Page 37 of the Evening Standard, Tuesday 28th July 1992:

Are we seeing too many spooks?

As yet another ghost glides across TV screens, GEOFFREY PHILLIPS feels his own spirits begin to sink

TOMORROW night Channel 4 unleashes a new series upon its eager audience. It is enticingly entitled My Dead Dad. It is a comedy.

Made by Scottish TV, My Dead Dad is based on a stage play by John McKay called Dead Dad Dog and concerns a young would-be TV producer whose father, who has been dead for 14 years, reappears outside a toilet cubicle.

Dad is still wearing his Seventies flares and kipper tie and, what is more, father and son appear to be linked by an unbreakable umbilical cord. So far, so hilarious.

But, with all due respect to the energetic performances of Roy Hanlon, as Willie, and Forbes Masson as Eck, the appearance of yet another ghost, even one in flares, causes one's own spirits to sink. Eck might have been dead for 14 years, the idea of comic spooks has surely been dead for much longer.

One cannot fail to observe an apparently incurable obsession with the supernatural as a storyline springboard. We have had recently a BBC sitcom, So Haunt Me, with Miriam Karlin as a Jewish ghost. On a considerably higher plane we have had the films Ghost and Truly Madly Deeply leaving cinemas around the world ankle-deep in soggy tissues.

The recent BBC1 drama series, Friday On My Mind, was another grieving process exercise in which Maggie O'Neill's pilot widow met her dead husband on the beach for a last farewell. We were not told whether the deceased airman knew that his wife had, as part of the grieving process, been to bed with one of his comrades, but we will let that pass.

Whether the apparitions in Ghost, Truly Madly Deeply and Friday On My Mind count as real ghosts is a fair debating subject to lob into a wilting dinner party conversation, but showing hallucinatory ghosts on cinema and TV screens tends to raise just as many, if no more, questions than the portrayal of traditional ghosts.

Personally, one found the fact that Alan Rickman's dead cellist in Truly Madly Deeply had managed to catch a cold in the hereafter rather disturbing. The thought that there might be no escape from the sniffles beyond the grave proved so distracting that frankly one did not really care whether Juliet Stevenson was coming to terms with her loss.

What one wanted to know was: are there man-size tissues and Night Nurse beyond the grave? Perhaps hell will turn out to be an eternity of runny noses and no hankies.

In the much-acclaimed 1946 Michael Powell fantasy, A Matter Of Life And Death, David Niven glides heavenwards on an escalator rather more advanced than anything on the Underground. Was one alone in wondering how the escalator was powered? Did it operate around the clock? One noted that all the people being borne upwards were respectably clad.

Was there a divine law which ruled that people who had died in the nude must use the back stairs?

It may be that the current spate of supernatural stories is a consequence of disenchantment with Eighties materialism.

If Mammon has proved a disappointment worship-wise, perhaps the spiritual has investment potential.

Whatever the reason, the message ought to be as clear as if delivered by floating trumpet: give up the ghosts.