A friend of mine, it turns out, did have vague connections, but they were with the William Morris Agency in New York, she said, which was not exactly helpful since I was living on my brother’s couch in a derelict farmhouse in the north of England at the time, five thousand miles away.

But I love adventure. I do. I love the challenge of sailing beyond my comfort horizon. And I had so much faith in my book and also my talents as one of the best handwriting analysts around, that, despite having about $30 to my name in the world – don’t ask! My life was in crisis, hence the couch – I went out next day and bought a ticket to New York on my credit card. Craziest goddamn thing I’ve ever done, I swear.

Two weeks later, there I was standing on Broadway, wearing a horribly outdated suit that made me look like a badly-wrapped parcel and clutching a piece of paper with the name of my friend’s contact at the William Morris Agency written on it. Not even a phone-number, just a name.

Nervous suddenly, I called the WMA switchboard and asked to be put through, giving my friend as a reference, praying as I did so that this guy even remembered her. Well, evidently he did because his assistant connected us and, with a finger in one ear to block out the traffic, I began a yelled conversation with this big-time agent on the phone. I figured I had 30 seconds to make an impression. Maybe less.

So here’s what I did. It’s a fantastic threefold strategy involving flattery, a time-limit, and proof – and it works. Or at least it did for me.

Flattery: I explained that I’d flown all the way over from England just to see him with my fabulous book idea that would blow him away.

“Give me ten minutes of your time,” I said. “That’s all I need. If at the end of that ten minutes you are not so impressed with my idea and my abilities that you want to represent me, then I will leave and never darken your door again. You have my word.”

Placed in that kind of mentoring position, most people remember a time when someone gave them a much-needed leg up in the business, and if they have a heart they’ll say yes.

“Okay, I’ll see you at 12 o’clock,” he said, and hung up without a goodbye.

So I had ten minutes to impress him. That’s the time-limit part. One random act of kindness, then he knows he never has to see you again, something he is doubtless looking forward to. On the other hand, it puts pressure on you. Big pressure. You’d better be good or you’re going to look like an idiot.  

I showed up at the dead of noon, rode up to his office and was shown in by his assistant. He was one busy guy, clearly. Jacket off, red suspenders crumpling an otherwise dazzling white shirt, this little balding man didn’t get up or even say hello. Just sat at a side table scribbling on documents. There was no smalltalk.

“So what d’you need?” he asked brusquely.

What I needed, I told him, was some of his handwriting. “In cursive on a blank sheet of paper.”

He grabbed a Post-It note and dashed off about eight words on it. Now, I’ll be honest, as an analyst you hope for more – a sheet of twenty lines is best. But still I could do something with eight words. I stress, I’m very good at this, and confidence is important. So I took the note, sat on a chair by the door while he continued reading his documents, and did my stuff anyway. Analyzed it on the spot. There was no cue from him to start, I just launched into it.

I don’t remember everything, but I do recall telling him that he no longer enjoyed being an agent. That his mojo had evaporated. That he was unhappy at home and had no connection with his wife any more, and that his performance between the sheets was lacking as a result. In all areas of his life he needed to move on, basically, if he was to be happy in the future. (Once I begin, I have no control over what comes out, it just ejaculates from me like a gushing faucet, and sometimes it’s not pretty.)

I spoke for the full ten minutes, thinking, “Jeez, this isn’t going well.” At no point did he look up. Just continued reading and writing.  But also what I was saying was dreadful. Really awful stuff. True stuff, of course, but even so, hardly the kind of thing that wins you friends.

At 12.10 exactly, according to a clock on the wall, I stopped. There was my Proof. Whether he liked it or not, I’d delivered the goods in the promised time. Now it was down to him.

“That’s it,” I remember saying quietly, feeling horrible about it all. “That’s you.”

He said nothing for the longest time. NOTHING, though. But he did quit making notes, opting instead to stare expressionless at the wall ahead of him, probably debating whether to throw me out personally or have his assistant do it. Meanwhile, what could I do? I just sat there mute, listening to the air conditioning unit buzz and feet and voices pass by in the hallway outside.

Until, finally, and still without looking over at me, he broke the silence. “Give me a couple hours,” he mumbled. “Call back after two and I’ll get you an agent. I know just the person.”

And true to his word, he did. I called him again later, and flew home to England with not only an agent but a book deal!!!

The woman he’d recommended performed miracles. That same afternoon she called up four publishers who agreed to see me at short notice and let me perform my dazzling little handwriting trick on them as well, sparking a minor bidding war. This was many years ago. But the money I made from selling the book more than paid off my credit card bill and also enabled me to move to America, where I now live. Ten minutes of spunk and gall was all it took to get an agent and change my life forever.

Note: My latest book, a mystery-suspense novel called Force of Habit: Sister Madeleine Investigates, which I’m reliably informed by readers and reviewers is “highly entertaining, action-packed, and will keep you guessing to the end”, will be available on Kindle and iTunes, and also out in paperback, April 25th 2012. 

“It’s almost like two books in one,” someone added.

Well, no author likes to hear that. So clearly the excess weight had to go.

The question then became: what to do with Chapter 17? Where do I put it?

Easy answer: I’m putting it on my blog.

Chapter 17 features a run-down of 32 bright and in some cases unusual suggestions for things we can do to improve our health and save our life. Not should do, note. I’m not a medical doctor. In fact, I don’t know why I put the word ‘medical’ in there; I’m not any kind of doctor. I can’t advise anyone about health matters, and would never try to. The list is made up of ideas I learned from talking to people while I was at the Casa de Dom Inacio in Brazil. Ideas I take seriously, and which I and my partner have since incorporated into our lifestyle. With, I must say, highly beneficial results.

However, that’s us.

Every body is different, with different needs and its own special groundrules. It’s never going to be one size fits all. So if in doubt, be sure to consult the right kind of healthcare professional before doing anything to yourself. I am bound to say that for legal reasons, of course. But I also mean it. This is important. Don’t take it lightly. (Click on Disclaimer tab above to see how important.)

Having said that, I rather like these suggestions. They’ve made a big difference in my life.

In a world where cancer has us licked and heart disease and diabetes are rampaging through society, sometimes the power to make a difference begins, not out there, but within ourselves. It surely starts when we take full and personal responsibility for what we do to our body. When we make positive choices, not silly, self-defeating ones. When we veer towards alkaline-forming foods instead of acid-forming ones, even though it’s the acid-forming foods – everything  from bread to sweets to dairy and meat – that we love so much.

It starts when we cleanse and purify ourselves. When we rest, sleep, meditate, and pray. When we open up, unblock our channels, stop censoring or restricting ourselves, and dare to live, instead of holding back or closing down our of fear, anger, bitterness, and other negative emotions that cause us to live out our days under a cloud of desperation. When we honor our spirit and the work we’ve been given to do here rather than deny our true selves and go all-out to destroy our body, this sacred vehicle our spirit needs in order to move around, thereby cutting short our time and frustrating our purpose.

Live, my friends. Start now and don’t hold back. Reach further, fly higher, and surrender more. Dare to believe that you already have all you need, everything required to be happy, healthy, and prosperous without striving and struggling. That’s the message of the Believing book, after all. And having a body equipped for the tasks it’s designed for, including growing older, can only contribute to that.

Anyway, the list begins at Number 32 and counts down. Some ideas are short, some long. But you might want to take on board one a day for 32 days and see if any of them make sense.

If you’ve still not read the book, by the way, please don’t miss out. The information and insights contained within its pages are life-changing. They’re making a difference to people all over the world. I’d love it if you were one of them. It’s available on Amazon HERE, and also on iTunes as an iBook.

Here is the list of 32 fascinating health and healing suggestions I learned in Brazil, in reverse order:

32.    Switch from an animal protein-based diet to a plant protein-based diet. “Published data show that animal protein promotes the growth of tumors…”[1] …whereas plant protein can protect our health. “Heart diseases,” Colin Campbell says, “cancers, diabetes, stroke and hypertension, arthritis, cataracts, Alzheimer’s Disease, impotence, and all sorts of other chronic diseases can be largely prevented.” How? By turning away from cadaverous protein to a diet based on organic fruits and vegetables.

31.   Eat raw, living, nutrient-rich food as often as possible. We’re talking vegetables, fruits, sprouted seeds, legumes, sea vegetables, and pre-soaked nuts. Most foods in supermarkets are processed. Processed foods are dead. Junk food is dead. Packaged, boxed, canned, bottled and most cartoned food is dead. Dead when you buy it and dead when you consume it. But all food is especially dead after you cook it. There may be vitamins and minerals and stuff in there, but the vital living enzymes that your body craves and which it needs to build healthy cells and enhance your immune system, can’t handle heat over 117 degrees F, so when you cook them, they pass out. Then they die.

Dead food with no living enzymes in it really isn’t food at all; it’s just stuff. Stuff you’re cramming in your body to fill you up. An hour later you’re hungry again. Why? Because your body’s starving. It’s crying out for nourishment. Which is how people come to overeat constantly and get fat. Instead, try fresh, living, uncooked, organic food. You’ll feel fuller faster and, once your body has the nutrients it needs, it doesn’t crave food again for hours.

30.   If it’s mass-produced or came from a factory, don’t put it in your body.  To stay youthful, bendy, strong, and disease-free, your system needs lots of clean water, exercise, adequate sleep, air, and good nutrition from living food. What it may crave, but does not need, is pizza. Or, for that matter, chips, cookies, hot dogs, lattes, pretzels, doughnuts, sugary breakfast cereals, artificial sweeteners, fried steak, meatballs, quesadillas, processed meats, refried beans, burgers, fries, sodas, or, I regret to say, cake. These “foods’” are acidic to the body and slowly poison it or else block it up.

“When cells live too long in an acidic condition, they adapt to it by mutating and becoming malignant. Long-term acidic conditions in our bodies provide perfect environments for cancer, and auto-immune diseases like AIDS to flourish.”[2] To insure good health, we have to declare sovereignty over our body, and that means closing our borders to outside invaders who would take us down and leave us for dead. It’s not just about the sugar or chemical contents either, or the hormones, or the antibiotics, colorings, and flavorings – it’s the salt too. Factory-produced food and restaurant-cooked meals tend to contain a lot of salt, which, eaten to excess, can lead to stomach cancer, strokes, cardiovascular problems, and so on[3].Therefore minimize your intake. And never use table salt, always kosher or sea salt.

“But does all this mean I can’t eat fries or hamburgers?” I imagine you’re saying, reeling from this terrible news. “After all, what’s more American than a hearty meal of burger, fries, and a soda?”

Well, oddly, the only thing more American seems to be premature death from obesity. Around 30% of us are officially obese[4]. One in three. It’s the seventh leading cause of death today. Go sit in your local shopping mall and watch the hundreds of porkers as they waddle by, with an ice cream in on hand and a super-sized soda in the other. I now believe, after a little research, that soda is death in a can. I wish I’d never drunk any. It’s been shown to lead to osteoporosis, obesity, and heart disease.  

29. Cleanse the body. For the past who-knows-how-many years, you’ve been ingesting boatloads of noxious substances – chlorine, hormones, pollution, pesticides, drugs, antibiotics, lead, fluoride, polyhydrocarbons, MSG, transfats, preservatives, the chemicals in detergents, and more. The body has a mechanism for detoxing you in normal circumstances, but we no longer live in normal circumstances. Chances are, you have many toxic residues still stuck inside you, and they’ll stay there, slowly poisoning you, unless you take specific direct action to detox, decontaminate your body, and flush them out.

Read up on this[5]. Seek advice about what’s right for you. Maybe try a series of flushes. There are many kinds, all good: a colon cleanse or colonic irrigation to aid the digestive and elimination process; flushing out the liver, gallbladder, kidneys, etc., plus ways to rid yourself of harmful parasites and heavy metals. Not enjoyable ways – but ways. Worth investigating.

28. Go on a fast. A fast is controlled starvation. Author Paul Bragg says we’re slaves to food – “Man digs his grave with his knife and fork.”

During a fast, you put your knife and fork away and stop eating altogether for a period of time each year – a day, a week, a month – to give your system a break. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Food is replaced with a drink, which may include green and fruit juices. When your digestive enzymes are not busy doing their job, which is to help convert food to energy, they get bored. To stay busy, they start flushing mucus and toxins from the colon, kidneys, pancreas, liver, intestines, and so on. Read up on fasting. Look into the different options and find one that works for you.

Extra note: My personal experience of fasting has been astonishing. Once a year in October I personally do the Master Cleanse program for two to three weeks. No eating, just a special drink packed with nutrients several times a day. During that time, after a short detox period, not only do I feel great, shed weight, empty out my system of toxins, and feel my body repairing itself, but apparently crystals are flushed from my joints, thereby heklping prevent arthritis. You can actually feel yourself peeing them away. The whole thing is a living miracle.

27.    Lose weight and keep it off. Three-quarters of all health care spending in America goes to treat preventable chronic diseases, including $147 billion annually on the problems of obesity[6]. Ageing well tends to be a privilege, not a right. Which makes being fat a death sentence. Most times, only thin people get to grow old. Seekers believe that robust health in later years is earned by effort put in during their earlier ones. It’s like a pension, and you pay into it over a lifetime by maintaining a reasonable body weight. Above all, stop calorie counting. Stop with the fad diets. Stop buying books and programs to help you lose weight. You’re wasting your time and money, while making a lot of other people very rich. Instead:

a) quit eating junk (see #28 above). In 2009 alone, Americans spent $109 billion on junk food. Aside from being acidic to your body, it is a major factor in making you fat. Research shows that you’d have to ride a bike for an hour to burn off the calories from a single bottle of Coke, and you’d have to walk for six hours to burn off a Supersized McDonald’s meal;

b) cut out refined sugar (as well as chemical artificial sweeteners[7] and any product containing the extremely fattening corn sugar (high-fructose corn syrup[8]), dairy products, and food made with refined white flour: pasta, bread, cake (sigh), etc;

c) switch to a diet based predominantly on plant-protein and raw, organic, fresh food;

d) cleanse your body in all the various ways mentioned in #27) above;

e) turn off the TV and actually do something useful and physically challenging with your free time; and

f) adopt and maintain a proper exercise regime every day.

If you do all this, how can you not lose weight? In fact, you’ll probably outlive the rest of us.

26.   Breathe. I know, you do this already, but for something that our daily lives actually depend on, we don’t have it mastered at all.

Mostly we take short breaths using the top of the lungs, when what’s needed is deep breathing from the diaphragm. This helps drain the lymphatic system, promotes relaxation and general wellbeing, and is vital to continued health. Also, and obviously, quit smoking. Fifty years ago smokers were regarded as cool and sophisticated. Now they’re looked on as hopeless addicts with low self-esteem and a death wish. It’s time to move on and breathe oxygen like the rest of us. And while you’re at it, buy some kind of air filtration system for your home. Or at the very least for your bedroom so that you’re not breathing pollution while you sleep.

25.    Take coconut oil. Experts see this as the golden Wonka ticket of good health. One tablespoon of organic, cold-pressed, extra-virgin coconut oil twice a day boosts the immune system. According to research carried out by Harvard University Medical School in 1988, it also “reduces the risk of atherosclerosis, heart disease, cancer, and other degenerative conditions.”

Plus, it’s good for the hair and skin, gives you bundles of energy, and helps maintain reasonable cholesterol levels and increased metabolism, which in turn can lead to weight loss.

