Lost in Showbiz is an unashamed fan of the partnership of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. So much about their union has brought it joy. The fact that she gave him a waterfall for his Christmas present. The fact they scoured the globe in search of a suitable location for baby Shiloh's arrival and decided on Namibia: it pictures Brangelina excitedly stabbing a finger at the atlas and crying: "What about here? It's got cholera, leprosy, multiple and extensively drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, malaria, a rampant Aids epidemic and the ninth-lowest life expectancy in the world! Who wouldn't deliberately travel there to give birth, given half the chance?" Waterfalls, Namibia: Lost in Showbiz feels that Planet Earth would be a sorrier place were they to go their separate ways.
So it read with mounting horror this week's reports that the pair had been "hit by shock claims that Brad's no longer in love with Ange – and still has feelings for Jennifer Aniston!" Or at least it did until it came to the source of said shock claims: "Brad's psychic, Ron Bard." As it turned out, Brad's psychic Ron Bard seemed to have been temporarily deserted by his abilities of divination – two days before his claims that the couple had no future were published, the pair had actually got married in France. But let's not split hairs: the important thing is that LiS had alighted upon a new celebrity psychic.
God, LiS loves a celebrity psychic. Weekly, it scans the pages of the gossip mags, its fingers crossed that they might contain an appearance from scouse spirit-botherer Derek Acorah, sharing both his unique command of the English language – "Chantelle Houghton will go to bed and the maturity will start to happen" – and the astonishingly accurate predictions afforded him by his Ethiopian spirit-guide Sam: "I guarantee – and I've checked with Sam – that Cheryl and Ashley Cole will get back together and have a child" etc. It thrills to the news that there exists in America a lady called Linda Lauren, who went to the press claiming that Jon Voight was suffering from dementia. She knew because she had seen the colour of his aura and it was yellow.
But, with due respect to the hugely impressive powers of Mr Acorah and Miss Lauren, LiS's favourite kind of celebrity psychic is not the one who offers the general public valuable insights into the future of their favourite stars, but the psychic whom the celebrities themselves visit. Who didn't gain a little more respect for George Clooney after reading that he had visited a psychic in an attempt to contact the spirit of Max, his deceased pet pot-bellied pig? "The psychic told me Max had a great life with me," Clooney supposedly told a friend. "He is very happy in spirit and still hangs out with me sometimes. I am not sure she was telling the truth," he apparently added, striking a curious note of scepticism about the ability of a human being to communicate with the ghost of a pig, "but I want to believe her."
Who didn't like the sound of the medium employed by Tori Spelling to contact her late father, TV producer Aaron Spelling, who informed her that he couldn't reach her father but, as a kind of psychic consolation prize, had managed to get hold of Farrah Fawcett? Who doesn't thrill a little at the mention of "Courtney Cox's guru", the amazingly named Thomas John, whose website comes with a plethora of media clippings that seem largely to illustrate his predictive powers are every bit up to the standard set by Derek Acorah and his Ethiopian spirit-guide Sam. "The 50 Shades of Grey movie will come out in 2014," he claimed, shortly before the Fifty Shades of Grey movie was put back to 2015; Prince Harry and Cressida Bonas's relationship "can endure", he predicted, weeks before they broke up etc.
Acorah and his Ethiopian spirit-guide Sam, Thomas John and anyone who told Clooney they could talk to the spirit of a pig: these people are all heroic in their own way. And yet, the more LiS reads about Brad Pitt's psychic Ron Bard, the more their achievements appear to pale by comparison. When not making wildly incorrect speculations about the state of the Pitt-Jolie relationship, he largely seems to devote himself to predicting imminent doom and catastrophe for entire countries. Last July, it was Japan: "In two or three months, Japan is going to experience a natural disaster," he announced, adding that the best way "to keep your loved ones and many others safe" was to get them to follow him on Twitter. This July, he was gamely predicting that the US "will become a third world country", that "Americans will take to the streets and there will be another revolution", and, more obliquely, "an earthquake 7.5 or higher will cancer-ridden northern hemisphere": no, LiS doesn't really know what that's supposed to mean either, but it doesn't sound terribly good, does it? He struck a more cheerful note a few days later, predicting that "an announcement soon" that "diabetes and some cancers" will be wiped out, but then we were quickly back to the earthquakes: Japan is definitely for it, apparently.
In between stockpiling tinned goods and bottled water in preparation for an earthquake 7.5 or higher will cancer-ridden northern hemisphere, LiS notes that this all amounts to a significant raising of the game in the world of the celebrity psychic. Enough already with the stuff about when the Fifty Shades of Grey movie is coming out! Stop worrying about the welfare or otherwise of Clooney's pot-bellied pig in the afterlife! The age of the celebrity psychic is over; welcome to the age of the celebrity soothsayer of the imminent apocalypse, with occasional erroneous diversions into the state of Brad Pitt's marriage!
