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In March, producer David Taylor embarked on an unorthodox talent quest. Travelling around the country, he went looking for Australia's hottest psychics - clairvoyants, mind readers, fortune tellers and other practitioners of the paranormal - whose abilities he intended to test before a live studio audience.

Taylor and his team ultimately met about 100 psychics, each of whom was asked to perform one-on-one readings. He then brought seven of the best to Sydney to take part in The One, a new five-part series that tries to uncover Australia's most gifted psychic. People have a huge interest in psychic phenomena, Taylor says. "Just look at TV shows like Charmed and Supernatural and all the astrology columns in newspapers. It's a subject that has mainstream prime time appeal."

With Andrew Daddo as host, The One is like a version of Next Top Model for supernaturalists: seven psychics undergo a series of challenges designed to test their abilities in clairvoyance, telepathy and mediumship, among others. Two judges, psychic Stacey Demarco and sceptic Richard Saunders, decide at the end of each episode who stays and who goes, until the final instalment, when the audience gets to decide which of the remaining spoon-benders is truly The One.

"Quite frankly I am sceptical that any of the psychics have the ability they say they have," Saunders says. His role is to cast a critical eye over proceedings and "maybe even provide a rational explanation of what is going on". As a past president and current vice-president of the Australian Skeptics association, Saunders has certainly seen his fair share of hokum. He has infiltrated psychic hotlines (and discovered that most simply read from a script) and once investigated a "haunted" schoolroom in Campbelltown, concluding that it had more to do with warped floorboards than a wicked poltergeist.

This time, however, it's different.

"We are using a variety of tests that will, hopefully, leave very little to chance," he says. "And there are rules that all the psychics have to go by that will tell us if they are really using their psychic abilities to discover insights about people they would not normally have known."

One of the tests, for instance, involves a young boy "lost" in the bush. "We had a volunteer boy playing a lost child in the bush out the back of St Ives and the contestants have to use their abilities to home-in on his location, all in a reasonably short period of time."

Another test has the psychics trying to find a single piece of contraband in one of 70 shipping containers. Another sees the contestants taken to Pentridge Jail, in Melbourne, to find the buried bones reputed to have belonged to Ned Kelly.

The contestants are a varied bunch, ranging from Charmaine, 43, a medium with "a healthy sense of competition", to Jason, 37, a mathematical genius and Reiki master with an IQ of 160. (Producers' notes say after surviving a near-death experience Jason abandoned medicine to study science and philosophy, "in an attempt to better understand our universe".) Rayleen is 38, and has often assisted police with their investigations, and Mitchell is a fifth-generation psychic who specialises in clairvoyance. Ezio is "Australia's foremost authority on spirit communication", and She is a 44-year-old pagan witch specialising in Tibetan and Hindu shamanism.

Taylor concedes that television places unusual pressures on the psychics. "TV is all schedules and time frames and definitive outcomes. Getting the psychics to do their thing on cue was a big ask but they all deliver time and again."

Though initially sceptical about paranormal phenomena, Taylor now classes himself as more of an agnostic. "I have a fluctuating perspective, I guess. We didn't come into it as believers but we don't have a hardline sceptic view either. And, to be honest, things have happened in the production process that have been jaw-dropping.

"That's what's good about this show. Believers will take away one thing and sceptics another. People in the middle will see some pretty amazing things that will give them plenty to think about."

The One airs on Seven on Tuesday at 7.30pm.

Copyright: smh.com.au