And that’s not all. The oil aids digestion, and is useful as one stage in tackling liver and kidney problems, heart disease, high blood pressure, prostate enlargement, osteoporosis, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, HIV, and cancer.

Yet, in spite of all this, most conventional doctors are against it. “Yeuw, it’s a saturated fat,” they say, pulling a face, “and saturated fats clog your arteries.” They’re right, coconut oil is 90% saturated fat, and animal-based saturated fats do clog your arteries. But coconut is a plant-based saturated fat, and plants, as we know, are our friends. The idea that coconut oil is bad for you is a con trick. A lie put about in the 1980s by manufacturers of rival domestic oils in the U.S. to prevent this amazing tropical oil getting a foothold in the home market[9], when in actual fact coconut oil is a miracle product. It’s antimicrobial, antioxidant, antifungal, and antibacterial.

24.   Avoid storing up negative emotions, they’re lethal. Rene Caisse said: “Cancer patients have usually lived in relationships that have had serious negative impacts on their lives. Let go of hurts of the past. Deadly emotions can lead to cancer. Feelings used as weapons against someone, or self, can be as toxic as exposure to a lethal physical agent. Stay away from spiteful, negative, irritating, overbearing people. You don’t need friends who find fault. The magic key to curing cancer, to cancer prevention, is to live, to really live…full of vigor and hope…to live every true vital force in you.”

Tackle lingering dark emotional issues head-on. Let old hurts go, be rid of festering conflicts. Meditate, do yoga, Pilates, enjoy regular massages, hike, attend retreats – whatever it takes to stay positive, stress-free, open-minded, rested, and, above all, alive.

23.   Avoid the news. Ignorance has served me well over the years. There is no real news any more anyway; there’s only spin, polarizing opinion, PR, and propaganda neatly packaged and promoted as fact, usually with a view to startling members of the public, or recruiting them to a right-wing cause. So skip it. Take back your power of independent thought and judgment. Turn away from sensationalist “Breaking News” headlines and unscrupulous braying pundits who are willing to lie, deceive, misrepresent and exaggerate just to raise their ratings and make more money for themselves. Trust me, if something urgent happens, someone will tell you about it. People can’t wait to spoil your day.

22.    Fit your water supply with an activated carbon filtration system. Your body’s a sponge, millions of tiny holes held together with a seamless, vulnerable blanket of flesh. Whatever touches that blanket is absorbed into it. Regular tap water is loaded with chlorine. Each time you shower, your pores suck in cups and cups of chlorine, which over time can deplete your body’s supply of vitamin E, aggravate asthma, lead to skin problems such as eczema, and generate free radicals that lead to cancer. According to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 1987, people who drink chlorinated water are twice as likely to find themselves with bladder cancer someday than people who drink water without chlorine in it. Twice as likely. And I can testify to that: my dad drinks cups and cups of tap water every day in his tea, and he has bladder cancer. Filter your water, guys.

21. Organic vegetables and fruits are healthier for you than those sprayed with pesticides[12]. If the cost of switching to organic is an issue, put your health first. Cut down on something less important. Suggestions for saving money:

i)              Unhook your Cable or Satellite box; claim your life back from the manipulation of TV companies and advertisers.

ii)           Quit going to bad movies. For the price of two tickets to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, you could have stocked up your fridge with salad for a couple of days or more.

iii)        Cancel donations to charities set up to research disease. In a lot of cases, there are already cures. If they were endorsed by scientists and put into general use, charities would go broke. They exist to exist.

iv)         Quit buying coffee in coffee shops (especially lattes; see #13 below). Ouch – I know. But would you rather be well or sick later on? Your choice. And this is an ex latte addict speaking.

20.    Avoid dairy products. Milk, butter and cheese products sold either on their own or as ingredients in other products are acid- and mucus-forming and therefore not good for your system[11]. The advertisers lied. Too often, the milk was taken from unhappy, regimented, imprisoned cows and is loaded with growth hormones, antibiotics, and traces of blood and pus. That aside, the predominant protein in milk, known as casein, was found by T. Colin Campbell to be carcinogenic. There are other sources of calcium besides milk: dark, leafy vegetables, sardines, salmon, sesame tahini, and sea vegetables.

19. Fit your water supply with an activated carbon filtration system. Your body’s a sponge, millions of tiny holes held together with a seamless, vulnerable blanket of flesh. Whatever touches that blanket is absorbed into it. Regular tap water is loaded with chlorine. Each time you shower, your pores suck in cups and cups of chlorine, which over time can deplete your body’s supply of vitamin E, aggravate asthma, lead to skin problems such as eczema, and generate free radicals that lead to cancer. According to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 1987, people who drink chlorinated water are twice as likely to find themselves with bladder cancer someday than people who drink water without chlorine in it. Twice as likely. And I can testify to that: my dad drinks cups and cups of tap water every day in his tea, and he has bladder cancer. Filter your water, guys.

18. Organic vegetables and fruits are healthier for you than those sprayed with pesticides[13]. If the cost of switching to organic is an issue, put your health first. Cut down on something less important. Suggestions for saving money:

i)              Unhook your Cable or Satellite box; claim your life back from the manipulation of TV companies and advertisers.

ii)           Quit going to bad movies. For the price of two tickets to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, you could have stocked up your fridge with salad for a couple of days or more.

iii)        Cancel donations to charities set up to research disease. In a lot of cases, there are already cures. If they were endorsed by scientists and put into general use, charities would go broke. They exist to exist.

iv)         Quit buying coffee in coffee shops (especially lattes; see #13 below). Ouch – I know. But would you rather be well or sick later on? Your choice. And this is an ex latte addict speaking.

17.    Avoid dairy products. Milk, butter and cheese products sold either on their own or as ingredients in other products are not good for you[14]. The advertisers lied. Too often, the milk was taken from unhappy, regimented, imprisoned cows and is loaded with growth hormones, antibiotics, and traces of blood and pus. That aside, the predominant protein in milk, known as casein, was found by T. Colin Campbell to be carcinogenic. There are other sources of calcium besides milk: dark, leafy vegetables, sardines, salmon, sesame tahini, and sea vegetables.

16.    Quit playing dangerous sports. They put unnecessary strain on your joints. Joggers look so cool running along the sidewalk, but how many of them will need hip or knee replacements by the time they’re sixty? Take care of your body. Leave the stupid stuff like marathons, snowboarding, and wrestling to other people. Invest in a pain-free future – say no to overly-strenuous activity and yes to exercise. Brisk walking that breaks a sweat, swimming, yoga, Pilates, t’ai chi, dance – all worthy, gentle stuff. You’ll thank me later.

15.    Bounce for 10-20 minutes a day. Rebounding is like jumping on your bed when you were young, only this time, because you’re grown now and you bought yourself a mini-trampoline, you won’t get yelled at. Great for the heart, the brain, the muscles, but especially your lymph nodes – and you definitely want to stay on the right side of your lymph nodes[15]. The G-force created by bouncing for ten minutes per day on a rebounder squeezes toxins out of your cells, stimulating your immune system. Plus, it helps oxygenate the blood, increases lung capacity, and lowers cholesterol. Start gently and work up. Seniors especially. You’re not auditioning for Cirque du Soleil, people; don’t go crazy.

14.   Chew your food. If your stomach could be granted one wish, it would be to have teeth. But since that’s not going to happen, do it a big favor: eat slowly and chew. Chew, chew, chew. Food can be fully digested by the stomach only if it’s been mixed with saliva first, which is what happens in your mouth. Eat mindfully until your food turns to soup, then swallow. Never eat “on the go.”  

13.   Drink fresh organic green vegetable juice. Plants contain phytonutrients and are alive. Homemade green juices are therefore alive too. Juices packaged in boxes and bottles are not. They’ve been pasteurized and homogenized, killing the very enzymes you’re drinking them for in the first place. Fresh green organic vegetables, on the other hand, boast a treasure trove of enzymes that, when ingested into the human body, go a long way toward protecting it from future illness. Living foods feed living cells. So buy a juicer, and a good juicing book, and make your own. Alternatively, blend a bunch of green leafy vegetables – spinach, Romaine lettuce, parsley, collard greens and kale (cut the spines from the leaves first); throw in a green apple, a banana, a big squirt of lemon juice -  that way you drink the juice and the fiber in the pulp as well. Remember: drink slowly, don’t chug. It’s not Heineken, and you’re not in a frat house (unless you are, of course!) Slowly sipping your juice allows the saliva to break it down.

12. Remove toxins through the mouth. One in four Americans is afflicted with heavy metal poisoning – lead, aluminum, mercury, and others – as well as chemicals from pollution, household products, pesticides, contaminated food, smoking, drugs, and whatever else. Cleansing the body is one way to get these out. Another is oil-pulling, an ancient holistic technique dating back thousands of years. Each morning, a tablespoon of organic, cold-pressed sunflower oil is “chewed”, then swilled and swished around the mouth for fifteen minutes. Magically, this draws out multiple poisons from the blood stream through the mucus membranes of the mouth. Important note: Do not swallow the oil. It’s toxic. Once you’re done, swill the mouth out with warm salted water, then spit that out too. Oil-pulling is thought by Eastern doctors to see off a whole raft of maladies, including migraines, meningitis, encephalitis, cancer, glaucoma, heart and kidney problems, ulcers, and bronchitis. And even if they’re wrong and it doesn’t do any of that, at the very least swishing whitens the teeth and keeps the gums in the pink of health, saving money on dental bills.

11.    Dry-brush your skin. Before showering, rub yourself all over with a stiff natural fiber brush for five minutes. This aids detoxification and exfoliation, promotes skin renewal, helps the body absorb nutrients, lessens cellulite, boosts blood circulation, and combats premature ageing by tightening the skin. Important note: it also hurts. Don’t dry-brush your face with stiff bristles, it’ll strip your epidermis like a blow-torch. Use a soft brush or a flannel instead. Or, alternatively, try a natural body scrub.

10.   Invest in an Infra Red Sauna. Infrared works differently to traditional saunas (where you sit breathing in dangerous chlorinated steam the whole time), because it’s dry. Ceramic or carbon panels around the walls emit a radiant heat that penetrates the body’s muscle tissue to a depth of about 1.5 inches, raising your core temperature and making you sweat very hard. That sweat is removing toxins. Plus, infrared heat boosts blood circulation, fights inflammation, eases aches and pains, and even goes so far as to provide relief from broader ailments such as arthritis, headaches, heart disease, obesity, asthma, high cholesterol, low blood sugar, depression, infections, as well as afflictions of the immune system, such as chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and candida. If that weren’t enough, infrared heat has toxicity in its crosshairs: car emissions, molds, lead, nicotine, alcohol, sulfuric acid, and whatever else your body has absorbed. Toxins are cowards. When you sweat deeply, they head for the exit, fleeing from your muscle tissue and out through the pores.

9.   Replenish your body with superfood smoothies. Nutrition is the cornerstone of daily stamina and the key to staying fit and vital when everyone else around you is dropping like flies. But here’s the thing: we’re all different. Nobody knows the right combo of ingredients to put in your smoothie. So go online, find nutrition sites, research what your body needs. If necessary get advice from a nutritionist. Suggested organic ingredients to throw in your blender, though, include apple juice or soy milk (as a base), coconut oil, aloe vera juice, maca root powder, He Shou Wu[15], bee pollen; powdered goji berries; raw, unsweetened, organic cacao nibs[16]; raw organic honey; cellfood[17]; cold-milled hemp protein; ground flaxseed; cayenne pepper; organic green superfood powder, and fresh fruit, such as apples, bananas, blueberries, and melon.

8.   Get enough sleep. In bed by 10pm, up by 6am. This is not my rule, it’s Nature’s. Even if you don’t go to sleep straight away – doesn’t matter; lie down, close your eyes, and rest. It’s best for your body if you don’t eat at all in the three hours leading up to bedtime, otherwise your system has to work overtime during the night trying to assimilate it. A lot of insomnia is caused by people eating too late and not exercising enough to use up all the energy generated by the excessive amounts of food they’re consuming daily. The most rejuvenating form of sleep happens in the two hours before midnight. During the night, the body’s very busy. It removes dead/damaged cells, repairs muscles, balances fluids, purifies the blood stream, and engages in a general program of nourishing, cleansing, balancing, and rejuvenating. To do that it needs adequate rest. The correct amount of sleep varies from person to person. The optimum, though, is around eight hours. Every night. Without fail.

7.   It’s not paranoia; your toiletries really are out to get you. Commercial personal hygiene soaps, shampoos, conditioners, skin creams, and whatever else, are often loaded with harmful cancer-causing chemicals that get absorbed through your pores into your body. Invest instead in  products made from pure, natural ingredients. This applies especially to deoderants. The sweat glands act like a pressure-valve. They’re one of the body’s escape routes for toxins. Why would you want to plug them up with sticky chemical goo? Plus, avoid any antiperspirant product that lists aluminum among the ingredients. Aluminum has been linked to dementia, including Alzheimer’s. Check the label. If you see chlorohydrate or aluminum zirconium cholorohydrate, throw it down and run. Another tip: use an Ayurvedic toothpaste[18]. Standard toothpastes contain fluoride, which is poisonous in quantity, plus a bunch of other chemicals, artificial sugars, colorings, and flavorings.

6.   Poop regularly. Do I really need to tell you this? You must get rid of waste products. You wouldn’t keep a bin full of rotting trash in your kitchen, would you? You’d throw it out. Yet people keep dangerous putrefying waste in their stomachs for years and never flush it away. Some don’t go to the bathroom for days. Causes of constipation include milk, medication, dehydration, lack of exercise, and lack of fiber. Whatever yours is, track it down and try to stop it. Generally speaking, if your bowel is in perfect working order, you should be taking a small, but lovely firm dump after every meal. If you’re not, think about cleaning out the colon with colonic irrigation or a cleanse, and switching to a raw food-based diet for a while.

5.   Consider drinking bentonite clay now and then. Sodium bentonite is an absorbent clay of 60% silica that, when turned into a liquid, makes a great intestinal detoxifier and cleanser. You can buy it in bottles. It acts like a bounty-hunting sponge, tracking down metals, impurities, and free radicals, and carrying them out of your system. It can cause constipation, though, and be harmful if you do it too often. Read the directions very carefully.

4.   Invert. Turn your body upside down a couple of times a week, or at the very least get into a position where your feet are higher than your head. This uses the force of gravity to shift any build-up of sedimentary material out of the lower parts of your body, allowing it to be expelled. Otherwise it just sits there like an old woman at a bus stop. Get it out of your joints and cells now while you still ca

3.   Spend time in the sun each day. The sun is a vital source of vitamin D.  It protects the immune system, boosts bone strength, and helps avoid osteoporosis, as well as breast, prostate, and colon cancer, whereas vitamin D deficiency doubles the risk of heart disease. Aim for twenty minutes’ exposure in off-peak hours – early- to mid- morning before the sun is at its height, or mid- to late afternoon. Failing that, an appropriate Vitamin D3 supplement taken daily can reduce cancer risk by 77%[19]. Note: avoid chemical sunscreens. A 2010 report by the Environmental Working Group claimed that half the sunscreen formulations on the market contain Vitamin A, which has carcinogenic properties that increase skin cancer rates in lab animals by 21%[20]. Seems that big cosmetics companies have been deceiving us for years in order to boost profits. Imagine that! The wrong sunscreen generates free radicals in the body and the very worst ones can interfere with human sexual function. Have you noticed how the incidence of skin cancer has risen substantially since the increasingly widespread use of sunscreens? Coincidence? I don’t think so[21]. Be sensible: expose your skin lightly to the sun according to your skin type – fairer skin needs less time than darker skin – using a natural, effective sunscreen if appropriate. Above all, don’t burn. As a rule of thumb, anything that is burnt can lead to cancer, including eating burnt toast and charred meat from a grill.

