I am not what you would call a credulous man. I am not, you might say, a believer. I cling defiantly to the Greek tradition. (The Greek tradition of rationalism, that is, rather than the Greek traditions you are probably snickering about over your breakfast newspaper.)

Being a rationalist is comforting. Having set aside a childhood belief in miracles and magic and the inscrutable and invisible wills and powers at work and play in the universe - a belief that always caused me far more anxiety and fearfulness than any peaceful sense of wonder - I am soothed to imagine and believe in a world of bounded causes and material effects.

It is a comfort to me to know the general parameters of what is possible, and to understand that this fragile thing we call our life is only a brilliant leap between darknesses. It does not dismay me to think that there is nothing more than this - aesthetically, it rather pleases me. Any good story needs a fixed beginning and a formal end.

At any rate, I am a rationalist, despite a range of slight superstitions that include never walking under a dangling piano, trying not to step on crack addicts on the pavement, and when in the economy class of a domestic airline, always throwing that little packet of salted peanuts violently over my left shoulder.

Most so-called spooky and unexplained phenomena can be explained away to my satisfaction, but John Edward still unsettles me a little.

John Edward is a television medium, which means he's a medium on a medium, but as old Grandpappy Hot Medium used to tell me, a medium on a medium is not a large, it is still a medium. No, I don't know what that means either. I have tried very hard to dislike John Edward. For one thing, I am as a rule suspicious of men with a first name for a surname.

There is something shifty about them, if you know what I mean. Something made-up. Something unfinished. Consider George Michael. Consider Earl Spencer. Consider Pee Wee Herman and Elton John. Remember John Calvin and Martin Luther. Think of John Paul I, not to mention John Paul II. And of course there was also Pol Pot. (Is "Pot" a first name? Sure. Or at least, as much of a first name as "Pol" is.)

Still, John Edward seems a solid citizen, for a medium. Crossing Over With John Edward (SABC3; weekdays; 10.30pm) each day features John Edward in conversation with the dead. This is more engaging than it sounds. John Edward invites a studio audience into, well, a studio.

He then waits for the inaudible ethereal whispers of the numinous world to tell him which audience member they wish to address. No one dies in John Edward's world - they "cross over", as though human beings are chickens and death is a road. Or as though death is nothing much more than an outbreak of parliamentary party politics. Which makes a certain sense, I suppose.

"University studies have confirmed that John Edward can connect the living with those who have crossed over," we are told each day by a disembodied voice, though presumably it is a disembodied voice belonging to someone still alive, since I can hear it, and I am not a medium. Well, not that kind of medium, any way. Besides, dead people don't have to rely on university studies, especially not the kind of unspecified university studies you can expect in a nation that boasts such bastions of higher learning as Bob Jones University (president and chancellor: Bob Jones) and Old Swimming Hole University of Distance Learning, so named because the founder hatched the idea to start a correspondence university while thinking about his future, yes, down at the old swimming hole.

Actually, John Edward doesn't need vague references to fruit-loop universities studies to be impressive. He is strangely convincing in his conversations with his audience, offering them names and dates and details to identify the dead people with whom he is in contact: "Your Aunt Mary, who crossed over in 1987, says to say hello."

If it is a fraud, it is an obvious fraud: he just conducts research into the audience members and stages everything that follows. Still, he is a fine showman. Even as he entertains, he casts the spell, the glamour that momentarily suspends even the most rational disbelief.

As you sit on your sofa in your home, a safe bubble of yellow light surrounded by the darkness of the night, it is possible to find yourself imagining that here, here alone, your television set has found a cathode channel to another place, a twilight zone, where things are all different. It is fun to watch.

But John Edward seldom asks the dead any interesting questions. It is usually the kind of guff geared towards grieving people: "Your mom says to say she loves you and is always with you and will be there at your birthday party next week."

That is all very well, but if I had the opportunity, I'd try to get some more pertinent information: Is there a smoking section over there? Do we get our own rooms? Money: Can I really not take it with me? Then how do you pay for your drinks? Elvis: One of you or one of us? Is it true that you guys tell no tales? What's John Edward got that I don't have? Can you see where I left my car keys? What's that strange knocking in my car when I go over 100? Dad: Have you met David Niven yet?

Oh, there are a squillion things I would ask, but I won't, because I don't believe it. All the same, I like John Edward. He seems to be doing more good than harm, and that's as much as any of us can hope. So go in peace, John Edward. I shan't knock a happy medium.