision cameras. Thank God. Now I feel like I’m watching Most Haunted again. The pointless dark rooms and the whites of their eyes glaring at you through the screen. Maybe we’ll finally get to see some action.

Actually this has got me thinking. Why do ghosts only come out in the dark? Are they scared of light or something? I don’t get why they have to do this in the dark. But I digress. Impact finally identify that their in a kitchen and one girl says that the fire is warm. Gripping stuff.

GPS aren’t much better mind you. They get to wander around the great hall in pitch black. One team member calls it a little foreboding. Foreboding?! I’m scared to death when I’m left in the darkness of my own house, put me in there and I’d be climbing the walls looking desperately for a box of matches! As for doing something, they don’t. They just get cut off by the sports centre and we’re treated to an ad-break. Great, 20 minutes into this thing and the scariest thing I’ve seen so far is Jennifer Ellison’s acting in that Daz advert.

Turns out I missed nothing during the break, what a surprise. And instead of going back into the house, they keep us with the sports centre again. Argh! What’s the point. I love the way they have Ashley and Dr Knibb sat at desks looking at monitors and typing stuff into their keyboards as if they’re doing something. As far as you know Ashley’s playing solitaire and Dr Knibb is updating her Facebook status: ‘Can’t believe it’s come to this. Happy Halloween lol’

Finally we’re back in the house with team Impact, who are now playing bagpipes as apparently spirits come out when they hear music they used to listen to. So we get to listen to two minutes of that until the track ends and one of the blokes calls out to the ghosts. “If there are any spirits here, please make yourself known, we mean you no harm.” What the? Why do they always say that? “We mean you no harm” what are you going to do to them? Why the heck would they be scared of you? They’re dead. What, have they seen Ghostbusters the night before and now they’re too scared to come out incase Bill Murray appears and zaps them into a tiny Tupperware container?

Anyway they get nothing. So we get to see if GPS are having more luck. They’re not but at least they have cool devises including an ovilus, which is a machine that can pick up spirits. Clever. Unfortunately though they don’t use it, they get out their CD player. Oh no, not the bagpipes again! Crap it is. They try the bagpipes trick. So after another two minutes of nothing they whip out the ovilus. Hurray! But all that does is blurt out random words. How is that helping? Oh the spirits are talking through it. It says worry, smell, fell, eye. Yes! We’re getting somewhere finally. An ad break?! Not cool. Oh well my brew went cold anyway.

We finally get back to the show and it’s the sports centre with Ashley talking about a story where someone fell down the stairs. How interesting, thanks Ashley. Anyway back to the house where the ovilus calls Barri a dick. Easily the best part of the show. The ovilus literally says “you dick.” Simply brilliant! But the team think it says “you check” what a bunch of idiots. Only Laura thinks it said the obvious but she doesn’t want to repeat the foul mouth ghoul’s rhetoric.

To be fair I bet these ghosts get so bored of crap like this. Every year at Halloween they have to put up with a bunch of people and a camera crew loitering around their home. Maybe they’ll come round your house on a random non-holiday. Valentine’s Day could be fun next year.

The show pretty much goes along like this for the rest of the night. The teams throw herbs into fire, put their hands in water, point metal prods at each other, all in the name of science. Well not science. All in the name of TV ratings I suppose. Of course it all happens at about 2cm an hour, to add to the suspense probably, but the constant back and forth between the sports centre and the two teams gets so annoying I’m going out looking for that historian with a black cloak and a big scythe. My goodness he talks so much rubbish it is untrue. Literally. I mean… dragons: seriously?

So that’s it, I sat through about an hour and a half of it and couldn’t take much more. So I went to bed. This was actually the scariest part of the night as upon entering the bedroom the neighbours’ security light etched a shadow of what appeared to be one of hell’s own demons onto my wall leaving me swinging from the lampshade for forty five minutes. Turns out it was only a crisp packet and a silly straw. Such is life. Happy Halloween. I guess.