2. Stay hydrated. The human body is made up of around 75% water. And the brain’s 85%. Unfortunately, you leak fluid constantly – from your feet, from your lungs as you breathe, from your skin when you exercise. And when you pee – well, there goes another cupful, taking vital minerals with it. Dehydration is one of the major enemies of good health. So each morning when you get up, replace essential fluid lost overnight by sipping an 80z glass of filtered warm water, preferably with some squeezed lemon juice in it to stimulate the colon. Drink around eight glasses of fresh spring or filtered water throughout each day. No substitutes. Coffee, tea, fruit juices, and other beverages don’t count.

1. Tackle EMFs. The American Cancer Society is expecting around 1,500,000 new cases of cancer to be diagnosed in the next year in the U.S., plus 500,000 cancer deaths. It’s believed, though not yet proven, that EMFs will be a significant contributory factor to that number, causing not only cancer, but fatigue, cataracts, miscarriages, nausea, stress, brain tumors and leukemia as well. In her book How To Stay Young and Healthy in a Toxic World, Ann Louise Gittleman says, “Radiation does its damage by entering the body and attaching to the cells, where it stays for a very long time, absorbing large amounts of minerals and trace elements, leaving the body with little reserve to carry on its normal functions of digestion, absorption, elimination, and reproduction.” EMF researcher and activist Paul Brodeur wrote, “[E]xposure to low level electromagnetic radiation…. can cause cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and other health problems. This information has been suppressed or downplayed for years by the electric utility industry, manufacturers and the media.”[22] Worse, the positive charge from EMFs can build up in your body. So you need to protect yourself. Here are TEN things you can do to minimize the possible deadly effects of EMFs on your body:

i) Earth yourself. Walk barefoot outside, preferably in the wet sand at the edge of the ocean, or touch the ground with your hands. This releases the build-up of positive ions in the body. Or else buy an earthing blanket. It plugs into the earth socket of your electric wall-mount, grounding you while you sleep.

ii) Don’t keep a cellphone or PDA in your pocket, attached to your belt, in your hand, or within three feet of your body. And don’t sit for hours in coffee shops that offer free wifi.

iii) Stay away from fluorescent lights.

iv) Don’t have loose wiring or cables running around or under your bed.

v) Don’t sleep close to an electric alarm clock, radio, wifi unit, computer, or phone; and don’t work, or spend time near a wall that has electrical devices such as a TV or refrigerator on the other side of it.

vi) Investigate protective technologies such as a Q-Link or BioElectric Shield pendant to deflect EMFs;

vii) Make sure your bedroom doesn’t have a box on the outside wall where power enters the home. If it does, treat that room like the off-limits motel room in horror movies, the one that never gets rented out because “someone died in there.” Take care it’s not you.

 viii) Don’t allow your kids to sit too close to the television or computer, or to play near or under power lines, not even as a punishment.

ix) Unplug electrical devices you’re not using. Many of them emit radiation even when they’re switched off.

x) Dump your microwave oven. Ovens leak radiation. Plus, in tests, they’ve been shown to turn lovely healthy food molecules into jagged, carcinogenic ones that tear down your body’s cell-structure. Paul Brodeur, author of The Zapping of America, said: “Microwave radiation can blind you, alter your behavior, cause genetic damage, even kill you. The risks have been hidden from you by the Pentagon, the State Department, and the electronics industry.” Don’t take the risk – get rid.

And a bonus one, we’ll call zero, because it rules all the rest and can’t be number 1 or given an order. It’s more important than anything.

0. Love. If life at the Casa de Dom Inacio in Brazil proves anything, it’s this: unconditional love is serious healing energy. So use it in everyday life. Love unashamedly for no reason other than that you can. Love everyone you value and even those you don’t. Love as deeply as you dare, and demonstrate your love openly as often as conditions allow. I know it sounds sappy, but honestly it works. Love the bad days as well as the good. Love the dog that bites you as much as the one that falls asleep in your lap. Love your body enough to stop abusing it. Love others by being grateful, kind, appreciative of everything they’re trying to be and do. Love your rivals enough to disagree with their point of view without hating them for holding it. Shun arguments, disputes, forgive grievances, overlook transgressions. Instead, seek kindness and harmony. Forget trying to be first at everything. Be happy for the guy who wins, and love him when he does, if only for giving you a dose of humility. Love is enormously good for you, it’s good for everyone who comes into contact with you; it’s good for the body, good for the digestion, good for life, and good for the planet. Nothing else matters, because, except for love, as the great stand-up philosopher Bill Hicks said, none of this is real anyway. “It’s just a ride.”[23]

*

There were many other suggestions in Wendy’s scribbled manifesto too. Good suggestions too, all equally useful in their way. But here’s the thing: there are only so many hours in the day, and most of us have work to do. If Wendy had her way, I’d be devoting so much of my life to making sure I’m healthy that there wouldn’t be a minute left to enjoy the benefits. As well as the thirty tips listed above, she’d have me:

• growing my own fruits and vegetables;
• composting my kitchen waste;
• taking cayenne pepper to aid the cardiovascular system and help prevent heart attacks;
• eating cultured vegetables or taking probiotics to repopulate depleted flora in my digestive system;
• drinking juiced wheatgrass for its powerful phytonutrients;
• switching from coffee and black tea, which are acidic in the body, to green tea, which is packed with antioxidants;
• ingesting apple cider vinegar regularly and also an MSM sulfur powder supplement each day for my joints;
• buying only locally-grown organic produce;
• eating wild salmon, rather than farm-raised. Farm-raised salmon, I hear, eat their own poop, and are pumped with growth hormones.
• never drinking water out of plastic, recyclable bottles because they leak phthalates, which are poisonous chemicals, when they get warm, and maybe they got warm in the delivery truck before you ever laid eyes on yours;
• throwing away all my chemical cleaning products and using natural ones instead;
• breeding alpacas;
• pooping with my hands stretched high above my head and my feet raised up on a box to unkink my colon;
• eating garlic in some fashion every day, simply because it’s a little alkalizing miracle-worker that helps the immune system resist attackers;

Isn’t that crazy? Just think of all the great stories and information they’re missing. Getting adults to read books nowadays is as near-impossible as persuading young kids to eat their greens.

On the other hand, if you’re among the 30% of readers out there, let me introduce you to a locomotive of an action-suspense novel that you are almost guaranteed to enjoy. Called Force of Habit: Sister Madeleine Investigates, a very small number of them are available in paperback right now. They were printed up as sample copies, but they’re exactly like the real thing.

If you want one of these copies, you need to email me. We’re no longer selling them. There’s a contact form HERE. Just drop me a line and I’ll tell you how to get one.

That said, I did put a dozen up on Ebay the other day and they were snapped up immediately. One person bought nine copies at one go. Someone else called it their ‘favorite mystery-thriller EVER’.

I promise you, it’s a cracking good read.

Here’s the story.

      ’BILLIONAIRE SUICIDE                       MYSTERY’

Someone else: “Just finished devouring Force of Habit…when does the next book come out?  I am not the world’s biggest mystery reader – very particular about my reading – but this was really addictive. Great writing.”

And another:  “Refreshingly different. A brilliant mix of fast moving action packed mystery/thriller and humour…A brilliantly conceived plot with twists and turns that kept me guessing right up to the end. Highly recommended.”

MysteryNet, the site for lovers of mystery books, called it: “Action- packed to the very end.”  

Michy’s Book Reviews said: “The action and voice kept me reading. If you’re looking for a good and quirky mystery-style story, this is an author and a series that should satisfy.”  

From Wendy Hines of Minding Spot book reviews: “Great characters, a twisted plot, entertaining situations and really good writing, I can’t wait for book two!”

And Tristi Pinkston – yes, THE Tristi Pinkston – said: “Cash Peters has created a gutsy, loveable main character, placed her in breathtaking danger, and brought all his readers along for the ride of a lifetime.”

You’ll feel the same way, I’m sure.

A childhood dream becomes a reality

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write fiction. Specifically, a thriller. Detective stories and vintage murder stories were my fascination when I was a kid. I gobbled them up by the dozen, and long believed I was capable of creating one of my own.

But you know how it is. Life intervened. Things happened. I never got around to it.

The adult Peters struck it lucky. He was on TV and radio and traveled the world, writing non-fiction books about foreign cultures and spiritual matters. Which was wonderful and a dream come true. The younger Peters, meanwhile, who was still trapped inside the older one, nurtured another dream. He longed to pen a cracking good thriller, but in his own style.

Then one day, the older Peters – which is me, by the way, in case you were puzzled – turned a certain age and noticed that people he’d worked with back in his 20s and 30s were getting sick and dying well before their time.  Improbably, guys I thought would last forever were suddenly gone. There are no guarantees, as we all know. The call could come at any time.  Therefore I figure it’s vital to live out your dreams to the fullest whenever you can. Don’t die, as they say, with your music still in you.

So with that in mind – “It’s now or never,” I told myself – I shelved most of my workload for the next eighteen months and wrote Force of Habit. I did it for me, mind. To prove that I could. To validate the kid inside of me and make him proud.

It didn’t even matter if nobody else liked it, as long as I liked it.

But here’s the thing:  to my delight, the reaction from those who’ve read it has been incredibly warm and amazing. Beyond anything I could have hoped for.

“Dazzling,” wrote one.

“Compelling and brilliant. Relentless and frightening.”

“It’s so COOL,” someone else said. “I love it.”

Well, yes, me too. I’m as happy with this as anything I’ve ever done, and hope you love it as well.

Published by Penner Press, it’s lots of fun. A gripping wild ride filled with action, intrigue, humor, satire, and strange, unexpected twists.

My Life as a Nun’s Mentor

I had the idea way back in 1983. I was living in Golders Green, North London at the time, renting a small bedsit.

One day, a new tenant moved in next door to me. A nun. I remember her name: Sister Margaret Sherwood. Wonderful woman. Very toothy, quite oversized and shuffling, and absolutely  clueless about everything. She was on an apostolate, she said, which, as far as I could tell, meant she’d been thrown out of the abbey, a bit like Maria, and left to fend for herself.

Though Sister Margaret was in her 70s at the time, she’d led a cloistered life for decades and knew nothing – and I mean nothing – about the modern world. She had no clue how to use a can opener, for example. She’d never watched TV, made a Panini sandwich – in fact, she couldn’t cook a thing – and she absolutely marveled at the way my electric kettle boiled water all by itself.

“That’s fan-tastic!” she’d shriek. “How does it do that?”

It was quite bizarre. Like having Catweazel come to visit. Or the apes from 2001.

For the next three years we lived together in that house. During that time, I introduced her to the concept of convenience, leading her through the basics step by step, as you would a toddler, or someone who’s just arisen from a hundred-year coma, giving her simple instructions on how to cope with life outside the convent wall, such as how to make mushrooms on toast, how a water heater works, how to vacuum a rug without sucking half of it up into the Hoover, and generally demonstrating what’s what.

It was a life-saver for her, I realize that now, and also an intensely interesting character study for me. “Somewhere in this,” I recall thinking even then, “are the seeds of a really good sitcom, or book, or movie, not sure what – but something.”

And that’s where it began. The novel stems from that situation, though with a much darker, sinister edge, and a lot more car chases.

But there’s more. Somewhere back in the UK I have a reel of Kodak Standard 8 film showing a couple of friends and me on a bleak, blustery hill near Stockport, called Werneth Low. We were fifteen years old, so this was 1971. For reasons I would probably have been hard-pressed to explain even then, I spent all my pocket money that week renting an oversized nun costume, which John O, the tubbiest of us, put on, then ran around in like a maniac for the camera, doing karate chops and other faux martial arts he had absolutely no knowledge of at all. Beyond the fun of the indulgence, it was a complete waste of time and money. But funny. Very, very funny to watch.

However, it sowed another seed, one that’s stayed with me ever since, and which would turn, many years later, when combined with snippets of the Sister Margaret episode, into something good and cohesive and really worthwhile: my first novel, Force of Habit.

 A Christmas Gift Suggestion

Now, I’m aware this means I’m releasing two big, and very different pieces of work within a year. My faith-healing adventure in Brazil - a little book about believing - continues to do well (last week it reached #6 on Amazon’s bestseller list in health and healing!). For that reason it was tempting to hold back and wait with the novel, so as not to confuse people.

I even had a consultation with a branding agent. I told him I have two books coming out – each radically different from the other. One’s a spiritual odyssey to Brazil, the second’s a mystery novel. What should I do?

He was adamant:  it’s too much. I’d be ruining my brand.  I must publish the novel under a pseudonym.

But why? Steven Spielberg made War Horse and Tintin this year. Very different. And look at Woody Allen. Over the years, he’s directed comedies, tragedies, a mystery, a musical, and several romances, some light, some dark – he doesn’t change his name each time, does he? And did he ruin his brand? Nope.

So mark this date: May 2012, Force of Habit: Sister Madeleine Investigates is in paperback, and I hope it finds an appreciative audience. Come on, why not let the kid inside of you read the novel that the kid inside of me waited a lifetime to write? You might be pleasantly surprised.

It works like a mirror. How you write reflects who you are, not only on the outside in terms of your personality and character traits, but deep, deep on the inside, where nobody ever gets to see.

By taking a look into your own soul in this way, you are often able – perhaps for the first time in forever – to really see who you are, behind the barriers, behind any conflicts and doubts, and why you came here. We think we know the answers. We think they’re obvious. “Are you crazy? Of course I know who I am,” we say. But all too often that’s a story we tell ourselves.

The truth, when it comes, is very different and can propel us to a whole new level. I’ve seen it happen a lot. People begin at Point A, have their writing analyzed, and suddenly switch, heading off towards Point B.

You can drive the same beaten-up old car for years if things are going okay. But when it isn’t working properly,  sooner or later you’ll need to take a look under the hood and see what’s going on.

Handwriting analysis tells us what’s going on under your hood.

*

Back in the early Spring, I wrote an article for Spirituality & Health magazine about finding your path in life and removing blockages to your gifts and destiny. The response from readers was overwhelming, beyond anything I could have anticipated, telling me how moved they were and how it had changed their perspective on their lives. I was deluged in emails for months.

To read the article CLICK HERE.

They reacted in this way because I also shared with them some information about my own special gift – for analyzing handwriting. It turns out that most of us, at one time or another, get to a crossroads where we begin to question our path, our identity, even our purpose in being here. How come nothing seems to be working out? How come we don’t feel fulfilled?

I admitted to our readers that I’d never studied the subject, and yet had found, about 20 years ago, out of the blue, that I had a quite uncanny ability to see beyond the writing itself, sometimes into what seemed like the very soul of the person who wrote it. Their motivations, their strengths, their pain, their abilities, their insecurities, any leftover hurt from childhood, and so on.

