Can this man read your mind?

INTERVIEW:A sceptical FIONOLA MEREDITHis won over by mentalist David Meade, star of a new BBC Northern Ireland TV series

DAVID MEADE DOESN’T look like a mentalist. In his staid suit and cosy purple cardigan, the bespectacled 28-year-old Co Down man – a lecturer in international business – appears more young fogey than glittering showman. Yet while he may lack both the smugness and panache of Derren Brown, Meade is a mind-manipulator of impressive skill. In a new BBC Northern Ireland television series, which begins on Wednesday, he demonstrates his uncannily accurate powers of perception and persuasion.

Determined to maintain thorough scepticism, I begin by telling Meade that I don’t believe he can read my mind. He shrugs, confident that he can get past my defences. No doubt he has heard these kind of protestations before. He starts by drawing a rectangular frame on a notepad, then begins a quickfire series of questions. “Name something you like to do. Quick, don’t think about it, just say something!”

“Um . . . writing?” I reply. Meade notes the word down in the top left-hand corner of the page. “Name a colour, the first that comes into your head.”

“Blue.” He writes that down too, in the bottom right-hand corner. Now he wants me to draw something – anything I like – inside the frame on the page, while he looks away. Checking that he definitely can’t see what I’m doing, I do a quick but detailed portrait of my Dalmatian dog Rudi, tear off the sheet, and – as a precaution – the next sheet in the pad too, in case the pen has left an impression. (You can’t be too careful with these mentalists.)

Next, Meade produces a dice and a cup, and – talking fast all the while, a constant glib patter, most of which goes in one of my ears and out the other – asks me to choose a number on the dice, leave it facing uppermost, and then cover it with the cup. Each time I choose a number – 2, 4, 5 – Meade guesses it correctly.

“Ask me a question, any question,” he says, out of the blue. “Er . . . do you have a cat?” I stutter. I’m beginning to see that part of Meade’s skill is in keeping me in a state of confused catch-up, unsure what he will fire at me next.

What he doesn’t claim to be is a genuine psychic. “No, I’m definitely not psychic,” Meade laughs, “though I would love to find a real one.” He says that anyone could learn to do what he does, and he relies entirely on skills of suggestion, verbal influence, and body language interpretation. “Every thought you have manifests itself physiologically in some way. What I try to do is put thoughts in your head. If I’m unsuccessful, I try to work out what it is you are actually thinking about.”

For instance, there’s a simple explanation for the dice trick. Each time he correctly guessed the number I had chosen, Meade asked me: “What did I say to you just before you chose the number?” Despite trying hard, I couldn’t remember. If Meade wanted me to choose the number two, he mentioned the word two as part of his patter. The same with the numbers four and five. So, like a gullible fool rather than the cool-thinking cynic I fancied myself to be, I unconsciously picked the numbers he wanted. It’s quite shocking to realise just how open to unconscious suggestion the mind can be, and Meade exploits that capacity to the maximum.

Meade’s interest in the unexplained began when he was 14, shortly after the death of his father. “I went to a psychic because I wanted to contact my dad. It did make me feel good – I got a sense of connection, and some of my questions were answered. After that, I kept going for two years.” But Meade gradually became weary of the readings, feeling that he was getting less and less out of them. Then he made a discovery which demolished his faith in the psychic he was attending. “She gave me a pad and asked me to write down questions or objectives that I wanted met during the session, and then she left the room. I flicked to the back of the pad and found a piece of carbon paper there, ready to take the imprint of anything I wrote. So I jotted down two random names – Sophie and Katie. Sure enough, when the psychic came back, she started going on and on about two people called Sophie and Katie. I had a flash of total perspicacity, it felt like my chest was opening up. The past two years had been a complete charade.”

Instead of shunning the world of so-called extra-sensory perception, Meade became more fascinated than ever. But this time he wanted to know the tricks of the trade. “I realised that it was just a mental game, all about behaviour and choice, and it could be presented as pure entertainment.”

It’s the end of our session, and time for Meade to guess what I’ve drawn in the frame he gave me at the start. “Hmm . . . well, you’re a writer, and you look like quite a bohemian person . . . so you’ve probably not drawn something obvious like a house or a tree or a car . . . it will be something personal to you, something you feel warmly about.”

Meade begins to draw on the page in quick, bold lines. He turns the finished sketch around and shows me. I am amazed. There on his page is a rough but unmistakeable drawing of my dog Rudi, spots and all. I show Meade my own drawing. “Aw, I can’t believe I didn’t get the collar,” he says. He may not use powers of super-natural divination, but he can clearly read minds.

The David Meade Projectis on BBC One Northern Ireland on Wednesday, at 10.45pm