This is a strange one, but it's related to this topic in a way - basically back in the late 1990s I was living in Walthamstow, London where I was flat sharing with an old school friend of mine. His girlfriend at the time who we called Cat, which was a shortened form of Cath was a media or drama student or some such. She had a friend called Mouse (I know right, seems unoriginal but Mouse was very small in stature), unsure what her real name was but again a drama student or similar.
They pulled a cunning wheeze that took advantage of the rise in popularity of those confrontational style chat shows (Vannessa, Trisha, Kilroy etc... etc...) - the ones where they'd have troubled individuals with complex relationship issues that people could gawp at as a part of the daytime TV offering. Sometimes there'd be a DNA test, other times a shock revelation and oftentimes the need for security to be called on to the stage.
Cat, Mouse and a friend (my old school pal was offered the role, but as a professional musician thought it would be reputational suicide and declined) managed to get themselves onto one of these shows as a fake threesome. The reveal was that one of them was having an affair with another, who was transexual, but when Cat discovered this she was OK with the whole menage a trois arrangement. In fact, one of the 'boys' was Mouse disguised as a male which they thought was particularly cunning. The whole show would barely raise an eyebrow these days, but at the time and with the average daytime TV audience it was probably considered quite a thing.
They were caught out and made to apologise. Their story became wrapped up in wider news coverage around fake guests and paid actors being featured in Vanessa, Trisha and other shows. Turned out that there was an agency in Walthamstow (see where I'm going with this yet?) that was deploying these guests, who were either paid or wannabe stars.
My partner and I met in the 'stow and both sat for the first half of the first episode of the TV show scratching our heads trying to work out where we'd seen Cate from. It'd been a long time, but I am convinced that I recognised the distinct voice of Cat from Walthamstow and my partner recognised her face.
Obviously I have no proof or anything, the details are scant and subject to the effects of the mists of time on memory, the collective agreement on her identity could be some form of sympathetic alignment of those memories, so I am not accusing anyone of anything.
Perhaps Cate's experiences were real, but there are a couple of flags in there: the addition of the timeslip experience, which kind of came out of the left field; Cate's profession being 'in the music business' or similar; the way that there was already some online chatter about a ghost in the house before the experience was brought to the production team's notice (a 2010 post, which has since been deleted, along with it's cache although a transcript can be found in a sceptical post on reddit here -
Reddit link); that Cat wasn't particularly shy about expressing her opinions and recounting her experiences to us when we knew her and she never once mentioned any ghosts; and, as a final Fortean touch:
A number of researchers were sacked as a result of the Trisha show fiasco, but not the Editor who had worked on a number of these shows.
The Editors name - Ms. Howard....!
Some references below to the talk show scandals:
Reference at Paragraph 19 to the three students who committed the referenced hoax
Vanessa Show Scandal
Tony Papotto - Strippergram Angent and Talk Show Guest Provider
Ms Howard comments
Free Library Archive of the Trisha Show Scandal Mirror Article