Leading astrologer Kristin Fontana said about it on her radio show, “I’m blown away by it. It was simply incredible. I don’t recommend anything unless it’s top notch, but…I highly recommend getting one of these done.” (You can hear her going nuts over it by clicking HERE.)

It’s a strange talent – some kind of psychometry, I think – and therefore something that, initially anyway, I could think of no practical use for, beyond being a sort of weird parlor game or fairground sideshow trick that I would do at parties or when specific people asked me to. That, however, changed over the years. In time, I was forced to take it more seriously, not least because the reactions I got were consistently mind-blowing.

“Wow!!! What a gift you have. I have so much to think about since reading this. Thank you for sharing your gift and for doing it with such beauty and kindness. You are “right on” about everything…”  M.L.

“There was just so much that reflected me. I tried to find something (anything) that I can say  ”that is not me” or “that’s inaccurate.” I haven’t found anything”  D.B.

“My ‘report’ felt like a love letter from someone who knows me very well and who cares. I have read it several times and cried. I feel seen. It is truly a gift to me, not something I have often experienced.” D.W. 

And so on. As you can imagine, it’s incredibly heartwarming to receive comments like this, even though it’s for something that I don’t even feel I’m responsible for. I’m channeling the information about the person rather than judging them or their writing.

Similar comments came from Kristin Fontana when she interviewed me at length for her internet radio podcast recently. She was blown away by the analysis I did of her.

So what is this thing I do, then?

Well, quite honestly, I’m a little hazy about the details. It appears I am what is called ‘a truth teller’. Someone who knows without knowing how they know. Somehow, don’t ask me how, I have insights into people’s souls that allow them to see themselves for who they really are, free of encumbrances and judgments. That’s remarkable. There’s more information HERE if you’re interested in having your handwriting analyzed too.

As a journalist I denied this gift for years and years, until in the end, mostly because people kept saying how amazing it was, even I had to come around and admit, “It’s really potent, this thing I do.” And mysterious. A bit like crop circles. I may not know the how or the why of it exactly, but something’s definitely going on here, and it has the potential, it seems, to change lives and make people feel better about themselves.

Most times, all I have to do is stare at the writing and tune in to its vibe. Almost immediately, information about the person begins passing through me, sometimes at speed, sometimes slower, according to what the writer needs to know about their life, and I scramble to write it all down in as coherent a fashion as possible. That’s it. The process.

Once, a long time ago, I wrote to James Randi. D’you know him? He’s a Canadian stage magician (The Amazing Randi) who later upgraded from merely ‘amazing’ to being ‘really quite something’, after setting up a trust offering one million dollars to anyone who could prove they were psychic. It was meant as a sideshow, I think, intended to draw charlatan tarot readers, astrologers, and mediums (and he would no doubt say they’re all charlatans) into the light, the better to expose and debunk them. And a good thing too.

In my case – well, I don’t pretend to know much about all of that, but this handwriting gift seems peculiarly psychicky to me. So, I said to him, “Look, James, I’m not interested in your money – I’ll take it, of course; I’m not an idiot, but I don’t care about it – what I’d like is for you and your peeps to conduct exploratory tests in a laid-back fashion (if I try it under pressure, the whole thing goes away; I freeze up), and find out why I can stare at the handwriting of someone I’ve never met, seen, or spoken to, and instantly know a thousand tiny things about their life and behavior – because, hey, I’m a journalist, and even I can see that what I do is impossible. So come on, let’s debunk this together.”

Randi wrote back very quickly, interested but stern. Told me the first round of blind tests would include the handwritings of five complete strangers. “Fine,” I replied. Then the next round would involve ten strangers, and I’d have to get them all right. “Fine, let’s do it,” I wrote back. “I’m confident it’ll work. It always does.”

I never heard from him again.

But that’s not how it went. I was inundated.

Realizing that I am just one person and they were many, and it was impossible for me to satisfy the demand while still carrying on my other work in any meaningful way, I decided to charge a nominal submission fee, just to make it a two-way street. It’s only right – right? After all, you really only value what you pay for, and I know how life-changing this stuff can be in some instances.

In the event, I would say that, out of every ten readers who contacted me asking for their handwriting to be analyzed, probably 80%, on finding out that they might have to pay, shied away and were never heard from again. Because they didn’t understand the value of what they were getting and, as I said, assumed it was a parlor trick, they couldn’t bring themselves to pay for it. That was a huge surprise. However, it turned out to be the perfect filtering system, because otherwise I’d have been overwhelmed. (I average two a day, that’s all). Meanwhile, the remaining 20% continued happily on and were effusive in their praise of the analysis when they read it. I was blown away by their comments.

“I just wanted to let you know that your analysis was astoundingly accurate and enlightening. Even my family and closest friends would not have been able to articulate the entirety of what you did — especially with such a degree of detail and nuance. I have already found it quite helpful and I’m very grateful for your gift.” K.C.

“This analysis was amazingly spot on.  There is so much there. Reading it felt like I was getting a good, deep look at myself.” C.L.

“Thank you, thank you. I have some new intentions to set, some freedoms to focus on, each moment of the rest of my life to enjoy. You have a beautiful gift. I hope one of these days I run into you in person and I can give you a big hug.” M.M.  

“The first words out of my mouth were, “Oh my God, wow!” You are an amazing man, Cash Peters!! I am astounded at how well you know me…..you pretty much got me pegged.” K.K.  

Isn’t that something? It takes my breath away sometimes, the reaction. This thing appears to be a really big deal. It moves people. It uplifts them. Many times it gives them a renewed sense of direction. I was taken by surprise at how much, actually. Therefore for the month of July 2011, I put my life and the book I’m writing on hold and enjoyed an incredibly happy and stimulating experience.

So far so brilliant.

But then things started to get weird.

The world, I now realize, is filled mostly with wonderful, upstanding, generous-hearted people who operate only with love, compassion, and the right intentions. I enjoy doing their handwritings and always will. Then there are a handful of kooks and opportunists who are out to game the system and take you for all they can, often for no reason other than that it fills their time and gives them a sense of superiority.

• The first sign was when I heard from a dark-hearted cheapskate in Florida, who wrote claiming she was unable to view the page on my website, the one with the instructions and the fee on it. But she submitted her handwriting anyway, hoping to have it done for nothing. And you know what? I did it. That’s how I know she was a dark-hearted cheapskate. Like a fool, I jotted down some quick notes and sent them back.
• Then there was the actress who tweeted me to say that she’d LOVE to have her handwriting done, and I told her I’d be honored. However, since she was a celebrity, she clearly expected it to be done for free – no questions asked. Well, okay…. but you know what? I did have a question, as a matter of fact: are you out of your mind??? I simply directed her to the information page on my website, and, needless to say, she never supplied her handwriting.
• A single dad in Canada contacted me, claiming he had three starving kids and no money. But he was prepared to make a huge sacrifice, he said, and pay the submission fee anyway. And even though his writing revealed that he was pretty well off and most likely what he said wasn’t true, I decided to take him at his word. I gave him a full analysis for a third of the price, and refunded the rest. Afterwards, there wasn’t even an acknowledgement. Not a ‘thank you’. Not a peep.
• The actress contacted me, not about her handwriting, but asking for a copy of my new health and healing book. This time I relented and sent her one, thinking she might effuse about it to her vast army of followers. She didn’t. If I had it on elastic, I’d yank it out of her hands and back into mine, but it never occurred to me to do that.

In just three weeks, a fun project had taken a nosedive into craziness.

There were even, I suspect, a couple of graphologists who wrote in, testing me to find out how good this ‘gift’ could possibly be; or to see if they could smell snake-oil, as if I was some kind of conman out to fool everyone with my brilliant scam. A scam that, to work effectively, would require that I forfeit almost entirely my leisure time AND work time in order to sit at a computer for hours and hours and hours, staring at a piece of handwriting, trying to figure out what it meant – and all for what it cost back then, a measly ninety bucks!!! I’d rather sell boxes of oranges on a street-corner, quite honestly. At least I’d be out in the open.

Of course, it’s not a scam. The majority of people wrote back afterwards telling me how ‘spot on’ the analysis was – something I take no credit for, incidentally; I’m merely the messenger. While those I assumed to be graphologists never contacted me again. Most likely they were too busy staring at what I’d written, fuming, “Damn, he’s better than us!”

But all of that aside, it’s been amazing. Around 95% highly enjoyable, I’d say.

So enjoyable actually that I wound up putting both July, August, AND September on hold while I tackled the countless handwritings pouring into my fax machine.  Sure, it got a little messy and strange in places, but for the legitimate inquirers, the ones who entered into the true spirit of the experiment, I think we managed to generate some amazing results and maybe even change a few lives along the way. I mean, come on – what better way to spend the summer really?

“I want to thank you for opening my mind, my heart, and my whole being. It is extraordinary that you knew the whole me better than I ever knew myself. There is no dollar amount that can measure the value of what you have given me. I am truly grateful.”  K.B.

TV Swami – he worn out. A tad confused too, but very happy and satisfied.    

I want to introduce you to my new travel book. Called A Little Book About Believing: The Transformative Healing Power of Faith, Love, and Surrender, it’s about the quite astonishing events that took place in Brazil when I  underwent ‘spiritual surgery’ from renowned healer John of God, and opens the door to a new perspective on what it takes to heal from serious illness. Oprah herself visited the same place in March 2012, and that’s about the biggest spiritual endorsement you can get these days.

Anyway, this book, as unlikely as it seems at first, might just change your life. I don’t say this glibly. The effect it’s having on people’s perceptions of life and how they live theirs is quite astounding, even to me – and I wrote it. And this only increases every day as more and more of you read it and absorb its revolutionary message.

Apparently, the U.S. Army has ordered copies of the book twice, a nurse in one California hospital bulk-ordered some to give to patients, and a famous actor who’s seriously ill right now insisted on taking me to lunch after reading it. Plus, countless copies have been mailed around the world to regular people like you and me who were, as they say, “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and hungry for alternatives to poisonous pharmaceutical drugs, invasive surgery, and harmful radiation. More than any of that, though, they were looking for hope, as well as an assurance that there might possibly, after all, be another way.

“Started reading the book last night at elevenish,” someone wrote on Twitter recently. ”Read til 4am, passed out. Finished it today less than an hour ago. I have you and your exquisite little book to thank for changing my life forever, intimately and positively.”

Those words gave me chills, quite honestly. And it’s a common reaction.

Having said all that, this wasn’t an easy book to get through the system. My agent turned it down outright, telling me there was no market for it and she wouldn’t take it on, which was a terrible bummer at the time.

However, rarely down for long, I did the next best thing: I dumped that agent for having no vision and set out to find a new one.

I approached a guy I knew who worked for a big New York agency. He’d loved my previous work, and, sure enough, he loved this too. Adored it actually, and said so. “I couldn’t put it down,” he gushed in an email. Which, to be honest, is what everyone says. “It kept me awake at nights thinking about it.”

So clearly he’d want to represent it, right?

Wrong!  Too dangerous, he said. “If I represent this, I’ll be in trouble. I come from a family of doctors. They’ll never forgive me.”

Unbelievable. But here’s the thing: he didn’t really mean it was dangerous, did he? He meant it was new and different, and he was scared of it. That’s been true of many wonderful books in the past. Everything from Harry Potter to Chicken Soup for the Soul, they’ve all met with resistance at the start. Obstacles are part of the game.

It was then that it struck me.

What I was facing here was not opposition, was it? It was a series of sobering encounters with reality, to help me clarify my intention and galvanize my resolve. That’s all adversity is. It clarifies and galvanizes. Only when you’re faced with obstacles and setbacks do you find out what you’re made of. Did I believe in my wonderful little book enough to keep going with it through thick and thin until it made it to the stores? That was the question.

YES! –  was the answer. Because, although I may lack certain qualities in other areas – God only knows! – I do have one quality which has got me through many a tight scrape in my life, and that’s fortitude. Otherwise called follow-through. Or persistence.

In the words of Sir Winston Churchill, I “…never, never, never, never give up.”

The Pay-Off

And sure enough, my fortitude paid off. The book is now a glorious, wonderful paperback. The kind of paperback I want to stroke and hug and flick through countless times, even though I know every word in it. Because I also know the amount of persistence it took to fend off the naysayers and get it to this point. If I built it, they would come, I was convinced of it.

And you know what? They did come. They came in impressive numbers, gushing praise, proving the naysayers wrong.

“Your book is important, incredibly well written, and totally compelling,” someone else wrote.

And today I found another comment on Facebook: “Wonderful, surprising, challenging, eye-opening, sensitive, touching….I’m running out of words. Just get it and read it. You will discover things about yourself, and about everything else! It’s life changing!!”

On page 18 of a little book about believing, it says the following:

“In this book we are crossing a bridge into the unknown, ready to challenge some of our holiest preconceptions about health and healing. In my view that’s a good thing. The mere fact that we’re discussing this topic at all will bring us to a place of new understanding. A place where hopefully someday we, the ordinary people, may not be such easy prey for serious illness and can instead choose to be its master, or even avoid it altogether.

“It’s an exciting journey, one that requires a flexible mind, a willing heart, and a readiness to release ingrained attitudes.”

Releasing ingrained attitudes is what the book industry needs to do too, by the sound of it. If they can turn their back on my ‘little book that could’, what other gems are they not publishing either? If you too have aspirations to write a book – or do anything else, frankly – and you believe in it enough and feel like the idea came from your very soul, then maybe all you need is to summon the necessary amount of faith and fortitude, keep your head held high, and never, never, never, never give up ’til you push on past the finish line.

a little book about believing: The Transformative Healing Power of Faith, Love, and Surrender (Penner Press).

Read an article on Patheos.com written by Cash about the book and the power of prayer to help heal the body. 

Listen to an interview about the book with Dr. Rita Louise. This is really good. 

Years ago, I worked as a freelance reporter on a BBC news show in Greater London called Newsroom South East. It was a pretty gruesome, routine job, but with one brilliant and major perk: I was given a full studio security pass, allowing me round-the-clock access to Television Center, the BBC’s large doughnut-shaped HQ in Shepherd’s Bush.

So  far, not terribly interesting. But hang on, there’s more.

Also broadcast from Television Center at that time was one of the best, most seminal drama series ever, and I mean EVER: Doctor Who. If you’ve never seen it, then I’m afraid there’s a large void in your life that nothing else will ever be able to fill.

Doctor Who at a glance

The fundamentals are so ultra-simple that even a child could understand them. Which is good, because it is, after all, a kids’ show, as well as being a show for the kid in all of us.

The nutshell version: it’s about a very old but extremely brilliant and eccentric man from another planet. He’s a Time Lord, the last of his race, who freewheels through time and space, sometimes alone, but usually with companions he picks up in transit. These companions are integral. They give him someone to say his lines to, for a start, rather than just thinking them to himself. Also, they’re there to: a) scream when they’re scared or captured, and b) ask dumb questions as they go along that will help explain to the viewer at home what’s happening.

Assistant: “Doctor, what does this button do?”

Doctor: “That? Oh, it makes the balloon matrix defigrigater drive inflate. Whatever you do, don’t touch it.”

But of course they do touch it. Sometimes twice. And the consequences are generally dire, prompting an invasion of this cosmos by creatures from an entirely different cosmos, followed by hours of fighting and plotting to wrest planet Earth back from their grip.

It’s all extremely basic. You’d soon get the hang.

