When the young Uri Geller
packed his spoons and self-styled
supernatural powers to seek fortune abroad,
no one could have predicted he would return
to his native Israel in triumph 35 years
later as a reality TV star — no one,
presumably, except Uri Geller.
The premise of Geller's
new show, "The Successor" — which has
received smash ratings here and started
something of a paranormal fad — is that the
psychic celebrity, now approaching his 60th
birthday, has come home to choose an heir.
On recent episodes of the
live show, the nine contestants aspiring to
succeed Geller read the minds of audience
members and made them imagine different
tastes in their mouths on command. One
contestant stopped his heartbeat for several
seconds, leading an unfortunate 10-year-old
in northern Israel to try the same trick at
school — and pass out briefly.
Geller, who gained fame
bending spoons using what he says are
psychic powers, also performs on every show.
In one episode, he drew a copy of a picture
that had just been drawn by a pilot flying
an El Al jet 30,000 feet above the Sinai
desert. (It was a fish.)
In an interview with The
Associated Press, Geller attributed the
show's success to Israel's Jewish mystical
traditions. "People here have roots in
positive mysticism carried through the
centuries by the Kabbalah," he said,
referring to the ancient mystical work that
has won non-Jewish enthusiasts, most
famously Madonna.
While the show's content —
illusion, sleight of hand and the
supernatural — might stretch a picky
viewer's definition of a reality program,
its format sticks close to the staples of
the genre: judges, manufactured drama,
celebrity cameos and viewer participation.
Contestants show off their powers over 10
episodes, and the winner gets fame and
fortune as Geller's anointed successor,
along with a secret prize, though one can
assume the contestants have guessed what it
is.
For Geller, his new
success in his homeland brings him full
circle.
Before Geller became
perhaps the world's best known psychic
entertainer and an intimate of Salvador
Dali's and Michael Jackson's, he was an
unknown Israeli from Tel Aviv. His biography
— in his telling, at least — reads like the
plot of a spy novel.
At 10, his parents
divorced and he left Tel Aviv for Cyprus,
where his stepfather ran a hotel that was a
front for Israel's Mossad spy agency, and he
ran errands for agents.
He served in the Israeli
paratroops, was wounded in 1967's Six-Day
War, became a male model, began to showcase
his psychic powers at parties, was accused
of being a fraud, and went to the U.S.
There, he was humiliated by a dubious Johnny
Carson when his powers failed him, so he
moved to Britain, where he spoon-bent his
way to international stardom.
Geller has always been
popular both among the credulous, who fill
his shows and made him a multimillionaire,
and the skeptical, who have made him a top
target for debunking.
But none doubt his
supernatural powers of self-promotion.
Beginning with little but his trademark
trick, Geller turned himself into a major
entertainment enterprise, becoming a
self-help guru, a TV personality, a
sought-after motivational speaker and the
author of 16 books. Today he lives in a
mansion outside London.
Geller immediately shook
things up when he arrived in Israel several
weeks ago and pronounced himself able to
wake up Ariel Sharon, the former prime
minister who has been in a coma since
January. He hasn't done so, he said, because
Sharon's sons told him they weren't
interested. When a serial rapist escaped
police custody in Tel Aviv, throwing the
country into a panic, Geller again appeared,
offering to use his powers to get the man to
turn himself in.
Geller's return has
sparked something of a paranormal revival. A
popular political talk show briefly
abandoned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
to devote an episode to the supernatural.
Another channel now has a show featuring a
young entertainer who claims an abnormally
developed sixth sense and who has mastered a
smoldering and distinctly Gelleresque gaze.
The success of Geller's
show might be due to the country's current
atmosphere of disillusionment following the
costly and inconclusive Lebanon war this
summer, said Tom Segev, a prominent
historian and journalist. "This atmosphere
leads people to look for escape in things
that can't be explained and to turn to
people like Geller," Segev said.
Geller put it differently:
"There is a tension in the psychic
atmosphere here."
Yossi Elias, the show's
chief editor, had a more prosaic
explanation: It's entertaining.
"It's fun sometimes not to
be able to explain everything," Elias said.
"Uri is very charismatic, and it's fun for
Israelis to get their rich and successful
uncle back from abroad. The combination
makes for good television."