Oh, and one other thing you need to know: transport-wise, the Doctor scoots around the universe in a stolen and very temperamental vehicle called the TARDIS, an obsolete Type 40 TT capsule that, according to the instructions, was built to blend automatically into its surroundings, whether it be Pompeii in 79AD or the base camp of an expedition heading to the frozen wastes of Antarctica (see picture right; utterly inconspicuous). A nice idea, the program-makers found, but costly. So, rather than go to the trouble of thinking up new ways to disguise the TARDIS each time it landed in a new place, with all the resources that would mop up, the early producers hit on a shrewd solution: they told viewers, “The TARDIS’s ‘chameleon circuit’ has broken down. Now run along and don’t ask any more questions.” This meant that it would have to stay forever in the shape of a blue 1960s British police box, the kind that bobbies patrolling the streets would make emergency calls from (or sit inside and sleep). In fact, since 2002 the BBC has owned the design patent to the police box so that they can cash in on it with merchandising.

Along the way, the producers devised explanations to many other similarly vexing questions too.

Such as: “But wait, how can one guy, two companions, and a whole bunch of machinery fit inside a single small police box?” Answer: the box was bigger on the inside than the outside. “Ahhhhh, of course, I see. Thanks.” And “How come the interior of the TARDIS looks so different now to when the show started?” Answer: Easy, the TARDIS can reconfigure itself and basically do its own makeover more or less whenever it wants to. “Ahh, yes, sure. That makes perfect sense. Nothing to quibble with there.”

As for the more troublesome issue: “Surely, don’t alien civilizations speak different languages to us? How would anyone communicate?” they gave the TARDIS a fully-functioning inter-species translation capability. You speak – everyone else gets what you’re saying, anywhere within a fifty mile radius of the box. The Translation Matrix, as it’s called, also interprets the written word. Phew, what luck, eh?

You can even open the doors in deep space and still breathe – the TARDIS takes care of the whole oxygen thing too. Oh, and just in case, it’s indestructible. All in all, they had the whole space-travel thing pretty much sewn up.

In other words, no matter what the writers or producers sought to do in a story, however ridiculous and far removed from the original plan, TARDIS folklore would simply be amended to absorb it.

Anyway, at the start of each adventure, the TARDIS dematerializes in a new place in history or the future, or, very occasionally, if the budget’s running low, present day Cardiff, which is where the show is produced. At one time, the traveling aspect was considered thunderously amazing. The Doctor and his companions would pile out of the door and be awestruck. “Wow, look at this – we’re on a new planet.” Or: “Wow, Doctor, is this really Atlantis?” But not any more. Awe’s for old people. Nobody does awe convincingly any more.

For instance, the other week, they arrived at a 13th Century island castle, which, if this were real life, would be considered pretty cool and awe-inspiring and certainly worth a photo, yet the only comment was a glib, “Oh, we’re going all medieval, are we?” And off they went. They may as well have been visiting Tesco’s.

Monsters are also integral to the show. In the early years, this would amount to a bunch of men dressed up in giant ant costumes (named Zarbi, which is an abbreviated anagram of ‘bizarre’) or low-paid extras rolling around the studio floor in large wooden crates called Daleks. Later on, with advances in TV technology, the costumes became more sophisticated and the crates a little more streamlined. In the end, though, nobody was fooled. It was still just actors in outfits. Nothing has changed on that score.

Anyway, the joy of Doctor Who adventures – which, I grant you, isn’t immediately obvious from the above description – is the endless permutations on a theme that the idea allows. No adventure, no place, no time in history or in the future is ever off-limits – unless it would cost a lot of money to reproduce on TV, in which case he simply doesn’t go there. There’s plenty of genuine playfulness and affection thrown in too. Above all, despite the let’s-pretend world the producers created, it’s always had an edge of plausibility to it that kept us engaged, scared when necessary, and fond of the characters.

So there you have it. That’s Doctor Who. It’s also the essence of the current problem they have with the show.

What makes Doctor Who more important than, say, the science fiction you like?

Created by a Canadian, Sydney Newman, the show launched in quaint old black and white in 1963. Forty-eight years later, it’s still going.

I was there for the first episode, just as I’ve been there for every episode since, as well as two blindingly fluorescent and largely terrible spin-off movies starring Peter Cushing, which got most of the mythology wrong, and a lesser TV movie that blew a hole in the franchise so big that it almost saw it off for good.

Sarah-Jane is the one on the right.

Over the years, I have witnessed the Doctor regenerate multiple times (which, ingeniously, happens whenever the actor playing him gets too sick or very bored, or doesn’t gel with the public and ratings start to tail off, and he needs to be replaced.) I’ve also bought into the lives of countless of his young traveling companions along the way, many of whom, when I was in my youth, made up for the friends I didn’t have in real life. The best by far was Sarah-Jane Smith in the 1970s.

I was a lonely, bullied, isolated child back then, someone who took refuge in TV as a means of escaping real world rejection and terror, and I remember vividly how the news that Elizabeth Sladen, who played Sarah-Jane, was quitting the show in 1976, affected me. It shook my faith in grown-ups at a profound molecular level. So much so that I had serious abandonment issues for a long while afterwards. And I’m not kidding about this. Even my mother’s death didn’t affect me a fraction as much as Sarah-Jane’s departure from the show. To a kid’s eyes, it was a tragedy. I felt like an orphan. Though even then, even as this strange relationship was playing out, I wasn’t unaware of how odd it was for a child to have such a level of commitment to something he absolutely knew was fake and just a drama. Didn’t matter. It became the sole focus of my week and my life. Everything I did seemed to be just filling in time while I waited for the next Doctor Who to come around.

As I said, the show originally aired in black and white, and stayed that way for years before finally upgrading. When it did, we unfortunately still had a black and white set at home, which was no use at all. So each week on a Saturday afternoon, this peculiarly distant kid would take the bus into Stockport town center to visit a store called Nield and Hardy, because they sold TVs there. And for half an hour he would stand, with shoppers and assistants staring at him wondering if someone should notify the authorities, intently watching Doctor Who play out on a new technology being touted as a sensational alternative to monochrome and the Next Big Thing: color.

Such was my attachment to, passion for, and love of, this amazing show.

Years later, the lonely, isolated kid, who’d by now grown up to become a lonely, isolated adult, moved from the north of England to London, where he figured he wouldn’t get beaten up so much, and where, by some miracle, he was given free access along with his job to the legendary home of Doctor Who - BBC Television Center. It was the most wonderful opportunity. Not only that, but I happened to live a few streets away (coincidentally, with a woman who’d actually worked as a production assistant on several episodes). From then on, I would go along on Sunday afternoons to the BBC, flash my pass at the security guard, but instead of going to the news department offices – which would have been a pointless mission, since news in those days only happened Monday to Friday, never at weekends – I took the lift downstairs to the Props Department, where the real TARDIS, the one used in the show, was kept….and I would play in it.

I’m not embarrassed to say this either. Many Sundays over many months, I played in the TARDIS.

I was 34 years old. (Okay, this bit is embarrassing. And quite sad.)

There was even a trip to Pinewood Studios arranged once, I remember, which is where the Peter Cushing movies were filmed. So of course their props department had a TARDIS too. And I played quite happily in that as well for maybe an hour or more, only to discover that, the very next day, the police box was taken out and burnt, as a way to reduce the number of unwanted props at the studio.

These days, I like to think I’m a lot more balanced and nowhere near as lonely or distant as I was then. But it was touch and go for a while. Obviously, though, when one has invested this much emotional and mental energy into something, one develops a somewhat proprietorial interest in its welfare. As a lifelong fan, you want those who have guardianship of it to understand what precious cargo is under their control and to show a high degree of care for it. You want them to respect it and love it the way you do. And you’re constantly on the alert for when they’re about to screw it up.

That’s why I’m writing this. I’m doing it as a long-term fan. A fan who sees Doctor Who heading down the wrong road, and doesn’t like it one bit. Not one bit, d’you hear?

How Doctor Who got hijacked by misguided people

Another great advantage of hanging out at BBC Television Center in the 80s was that you got to be within arm’s reach of so many famous and influential types. On the side, I’d been writing material for another great TV show - The Two Ronnies. But this was just one amazing series out of many. Virtually every big household favorite came from TV Center.

I recall once cornering a woman called Biddy Baxter, considered a legend in British television for creating and running the kids’ magazine show Blue Peter. Having grabbed her attention, I proceeded to tell her in mind-numbing detail how I thought Doctor Who had lost its way and was becoming a disaster and an embarrassment.

“Oh really? Why?” she asked. “What’s happened to it?”

Quite honestly, I was shocked that someone so eminent would give over a couple of hours of her busy day to hear me explain. But that was how people were back then – they listened. Took in all different viewpoints and embraced them.

At the time, the show was being produced by John Nathan-Turner, who, I told her, was single-handedly wrecking it by making one cretinous decision after another. For a start, he brought in the insufferable red-headed all-singing, all-screaming Bonnie Langford to be the Doctor’s assistant – a calamitous selection. He’d also decided at one point to get rid of the police box idea and let the TARDIS be another shape, shattering one of its most iconic characteristics. Plus, his choice of actors to play Doctors #6 and #7 was appallingly miscalculated, I felt. Number 6 was Colin Baker (who was distinctly unlikable in the role). Then, after he left, came Number 7, a Scottish comedian and mime artist called Sylvester McCoy (real name: Percy Kent-Smith), who, for reasons known only to himself, played the Doctor as a clown. Then, when that didn’t work, as a sinister bizarro man with evil intent, which didn’t work either.

Within a matter of years,  it had become campy, ridiculous, cheap, and pointless. So it was hardly surprising, perhaps, that ratings fell into an abyss, as the show repeatedly missed its mark and went way off the rails. In the end, the unthinkable happened. The BBC cancelled it.

“They are completely missing the point of what the show is about,” I complained to Biddy, who made like she was genuinely interested, even though she must have been bored out of her mind.

“And what is it about?” she asked. 

“It’s about finding a secure place in a difficult, dangerous world. It’s about being in awe of the universe and adventurous in the exploration of it, but always having a safe spot you can run to when things get too dangerous. A spot where nobody can touch you, where you are in control. The TARDIS is a surrogate, albeit temperamental parent. That’s what it means to kids. The producer doesn’t understand that.”

Biddy, who no doubt realized that these were my own personal issues, not John Nathan-Turner’s, nevertheless assured me that what I was saying was valid and important. “I will tell him immediately,” she said. “Thank you for letting me know.”

And she hurried away. Possibly to alert Security.

Let’s fast-forward now to the present day. If you have a time machine, go ahead and use it. The rest of us will resort to a heading in bold letters.

How Doctor Who then got hijacked by smart people

In 2005, Doctor Who was rebooted under Russell T. Davies as a much darker, more troubling show. He took the whole thing very seriously, giving it a breadth, depth, and overall scope that made anything that had gone before seem as light and fluffy as lint from a tumbledryer. His best decision of all was to hire a young actor called David Tennant to take the lead.

Up to then, the title of Best Doctor Ever had gone to the 4th incarnation, Tom Baker, who was a mind-blowing iconoclast in the role. But Tennant was different. He raised the bar a hundredfold by making the alien Time Lord more human than ever, blowing previous perceptions and expectations out of the water, bringing to the show a pathos and soul that could have you laughing one minute and weeping the next.

A trust developed. There was a sadness and vulnerability to this character that we all identified with. Up until then I’d cared very much about the show. But when Tennant took over, I noticed that I started caring about him. He brought resonance and humanity and meaning to this hitherto crazy character that somehow went way beyond what it required. He grounded the Time Lord in verifiable feelings. His needs became our imperatives. The Doctor was a sad, distant, haunted, lonely man, we discovered – ah! – someone who couldn’t be happy for long. In playing with our emotions in such a broad, complicated way, this guy turned a show I’d loved as a kid, but which had become increasingly trivial and superficial, into something of importance, something of depth; something fascinating and gripping that was worth watching again.

Then Tennant left before he could become typecast, which was bad news. And I, like many others, experienced a real sense of loss all over again.

His departure episode was a little overplayed, I thought, but still managed to move me as much as any modern dramatic piece ever had. I didn’t want him to go, same way I didn’t want Sarah-Jane Smith to go in my teens. Though a middle-aged man by this time, I felt a pang of the same abandonment issues.

With David Tennant leaving, Russell T. Davies went too, and this was the really bad news. He’d shot his bolt, taken it as far as he could, he figured, so he handed over stewardship to Steven Moffat, a clever man who you’d think would be a natural choice, given that he wrote possibly the best Doctor Who episode ever, called ‘Blink’ (which, bizarrely, hardly featured the Doctor at all). However, he also wrote what was, to my mind, one of the very worst sitcoms ever, Coupling, which I thought was horribly unfunny and lame in ways that mere words cannot explain (unless you use unfunny and lame) and whose U.S. adaptation tanked after four episodes. This was not a good sign.

At the same time, David Tennant’s successor was named as 26-year old Matt Smith, a man deemed by many to be way too young and lacking the wisdom of a guy who is supposed to have lived many lifetimes. Indeed, at the time that I was ruining an afternoon of Biddy Baxter’s life by regaling her with my abandonment theories, Smith was five years old. And Karen Gillan, his current assistant, was barely a foetus.

By the way, those last few sentences contain all you need to know about what’s going wrong with Doctor Who currently.

David Tennant was the Doctor, bringing a complicated span of layers to the part, whereas Matt Smith is merely playing him, I feel. Not only that, but he’s playing him as a manic, ADD-afflicted, wisecracking for no reason, run-around-saying-things-faster-than-the-audience-can-catch them kind of uppity schoolboy. He’s taken the natural smarts of the character and his other-worldly eccentricity, and made them virtually all there is, top and bottom. Plus, the TARDIS is no longer a safe harbor and place of refuge, it’s become a traveling spa, one that has a swimming pool and which keeps breaking down and exploding or catching fire. To my mind, the producers have blown any mystique the show might have had right out of the water.

As a result, this eleventh regeneration of the Doctor led to a degeneration of the entire show. It immediately became silly and soulless, oftentimes played only for laughs. A series of dizzy sight gags, a droll excursion into absurdity.

If the show doesn’t take the emotional side of things very seriously, why should we? Nowadays, the peril the Doctor and his companions find themselves in seems wholly unreal a lot of the time, and therefore unmoving. There’s implausibility at every turn. You find yourself shouting at the TV, “Oh, come on, that would never happen!” Even though you know that none of this would ever happen anyway, because it’s utter fiction. That aside, I’ve reached a point where I honestly don’t care if these people survive or not. I’m not involved in their lives. They’re just actors playing characters.

A Separate Heading

People constantly refer to Moffat as a genius. Deservedly so, I’d say. His ideas are clever, convoluted, and technically brilliant, and his past scripts have been extraordinary. For that he deserves his weight in accolades and thanks. But what use cleverness and brilliance and accolades and thanks, I say, if your show has no soul and has become a smug, bloated, overcomplicated, ludicrous farce?

Here are some reviews I read recently:

“Noisy, repetitive and obnoxious. The… sensory overload is somehow blindingly dull. The barrage of onscreen overstimulation will keep kids glued to their seats, but won’t make them care about or cherish the characters.” (The Diva Review)

“The action grows wearisome as it grinds on, and…becomes a succession of dazzling set pieces devoid of simple feelings.” Wall Street Journal.

No, wait! Those are reviews of The Adventures of Tintin.

And guess who wrote that.

Steven Moffat.

There was another review I saw, this time in The Guardian newspaper, in which journalist Nicholas Lezard says, “Coming out of the…film, I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape. I use this comparison not as a provocation or to cause unnecessary offence: I am using it in honour of a very good joke made by an episode of South Park, in which the cartoon’s children watch the final Indiana Jones film and are so traumatised by what they have seen that they go round to the police station and try to get Spielberg and his colleagues charged with the crime. “What did they do to poor Indy…?’… As it is, the film has turned a subtle, intricate and beautiful work of art into the typical bombast of the modern blockbuster, Tintin for morons.”

Now, of course, many hands went into the making of Tintin, it’s not just Moffat, and there’s no telling how much of his original script made it into the finished film, because other writers were brought in later to fine-tune it, so we need to be careful here, and also as fair as we can be to the man. Plus, when I saw the movie I liked it very much. There were some dumb, quippy parts, but generally speaking it was highly engaging. Even so, Lezard’s view about the film applies to how I see Moffat’s version of Doctor Who. I have a sense of violation.

(BTW, there’s a review on Collider.com HERE about the movie, giving it a C, that, were it not about Moffat’s Tintin, could, I suspect, just as easily be trying to describe the flaws in Moffat’s Doctor Who.)

The stories play with our minds now, not our hearts. It’s smart, fast, bright, and trying very, very hard to be engaging. A Rubik’s Cube of intricate components, slickly delivered and not impossible to unravel, obviously, but lacking the incentive to make you want to. The show is cerebral and shallow suddenly, rather than emotional in ways we can relate to, as the human component gets wedged into the tiny gaps between wisecracks. And even when there is emotion, when people cry at a loss or out of fear, it doesn’t touch us. It’s fleeting and contrived. Consequently, I find I’m not involved. Not the way I used to be under Tennant and Davies’ stewardship. Why? Because I don’t care about these latest people. I don’t recognize them as real. They’re quirky caricatures. They mean nothing to me.

Where once the series was packed with mystery and awe and presence and took its time to breathe, the new shows are glib and fanciful, filled with sudden left turns and surprises we can scarcely follow, because there was barely any build-up to them. Oh, Amy’s pregnant suddenly. Sure – right. Ah, River is, out of the blue, Amy’s daughter now, and simultaneously Amy’s best friend from her school days. Of course she is! Whatever you say. But it’s meaningless, don’t you see? Doctor Who in its present incarnation has become a series of long-term plot-points connected by one-liners and “situations.”  For some reason, the producers seem to have it pinned, not as a quality drama that spans generations, but as a science fiction sitcom in space with a few serious bits thrown in. I can’t tell you how depressed that makes me feel.

The issue is simple: in previous incarnations of the character, the stories have always involved exploring planets and historical or future time periods, saving lives, winning battles, outwitting enemies, whereas under Moffat’s charge, the show has become about the Doctor himself. He is the whole focus. Everything boils down to him – his problems, his death, his history, him him him. And that, in my eyes, betrays everything the show’s about.

My partner is American. He discovered Doctor Who during the Tennant years and became hooked. We’d watch it together and he would marvel at the intricacy and the mythology and the sheer inventiveness and craft that went into every episode. Now, too much of what was good has been eaten away. He often walks out during the show, saying, “They’re losing it, aren’t they?”

And he’s right. They’re losing it. And they’re losing me. And I don’t think they see it at all.

Spoilers!

My guess is that, somewhere between seasons, an expert with a graph and a Powerpoint presentation showed up in Moffat’s office and said, “Look, we’ve figured out that if you switch the intended demographic of the show away from older, established fans, and aim it more at kids, adolescents, sci-fi geeks, and the totally undiscerning who’ll watch anything as long as it’s fast and has running and explosions in it, the emotional quality might drop, but we’ll draw bigger numbers. Plus we can then sell it to kids, adolescents, sci-fi geeks, and the totally undiscerning in America too.”

This wouldn’t surprise me in the least. It’s how TV works nowadays a lot of the time. And, sure enough, ratings are rising nicely, though that’s no measure of the quality of a series. Look at how many truly lowest-common-denominator trashy shows are top-rated in America.

“Oh, and while you’re at it,” the expert with the graph must have said, “be a poppet and update the design of the Daleks and the TARDIS, would you? That way we can get the geeks to buy the merchandise all over again.”

I tweeted Steven Moffat recently on a whim, reminding him of the legacy he was carrying and how I thought he was spoiling something wonderful. “Glibness,” I told him, “is a sin in drama.” Alas, he’s no Biddy Baxter; he didn’t want to hear. He tweeted back, snarkily, “Okay, I’ll axe it immediately. Happy now?” Or something like that. I replied, “Don’t axe it, improve it. Take it more seriously”, and was promptly showered in abuse by irate Whovians, as they call themselves: fanboys and girls who are obsessive, like me, but without half the objectivity. They tend to cream themselves over Doctor Who no matter what, to the point where they’ll forgive the most major transgressions. I know that feeling, and it’s tempting to be that way, but it doesn’t help.

The third episode this season, about pirates, was a clunker, filled with moments of jarring implausibility and numerous attempts at jokes, the likes of which I’ve not seen since the Sylvester McCoy years. Quite a few sharks were jumped that night, and Moffat was justifiably pilloried for daring to put out such rubbish.

The fourth episode was penned by comic book writer Neil Gaiman, and was a good deal better, even haunting in some ways. It featured a junkyard of old dismantled TARDISes and the voice and soul of the TARDIS itself that had become locked into the body of a woman. Oddly, though, my partner still walked out. The episode, he complained, was unfocused, manic, and failed to captivate his interest. There was a lot of shouting, a lot of running about, some explosions, a lot of fast talking, and some one-liners that were meant to be funny. But in the end, where was the heart? (Well, okay, there was a bit of heart – but not enough, d’you hear?)

Despite the fact that the companion Rory died (which he does in most episodes), and Amy cried, and so did the Doctor, and therefore it should have been moving – it wasn’t. Tennant would have had me sobbing into a pillow. Matt Smith, the uppity schoolboy, left me cold. He acts the part, but somehow, to me, he doesn’t convey the truth of the role. This is slowly undermining the visceral power of the show to move and inspire and shock, turning it instead into a series of jokes and postures, dancing and Pythonesque prancing, crazy stunts and wrap-around conundrums. Plenty of brain stuff, but very little heart stuff. And it’s the heart stuff that counts. Ask Russell T. Davies. That guy knew a thing or two.

These are not exactly the Sylvester McCoy years all over again. Nothing could be that bad, although someone wrote from the UK to tell me that ratings are plummeting there. Hardly surprising if so. In my view we are in trouble here. The show is now hung up on its own cleverness. A hit in America suddenly, it’s become too big for its reboots. I’ve seen giant billboards on Sunset Boulevard here in Hollywood advertising it, and I can scarcely believe how far it’s come. Yet I fear the extent of its popularity is starting to strangle it, taking the last breath of plausibility from the concept in its efforts to please a specific youth demographic. For the Easter episode in the UK, ratings apparently plunged 1.5 million. That’s staggering, and worrying. It’s like learning that a dear old friend has just received a horrible cancer diagnosis. They may look fine and tell you they feel okay, but on the inside you know they’re slowly dying, one bunch of cells at a time.

That’s how I feel about Doctor Who now. We keep watching, because it’s on and it’s there. Doesn’t mean it’s good or that we haven’t noticed the obvious – that, one bunch of cells at a time, the spirit is dying. It all makes me very sad.

Since this post first appeared, I’ve heard from many annoyed Matt Smith fans, telling me, “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. Go get a life.” I consider that to be sound advice. Maybe it’s not a matter of whether my favorite show is better or worse, more that I’ve simply outgrown it. It is a kid’s program after all, and I am no longer that lonely, bullied, unhappy, distant child I was when Doctor Who started and my imagination needed somewhere to run to and hide each week. Nowadays, I believe I’m upbeat and well-rounded, and certainly very contented with my life. Maybe that’s why, for the first time, I honestly don’t care what the future holds for the Doctor and his jokey, glib chums.

So tonight I am doing something almost as unthinkable as when the BBC canceled the show in the 1980s – I am canceling it myself. Off the Season Pass list of my TiVo.

Friends, I have an official statement. Please gather round.

I – meaning me – formally declare that I am no longer a fan of this series. Thank you, people who make the show, for providing me with almost five decades of compulsive enjoyment. But it’s time. And I need some space. Like a middle-aged Trekkie finally realizing what a total doofus he must seem, and hanging up his James T. Kirk Starfleet uniform for good, I, after 48 years of love and adoration, have decided that I am all grown-up now and ready once and for all to let go of Doctor Who, as I did with Joe 90, Absolutely Fabulous, Monty Python, the cartoon Tintin, and many others, and not only move on with my life, but actually get one.

With that, then, I’d like to bid you all a very good night.

Okay, TiVo, do your worst.

TV Swami – he say NO to Doctor Who for all kinds of entirely valid reasons.

[UPDATE May 16th 2011]. After a little light toing and froing on a Doctor Who fansite, the gist of which was that they believe the show is the best it’s ever been, while I think it’s technically the best, but emotionally failing us in a big way, Steven Moffat himself pitched in with a snippy, “The ratings, reviews, and audience feedback are all superb. Disagree without me.” Needless to say, I disagree. He’s right, though – I overstepped the mark. We shouldn’t have included him in the tweets. I’ve said my piece. Discussion’s over.

[UPDATE: May 22nd 2011] Here’s something strange. Yesterday, I was flicking through the channels and inadvertently came upon Doctor Who. It was the Rebel Flesh episode. Out of habit more than anything else, I naturally began watching it. After 48 years, it’s a hard commitment to drop, obviously. But you know what? Everything I said in the blog post  applied to this episode too. It was dreadful. So poorly written and so emotionally uninvolving that after 20 minutes I fell asleep – which has NEVER happened before during this show. Furthermore, I have absolutely no interest in going back to find out how things worked out in the remainder of the program. That takes some doing, believe me. Seems I was right – the spell is broken after all.  We’re done, the Doctor and I.

[UPDATE: July 22nd 2011] Private Eye is running articles about chaos behind the scenes at the BBC in Wales where Doctor Who has been produced. According to them, a couple of problem-causing producers were let go in haste. Don’t know if it’s true, but if it is….well, I hate to say I told you so…. Something has gone very, very wrong with the show. It is now a silly, fatuous mess that has shot right off the rails.

[UPDATE: September 5th 2011:]  Over the summer I read some encouraging comments emerging from ComicCon, that Doctor Who might improve. It was going to become darker and more serious as the year went on, went the rumors. Ah, I thought, finally the message is sinking in. So I tuned in to the first episode, Let’s Kill Hitler, hoping it would win me back. Really, really hoping. But –  no. Oh my lordy, was it dreadful!! DREADFUL. The worst one since the dire pirates episode in the Spring, for which the show deservedly got a public drubbing. The story was, again, all over the place. An out-of-control whirligig of plot points and jokes, always trying way too hard, desperate to be clever, seeming not to care whether we followed it or not, and filled with manic shouting and running about and locking Hitler in a cupboard. Rubbish. Mental masturbation. And, I would respectfully contend, little more than the Executive Producer’s New Clothes.

That said, the next episode, Night Terrors, written by Mark Gatiss, was considerably better. Considerably. Not scary enough – story: little kid is frightened by monsters in his cupboard at night. Turns out he’s responsible for turning everyone he’s scared of into big, stiff, giggling dolls) – and of course I had to fast-forward through a lot of the dialogue, because everything’s a quip still – they’ve learned nothing on that score. But overall, it was better. Better and more engrossing, and very reminiscent of classic Doctor Who stories from the past. It had structure, good acting, and thankfully much less of the producer’s heavy-heavy ‘I have an overarching grand plan and here’s a meaningless clue to what it is’ plot-pointing, which is dragging the series to its knees – for me at least.

One of the best things I’ve discovered is that I can watch an hourlong show in about 25 minutes with my thumb on the FF button. So I skip the dross, kangaroo hop over the silly dialogue that infects everything now, and still stay broadly abreast, so that, hopefully, when a better team is put in charge of the series later on, I will be able to rejoin it and not feel as if I’ve missed too much. That’s the plan anyway.

[UPDATE: September 10th 2011]. Having established my particular ground zero last week with Night Terrors, which involved a new way of watching the show – mainly on fast-forward, stopping only for the action and skipping the horrible quippy dialogue, I applied the same technique to this week’s episode: The Girl Who Waited. Only, here’s the thing: I didn’t have to fast-forward at all. It was great. Really. Very enjoyable. They couldn’t help throwing in a few stupid lines of dialogue along the way – seems there’s no expunging those; someone on high must like them – but I found the story gripping, the execution of it fantastic, and once again it reminded me of the Doctor Who of old.

Seems the complaints to Moffat didn’t go unheeded. Not that I was the only one, mind; there must have been tens of thousands. Is it crazy of me to think that maybe my words on Twitter may have struck a chord at just the right moment? How fantastic. Because here it is, suddenly – a far better, more focused program that’s actually watchable for once in the longest time. Good job all round.

(I have amended the above para, BTW, after it was pointed out, quite rightly. that my ego had run away with me. Apparently, I mistakenly gave the impression that, due to my complaints alone, Doctor Who changed course, which is nonsense. (See comment below). But I do think waves of unrest most likely forced them to reconsider the tone as they went along. I hope so. That would be democracy in action then. However the current improvement was arrived at, the shows are better than what went before, for which we are very thankful. We are left hoping that things keep on improving.)

[UPDATE: September 17th 2011] The God Complex. Oh dear. I take it all back. Seems they learned nothing after all.

This episode had its moments. A few. Love the clown on the bed, for instance. And David Walliams’ eye movements. And the claustrophobic corridors. And the The Shining parallels. And the underlying dichotomy of faith and fear battling for supremacy. But otherwise, it lapsed once again from its slow path back to greatness, packed as it was with the usual raft of glib, needless one-liners, spots of drama school acting, and bursts of rapid cutting and weird camera angles, topped off with the ultimate confection: a man-in-a-costume minotaur monster with a papier-mâché head, sort of. Oh, and quick left turn: Amy and Rory departed from the show. Suddenly. Maybe. This, despite the fact that they’re supposed to be worried that the Doctor is about to get shot and up to a certain point wanted to prevent that happening, but now seem to have lost interest, same way we have. At any rate, no mention was made of that.

Anything could happen now. There seem to be no rules any more. It’s like someone went to a neighborhood non sequitur sale and bought everything they had.

On the positive side – and this is huge, so brace yourself, mateys – I saw glimmers here and there of a Matt Smith-style Doctor that I quite like. A-ha! Surprised? I’m serious. Wasn’t much. Looks in the eyes, twists of the head, tantalizing glances and intonation. There’s definitely something. If only the script weren’t plastered wall to wall with quips, I could eventually find myself warming to him, I swear.

Alas, it’s probably too late. The damage is done.

[UPDATE: September 25th 2011]  Closing Time. Words fail me. Except for unwatchable. One of the most excruciatingly horrible episodes ever produced. The sitcom in space continues to nosedive.

[UPDATE: October 1st 2011] The Wedding of River Song. Usual jumble, jammed with improbabilities and conjuring tricks that fooled the eye but left the heart begging for something tangible to go at. There were moments, definite moments, when it came close to redeeming itself. Not enough, though, and not in ways that felt truly satisfactory. The Doctor didn’t die. Why? Because there were two of him, one inside the other.

This was the season finale, and everyone in our house is mightily relieved it’s over. What an unsettling, uneven mishmash experience this has been.

[UPDATE: December 25th 2011] The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe. I was about to coin a word – moffatsturbation, to describe a self-flagellating, full-of-itself pleasure ride whose faux cleverness only pleased the person who wrote it and nobody else. Moreover, I’d read on Twitter that people in the UK were hating this year’s Christmas special. Horrible, they said. Self-indulgent, they said. So, with my thumb on the fast-forward button,  I sat down to watch. And you know what? I actually enjoyed it. I did. Yes, it was needlessly quippy, and yes it had sitcom moments that didn’t sit easily at all. (Moffat never learns). And yes, my partner walked out, disgusted at how stupid it was.

But then, almost like a Christmas miracle, it got better, and I actually began to admire the inventiveness of it. Kid opens Xmas present early, finds that one side of it is in the house, the other side opens up into a magical snowy forest, where people made of wood are desperate for help from acid rain. Sorry, haters, and sorry too to those who expected me to hate it as well, but I thought it was fine. Better than fine, a rather nice way to fill Christmas Day evening.

I quite shocked myself.

In seven days’ time, coinciding with the end of my BBC TV review slot on Radio 5 Live, I will be ceasing to watch TV completely. So there will be no more Doctor Who updates when it returns at the end of 2012. But at least my favorite show ever went out on a favorable note. Thanks  for that, at least.

In April 2010 I posted a blog entry explaining how I believed American Idol Season 9 was rigged by the producers to generate great, gripping television, by largely disregarding the votes of the public and just sort of letting through the contestants they thought would sell more records and dumping the ones they didn’t.

This was not random guesswork on my part, by the way. I had a system, and I laid that system down about two months before the finale, charting exactly how I thought the show would go for the remaining nine weeks. And lo, guess what! It followed my predictions more or less to the letter. And when it didn’t, there was a reason it didn’t. Which means that either: a) I’m a genius with a whole ESP thing going on, something we can’t entirely discount, or b) American Idol is rigged.

So, because the prediction game was such a hoot in 2010, and because I started watching the 2011 season tonight for the first time and feel there’s plenty of room for the producers to fix this season too, if that’s their plan, then I thought we’d try the whole thing again. The show’s received a make-over this season – my friends Jill and Scott designed and animated the dazzling new title sequence and logos, and did a fantastic job – plus it’s got new judges, and a new human side to it which has helped maintain ratings. But have the producers, I wonder, retained that one staple that seems to me such an important part of keeping the show on a ratings high? Are they messing with the voting this time?

Well, who can say? But there were hopeful signs of fakery on March 4th.

Example 1: The judges had to select a top 12 to move forward in the competition. Not a hard job. Frankly, it was absolutely obvious from the get-go who the 12 would be.

For instance, the woman with the bucket face that’s all rhomboid shaped, as if it was drawn with an Etch-a-Sketch, and who looks like she’s a singer by night and works on a fork-lift truck assembly line by day, had the voice for stardom certainly, but wasn’t attractive. Not at all. No sane 12 year old would ever post her picture on the inside of his locker. So she had to go. And that kid who looked and spoke like Rambo’s son, but who shocked everyone by singing like Jennifer Tilly in the shower, he was out. And that fool with the hair. Oh, and the sobbing dwarf in the cartoon professor glasses. All of them had to go. They didn’t stand a chance. No star quality. No charisma. That’s just how it is.

Whereas the little dark-eyed Hispanic guy with the lumpy head who, quite simply, is channeling God when he sings – he had to get through, even though he doesn’t connect with the audience much and his accent is so thick you could paddle a canoe with it.

This, I think, was the first sign of the show being rigged. Everyone loved Mr. Paddle. Everyone supported Mr. Paddle. He’s got star quality. So relegating him to the benches for most of the show and making us sit it out to see if the judges made Mr. Paddle a wild card pick was excruciating and blatantly phony, I thought. Of course he was going to go through! If I were a producer on this show, I’d pretend he might not be picked as well. What better way to build tension than a simmering sense of injustice?

Example 2: Towards the end, we came back after the break to find the judges deep in fake discussion. Ryan asked, “So, judges, have you made your final choice?” And Jennifer Lopez said, “No. We need more time.”

Oh yeah, really? But wait, I thought the order was agreed at a production meeting beforehand and given to the judges on a piece of paper to read. Surely they must know their verdict. It’s written right there.

But no. Cue Ryan’s acting, which he’s hopeless at, by the way. “Well, take your time,” he said. “Hey, here’s an idea…” Why not cut to a video of Jennifer Lopez’s new single while we’re waiting? My goodness, but that’s brilliant. And what luck that they had it all cued up, ready to go. Especially since they’d been promoting the thing for days and there were only nine minutes of the program left to show it in.

Example 3: They’re back to their old trick of saying, “America voted and….so-and-so is going home tonight.” Not, as it should be: “So-and-so got the lowest number of votes.” Read literally, that would mean they round up the bottom three contestants, then the producers get to choose which one goes home – which is to say, the one least likely to make them any money. (And there are a LOT of those this year, if not all of them).

The way they gauge this is most likely by the download sales figures on iTunes. The singer with the lowest sales each week leaves. But of course they do – if they’re not going to make any money for Fox, 19, the record company, or whoever else creams off a few cents, send ‘em home. Nobody will want to hear them sing on the American Idol tour anyway.

To read allegations about how Simon Cowell’s Britain’s Got Talent may be rigged, CLICK HERE

[UPDATE March 31st 2011]: On March 24th, Seacrest actually used the phrase, “The lowest number of votes….” for the first time in ages. I can hear the producers now: “For Christ’s sake, Ryan, mention the lowest votes thing this week; they may be onto us…” Yet, here’s what’s strange. The one and only week they mention the lowest number of votes is the week that they save the guy with the lowest number of votes and let him stay in the competition. Hm.

[UPDATE APRIL 10th 2011] Nigel Lythgoe, the executive producer, was interviewed by Yahoo recently and he spoke about changing American Idol’s format. “Maybe if we change the rules next season,” he said, “maybe do the same thing we do on ‘So You Think You Can Dance’….so that America votes for the bottom three, and then the judges decide who goes home….I think that will be thought about.” Er…okay, I thought that’s what you already did.

[UPDATE MAY 12th 2011] You don’t have to be particularly eagle-eyed to notice that, once again, it’s not the person with the lowest number of votes who went home, according to Seacrest tonight, but rather Scotty was chosen to go forward to be in the final three, leaving James Durbin alone on the stage. But of course! He’s the least commercial, with his screeching and running around and fireworks, and the one least likely to bring in viewers to the finale in a couple of weeks and music-buying fans to iTunes. He had to go, I should think, simply from a business standpoint.

Anyway, you get the idea.

SO WHO’LL WIN, THEN?

Well, left to me, the finale would be between Scotty and Lauren. Haley’s improved a whole lot, but I still don’t like her as a performer. I’ve tried, but I don’t get her allure. She does give 100%, though, whereas Lauren gives 80% and the rest is a wing and a prayer. If I were one of the producers, I’d be asking – as I’m sure they have asked – who’s going to make us the most money in the long-run? Answer Scotty first, then Lauren. They have built-in audiences. Haley will make an album, then vanish,  and archuleta her way back to oblivion.  

Scotty

Scotty McCreery This guy doesn’t need to win, he has a huge career no matter what. A pipe and slippers guy, and actually quite adorable. With your eyes shut he could be 45 years old.  Alas, he does a weird bendy thing with his neck, which is unsettling. His one-note hillbilly cuteness is wearing a bit thin. He does one style only, but he does it brilliantly. At one point, the producers must have been looking at him, going, “We may need to get rid of this guy soon. He’s becoming a bendy-necked liability.” Next thing you know, he’s stopped bending his neck quite so much and gotten a little bit cuter, putting him on the fast track to this year’s title. One of the most consistently good performers, Scotty’s the contestant who, in a couple of decades time, will probably have a theater in Branson named after him. And possibly a municipal library. He’s been my absolute favorite since the auditions; I tipped him as the winner way back then, and I’m still behind him. I just think he’s goshdarned great.

AND IT’S SCOTTY FOR THE WIN! This is my big told-you-so moment. I backed this guy from the auditions and said he’d won, and he soared home. 

Lauren Alaina  She’s my wild card, because she definitely has star potential. Yes, siree. Plus, the judges love her to bits and want her to win sooooo badly, because they sniff another Carrie Underwood. Lauren’s a bit fat, but hey, look what happened with Jennifer Hudson. Problem is, when Lauren sings she lacks the final 20% of confidence needed to be a star, as if she’s belting out a song, but all the while thinking, “How can they possibly like me?  I’m sixteen and fat.” Some kind of self-worth issue going on here which prevents her going the whole way. It’s frustrating to watch. But there’s great potential there.

[UPDATE MAY 25th 2011] It’s so obvious that the stage has been set for Lauren to win. There hasn’t been a female winner for years, and the whole contest looks engineered to make her a star, with Scotty rolling in, hands in pockets, wearing a tight-fitting suit, a casual second. The judges are clearly backing her big-time. Even the coronation song that Lauren got to sing, the one she’ll release if she wins, was fifty times better than Scotty’s, which is “boring to the max, dude” (that’s how the kids talk nowadays).

But I’ve seen this happen before – the judges push one contestant, and fans of the other contestant, who are feeling aggrieved that their guy is getting left behind, try extra hard to have him crowned. Which is exactly what happened. They backed Lauren, so Scotty fans rushed to the phones and repeat dialed ’til their nails broke. My guess is: Scotty got 121.9 million votes, and Lauren got the dregs. Without a doubt, the best man won.

GONERS:

See how you feel now? Now that the rest of them are off the show. Suddenly, the aura of excitement surrounding them disappears and you find you don’t care any more.

Haley Reinhart She began as someone who performs as though she’s practiced a thousand times in front of a mirror. I believe she’s in the tail end of the competition because occasionally she really belts one out, and gets it right. She gives 100% each time because she’s not fat. So boys think she’s cute, and A.I. needs little boys to watch as well as little screaming girls. But nobody – I repeat nobody – is going to buy her music once this is all over. A Haley-Lauren finale is not impossible, but it would be very, very wrong, and I wouldn’t watch it. Luckily, that’s not gonna be the case. Annoying Haley is GONE. VOTED OFF MAY 19th 2011. Yay! She should have gone weeks ago, as you know, and it’s been a long wait, but here it is. Next week, Lauren and Scotty in the finale, people. I’ve thought all along that Scotty would win. But if he comes 2nd it’d be better for his career.

James Durbin The Tourette’s guy. Personable, with a good voice, but he has a nervous twitch going on. His eyebrows keep giving us a Mexican wave. Though God bless the guy for trying. He’s without doubt the most talented one. Of course, as a heavy metal singer, he’s very screamy, but when he sings a really good song, his voice quality is excellent. He’s the only singer this season whose music I have actually bought, which must tell you something. If he does win – and he may not, because the best one usually doesn’t; that way he doesn’t get tarred with the American Idol brush – he’s destined for a small career, sadly. GONE. VOTED OFF MAY 12th 2011. Am I surprised? A little, but then what about the twitch and the screaming? Are those marketable? What seems great on TV during a singing contest tends not to translate to the real world. Plus, he doesn’t sing about God and Jesus, and Scotty and Lauren do. Middle America loves God and Jesus songs.

Jacob Lusk He gives off emotion like he’s leaking radiation. You can feel him through the TV. That’s star quality right there. Anyone who can touch the audience like that has a healthy career ahead of him whether he wins a dumb singing competition or not. Very strange-shaped body. He’d be more convincing as a woman if he were actually in drag. If this were the 60s he’d be an automatic star. He seems out of place in this century. But I love him. Was top 3 material for a while, but then he kinda lost it.  The outfit he wore on April 27th made him look like a very camp Batman villain. He’s never fully recovered in my eyes. Nor in the American public’s eyes.GONE. VOTED OFF MAY 5th 2011. 

Casey Abrams (The guy who looks like he’s peering out of a toilet seat. Lots of talent and a real original, but I think America could get sick of him eventually. If he doesn’t annoy everyone to hell and back with his backwoods Amish good looks and eccentric behavior, he could make it through to the top 3 or 4, but he’s just plain annoying, so who knows?) The least likely to sell any albums, because his style is too vague and idiosyncratic. Whatever happens, obscurity awaits.  VOTED OFF BY THE PUBLIC 24th MARCH 2011, BUT SAVED BY JUDGES. VOTED OFF AGAIN, FOR THE FINAL TIME April 28th 2011. And not a moment too soon. The most annoying finalist ever. Only his parents loved him, I’m sure. 

Stefano Langone (The tween favorite. So cute you want to stick him in your top pocket. He jerks around when he sings and leaps about the stage like he just sat on a cheese grater and it won’t come out. His edgy, over-the-top mannerisms could kill his chances, frankly. Clearly he’s got control issues and won’t let the real him get through. But he has a wonderfully light voice. If he calms down he could make top 5 or 6. But he’s so full of himself, I do wonder whether anyone over 14 is connecting with him.)  THEY DIDN’T. HE’S GONE. VOTED OFF APRIL 21st 2011.

Paul McDonald (When you’re dealing with this level of horribleness, it’s hard to find the words – though “Aaaaaaaagh!” comes pretty close. This year’s Sanjaya. They always make sure one eccentric goes through. Wretched performer, with a voice like wind wheezing through shutters). Hard to see his clothes for the dazzle of his teeth. The show always has someone that people hate and can’t understand why he’s still on. Usually they’re voted off when they reach the final 7 or 8. Producers may keep him around simply to annoy us. (BINGO! GONE. VOTED OFF APRIL 14th 2011 – from the final 8.) 

Pia Toscano (Excellent voice, but such a cold fish. We know she’s good, and the best of the bunch vocally, but is there any excitement around her? No. Because she lacks showmanship and charisma, which is what makes a star. Of a fairly mediocre bunch, she currently seems the front-runner, but she’s not really. They liken her to Celine Dion. But I liken Celine Dion to the sound of an unoiled gate, so what can you do?) GONE. VOTED OFF April 7th 2011. A-ha!! I told you. Why was everyone so shocked? Good singer, but a real cold fish. Didn’t hold my attention. This week she was like a robot. You need some charisma if you’re going to win this thing, and also to have a career afterwards, and she showed week after week that she had none.

I think I know the real reason she went home, though: she was the clear leader to win, and it was wrecking the competition. So maybe the producers pulled her out of there. Set her loose, they thought, and she can make an album and start cashing in almost immediately. There’s always one shocker who goes home too early: Daughtry was one, Jennifer Hudson another, so this is very much on track.

Thia Megia (Bland, nothing type of singer, but sweet.) Variable chances. Not winner material by any means.  One could overdose on her saccharine charm very quickly. GONE. SENT HOME March 31st 2010, exactly on schedule.

Naima Adedapo (Unpronounceable name, ghastly performer.) Come on, seriously….  GONE. SENT HOME March 31st 2011, exactly on schedule. Am I good at this or what?

Karen Rodriguez (Sings to please her mother, but not an audience. Ghastly facial expressions. Performs like she’s standing in front of a wardrobe mirror with a hairbrush.)  GONE. SENT HOME 17th March 2011.

Ashthon Jones (Too much hair. Diana Ross she ain’t. And a winner she definitely ain’t)  GONE. SENT HOME 10th March 2011

For the record, the epic website Vote for the Worst has Paul McDonald as its pick for the worst this year, so naturally they’re urging people to vote for him so that he reaches the top two.

TV Swami – he watching American Idol with, not one, but two beady eyes.

But it’s way more significant than that. This represents a turning point. Liberation. Rejuvenation.

This is our Egypt.

I hardly need to tell you, the American publishing world is in a time of great transition. We’re entering a literary ice age. Printed books are slowly becoming an outmoded technology. Next week, Borders will announce it’s going into bankruptcy. Our local Borders in Hollywood has a ‘for lease’ sign on the wall, and it’s not even closed yet. Barnes & Noble, once so vibrant, is now a chain of graveyards and shutting down branches.

Many people see this as the last gasp of glory for authors such as myself, before progress sweeps away our livelihood and we’re forced to get real jobs. Within a few years, as the iPad and other tablets rise to consume us, most people will view long-form reading as a drag, an antiquated pastime, and printed books themselves as ridiculously clunky, much like the first cellphones that were the size of housebricks or the first laptop, which actually was so heavy it used to crush your lap and make it hard to walk afterwards.

But this development is really a good thing and authors should rejoice.

Over time, the idea of writers needing publishers to support their work will fade. I’m even setting up a small epublishing company myself this year and putting out my own mystery novel, which is now complete and getting rave reviews from friends, even though they were charged with criticizing it and tearing it to bits, sparing me no mercy. I wanted it to be as good a book as it possibly could be. This way, though, I won’t need to go through the usual laborious process, waiting until 2012 or 2013 to see my work in bookstores (the same bookstores that will by then have closed due to lack of business). Instead, my work can be on readers’ Kindles and iPads by this summer, all cute and pert and lovely and ready to go. I am very excited by this prospect. We all should be.

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I used to work for a show on public radio called Marketplace. At our office in Los Angeles we had a very long wall lined with bookshelves up to neck height. On these shelves were stacked copies of new books sent to us by lazy PR people at publishing houses in the hope that we’d give them a free plug on the air. We didn’t. And the reason we didn’t was because the books were crap. With rare exceptions, they were poorly written, derivative, boring, badly-thought-through, and exploitative junk. Nobody read them – not us, not even the members of the public they were intended for. At best they were ornamental. Same way they are in bookstores. Eventually, after gathering dust on the shelves for a month, they were thrown into bags and tossed out. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Regularly. Year in, year out.

Frankly, I could stop this blog here. That’s all you need to know.

In that one short paragraph, I’ve explained why the publishing industry in America is gasping for breath, like an old aunt with emphyzema.

Editors were slow to see their own demise. They have continued for years putting out mediocre book after mediocre book, seldom investing in anything good or original. They played safe for fear of losing their jobs, sticking wherever possible to yawn-making celebrity tie-ins, self-help books that made huge promises but which were really just previous self-help books with a different jacket, and shallow, awful novels aimed at dim people who could only take chapters that were four pages long, Beyond that, things were too baffling. In other words, many editors abused their role. They became predatory opportunists rather than creators and instigators, which is what they were meant to be.

Instead of using passion as their baseline, making it a goal to discover and nurture good authors and stick with them from book to book until they attracted a strong following, they became fickle and coquettish, the way debutantes are in costume dramas, putting out any old book that took their fancy. If one author didn’t make it big immediately, the next one might. This same mindless policy was rampant in the music industry for a while too, and look what happened there.

Publishers plowed all their resources into the production of books, but left no budget for marketing them. That is to say, they’d launch a product, then tell nobody at all that it existed. I mean, jeez, what bright spark thought that system up? It’s tantamount to sticking your book in a garbage sack, leaving it by the side of the freeway, and hoping motorists slow down and go, “Hm, I wonder what’s in that bag?” It’s not going to happen.

So the industry is dying. Printed books are heading the way of CDs and newspapers. And it’s their own f’ing fault.

Success right now is a fluke. Without passion as their compass, book editors simply wish upon a star that somebody – anybody – will show an interest in their products; they neither put their weight behind them nor show courage in the convictions of their choices. That is no way to run a business.

I even heard that the marketing team at my publisher once refused to give Oprah a bunch of free books to hand out on her television show as one of her favorite things. They refused to give the Queen of TV 320 measly books. Oh my god. In the Kitty Kelley biography that was out not long ago, Oprah called this “the dumbest move EVER.” And it is. But that’s publishers for you. They have brilliant editors, but often, I think, total morons as publicists and marketing people, and they make one lousy decision after another. Why? Because nothing hangs on it for them. They get paid whether a book sells or not. They’re not personally invested in anything they put out. If they were, it would be an entirely different story.

Another instance: years ago, when my book Gullible’s Travels- which was a really funny book, and went on to win the Benjamin Franklin Award for Humor – came out, the marketing department at Globe Pequot, the publisher, mailed 150 copies to the press. But only in theory. In practice what they did was write their own address on the label. So within days all 150 books came back again. By the time they were sent out a second time, momentum had been lost. It was a tragedy.

With the US version of Naked in Dangerous Placeslast year, another piece of work I’m extremely proud of, about the amazing adventure I had making my TV travel series, the complacency of the PR people charged with promoting it grew to become the stuff of legend. The miniscule effort they did put in was the equivalent of going over to the window, leaning out, shouting, “Hey, everyone – look at us. We’ve published a terrific travel book,” and closing it again before anyone could catch the title. Result: not one radio interview, not one review of note, not one mention in any major magazine or newspaper. Nothing at all.

And you know what? They don’t care. Since Naked came out, the same company has published about fifty thousand more books. Some of them may even be good. And I bet they’re neglecting those as well.

“How the hell do these people still have a job?” I kept asking myself.

Well, actually, they won’t soon. That’s the gratifying part. Due to a gigantic volume of idiocy, greed, and short-sightedness that’s gone on for years, a fine industry is on the ropes, and before they know it, a good many of these apathetic losers will be out of work. When that happens, we mustn’t feel sorry for them. Remember, they slit their own throats.

For too long authors have been writing their books in order to appeal to, not the reading public as you might expect, but editors, trying to second-guess what editors would like, in the hope of pleasing them and getting an advance for their work. That’s the wrong way to go about things. It stifles passion.

Strangely, the editors, for their part, were not interested in quality or uniqueness. They showed interest only in books whose author had an established following. This system existed, again not for the benefit of the reading public, but because marketing people were drop-dead lazy and couldn’t be bothered to publicize their products, beyond sending out a press release or making a couple of phone calls between coffee breaks. This, thankfully, is about to change too. In time, authors will be empowered to take over the process and market directly to their readers, cutting out publishers entirely.

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And that’s why I’m so proud of my partner. He put his money where his mouth was and produced his own cookbook. A cookbook stuffed, crammed, jammed with fine recipes, each one of which we’ve eaten about two dozen times while he refined, played with, and photographed it (OMG, his cheesecake is the absolute best, and I’m not just saying that!)

The result is called Completely Delicious, and every ounce of the love and patience and caring he put into it is on display. It’s the real deal. I know I’m biased, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between this and any other professionally-produced cookbook out there.

Now, he’s lucky, of course – he has his own store in Beverly Hills, where he’s currently shifting several copies every day! But even so, what a coup. Here’s a guy who’s never written a book before and he’s beating the system. I hope more authors are inspired to do the same.

Inspired by this, I’m following him into the trenches. I’ve hired an illustrator, who is currently turning out fabulous work for the cover of my novel, and a designer is waiting to put it all together. Expect it to be available this summer.

Seriously, this is the future, people. A bright, shiny, new democracy. Where we, as authors, no longer have to hand our work over to companies that don’t respect it or have passion for it, the way we do, and where we can finally take control of our destiny, make our own decisions, and our own money. Remember, when you publish your own book, ALL the money goes to you, not just the measly 12% royalty the publishers decided to give you. That’s incredible.

So you see why I find this period of change so intensely empowering. I get tingles in my legs just thinking about it, although it may be the onset of diabetes from eating too much cheesecake, I’m not sure. But I’m betting that this is how the people of Egypt are feeling right now, and they haven’t even got a book out!

TV Swami – he get sidetracked today. But he have a point to make and he feel strongly.

Surveys suggest that our audience at that hour consists of truck drivers and nurses, and then only because, if they didn’t keep the radio on, they might fall asleep and kill someone. Plus a few students who were too drunk during the day to study and are having to stay up til dawn, cramming facts into their mind like wet socks into an overfilled tumble-dryer.

Then there are a tiny minority who actually enjoy the show and listen for its own sake. Many of these are institutionalized. For them, the sound of me talking on the radio simply helps drown out the voices in their head. Or the dull drone of their cellmate’s snoring.

Anyway, once we reached 15 regular listeners, a golden number, I thought it might be nice to compile a list of their names.

Two reasons.

First, because the day might come when we need a bunch of people to go and do something for us – storm town hall meetings, picket book-signings by celebrities we don’t like, or just to form a touring riverdance company. At times like these, 15 loyal listeners can come in very handy indeed. But also, by finding out who they are, I thought it’d make it easier to round them up and pop them off in the event that they become unruly or threaten to migrate to a different radio network.

So let me publish the list here. That way we’re all on the same page. At some point in the future, badges may be issued to these people, or possibly mugs, I haven’t decided, to commemorate their membership of this prestigious unit. In the meantime, if you’re interested, you can follow our progress on Twitter @cashpeters, and on my Facebook page.

The List of the Loyal runs as follows. Let the record be struck, let the record be respected.

#1 Simon Best

#2 Marc Fearns

#3 Paul Simpson

#4 Alastair Treliving

#5 Dave Shephard

#6 Tony Schumacher

#7 Craig Hirst

#8 Garry Strutt

#9 Samuel E. Robinson

#10 John Burdis

#11 Ethan Rayne

#12 Mark Cunnington

#13 Johnny Phipps

#14 David Harrison

#15 Gerard Thompson

There they are. Those are the 15 long-time listeners that we broadcast to every week. All of them men, for some reason. Maybe women see a certain futility in this exercise that the rest of us don’t. At least it’s now a matter of public record. Indeed, I believe this blog post is considered a legal register of their membership under Finnish law.

15, I know, is not a big number. Actually, by the standards of some lists – the list of people waiting to vote the present government out of office, for example – it’s quite paltry. On the one hand not enough to make an army, but, on the other, certainly more than we need to patrol a neighborhood and prevent looting, or to disrupt a taping of Strictly Come Dancing.

But wait – there’s more.

During the arduous months-long process of compiling The List, other people started asking to be on it too. Well, of course, that’s not possible, and I told them so. On a list of 15 people, there are only 15 places, any fool can see that.

However, the pressure was great and my resolve as weak as a 95 year old arm-wrestler, therefore I’m compiling a second list. A standby list, which is also official under Finnish law, for people who would like someday to be on the main list, and also for anyone who simply enjoys having their name on a list. Those who register for the Standby List are not without responsibilities. They will be expected to sit quietly, possibly for a considerable while, yet be ready at all times to step up and be counted if one of the original 15 should die, collapse from exhaustion after our riverdancing tour of the Pacific Rim, or get eaten by bears. You laugh, but it’s a real danger.

This, then, is the Standby List, as it stands right now.

#16 Victoria Diamond

#17 Ian Merridan

#18 Joy Ritchie

#19 Siobhan Hill

#20 Jonathan Matthewson

#21 David Hadfield

#22 Andy Carr

#23 Tariq Latif

#24 Carol Brown

#25 Sarah Jasmin

#26 Catherine Lister

#27 Bruce McDonald

#28 Ruth Kaye

#29 David W (last name to follow, if we can winkle it out of him)

#30 Mary August

Done.

A good and strong crew, born for greatness, but somehow sidelined to make way for other people who asked to be on The List before they did. Let the record be struck a second time, let the record be respected.

If you wish to be put on The List yourself and enjoy the obvious benefits, then contact me on Twitter @cashpeters, and I’ll make it happen. Please note: we are an equal opportunity group – it just doesn’t seem it.

So what are the benefits of being on The List, then?

Good question, thanks for asking. Well, the benefits are fivefold. Please fetch a pen, you might want to write these down. They are:

1. Exclusivity. That special feeling you get from being involved in something that only everyone who ever applies can be a part of.
2. Camaraderie. It’s a form of social networking, but without the networking part, so you can actually be quite anti-social and aloof if you want to, we don’t care. It’s not all about you, you know!!
3. Belonging. There are very few things you can be sure of any more. The whole of life seems to be in flux. But when you’re on The List, you’re on The List. That’s the end of the matter. Once you have your number, nobody can take that away from you. Unless you misbehave, in which case you’ll be stripped of your status and set upon by other people on The List who’ll thrash you like a Victorian orphan.
4. Order. The List is strictly numerical. What’s more ordered than that?
5. Finally, the really great thing about being on The List, as well as the Standby List, is that you could be mentioned at any time during the BBC broadcast each week, or, just as likely, not. This express lack of commitment on my part only adds to the excitement, I think.

So tell your friends. Spread the word. Get them on The List too. Let this be the kindling that sparks an entire self-combusting movement.

For anyone who, by this late stage, still has no clue what I’m talking about when I mention my BBC slot, you can tune in Tuesdays at 6.35pm (in the US) or Wednesdays at 2.35am (UK time) on BBC Radio Five Live and listen to Cash Peters’ TV review slot on Up All Night. I would, if I were you. How else do you stand a chance of getting on The List?

TV Swami, he proud of his followers and give them 5 magic carpets out of 5.

So how about we all quit fighting each other for once, stop with the corruption and the greed, back off from confrontation, oneupmanship, cheating, competing, and lying, and save ourselves the sleepless, sweaty moments at 4am when we just lie there worrying about money, the economy, our jobs, our mortgages, car payments, or tuition fees? In other words, turn our backs on the cold hard mercenary aspects of living, and instead focus on the work of Narayanan Krishnan.

This guy will change your view of life. He exemplifies all that’s great about our species, as well as encapsulating the true spirit of this time of year. I loved his message so much that, once I’d stopped crying, I donated instantly.

“I’m just a human being,” he says with great passion.

“My lord,” I thought when I heard this, “so am I!” I forget that sometimes. We all do.

Hey, so maybe we should do our part. Call one friend or family member and say, “I love you dearly…..[insert name here], but this year I’m opting out of the consumerist hell that is Christmas, which forces me to buy stuff and give it away even though I’d rather not, and doing something magnificent with my money instead.” They’ll understand. In fact, maybe they’ll catch the spirit too and we can start a ripple, a Mexican wave of love and generosity. If that results in fewer sales of Playstations or iPads, I can live with that.

Ooooooh, I get chills just thinking about this. About giving. And I don’t mean a bunch of useless stuff, but rather love, hope, encouragement, acceptance and kindness. Things that matter. The sort of things Christ would have given actually.

Uh-oh. Now I’ve gone and said it.

P.S. Guess what happened. As I said, I was so swept up in this guy’s cause that I donated $50 to it a couple of days ago. Today, I’m in the local health food store and I find a $50 bill sitting in a shopping basket. Karma – so sweet.

TV Swami – he got the Christmas spirit suddenly.