Claire Hickman

Ben Bentley meets a mother with psychic skills

It’s The Apprentice, but not as we know it. Although the candidates should do – because they are all psychic.

“I’m not “clairvoyant”, I’m Claire Hickman,” says the 35-year-old Telford mum-of-two who is among the contestants taking part in TV’s “psychic apprentice”, Psychic Academy, a brand new series to be broadcast on the Bio channel for the next six weeks, starting tonight.

Tony Stockwell is the psychic Alan Sugar, a leading mediumship practitioner in search of an apprentice so that he can pass on his unique skills.

After a nationwide search, Tony’s psychic academy has six students, all of whom have psychic abilities that need to be finely tuned.

Claire, who was chosen by Tony to appear after attending one of his performances in Telford, has had strange and often chillingly accurate premonitions for more than half her life.

The first came when she was just 13 and she dreamed about the Lockerbie disaster the night before it happened, which she found terrifying, but she was in denial about her psychic ability.

Since then she has also predicted the Indian earthquake, Bali bombings and Italian earthquake.

She says she has often felt pain for others, such as when she felt twangs at the moment her friend went into labour, and she collapsed at work one day as her former husband, a paratrooper, was involved in a parachute accident.

“I was at work and he was on fatigues doing a jump when I just collapsed and could not feel my legs,” she says.

“They took me home and I was on the settee when the phone rang and I was told that my husband was suspected as having sustained two broken legs.”

Also, when Claire was 15 weeks pregnant she had a terrible feeling that something was wrong. When she had her scan Claire was told her baby son was very ill and that if he actually survived, which seemed unlikely, he probably wouldn’t live beyond the age of one.

Claire made the difficult decision to abort her baby, and has felt terrible ever since. The scenario also led to the breakdown of her marriage.

In the TV show, Claire and the other contestants travel the country taking part in psychic tests, among them retracing the footsteps of Britain’s most notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper. They also investigate the case of a young boy who died in mysterious circumstances, and two of the students spend the night in one of Britain’s most haunted pubs.

Claire had no idea at the time that she was going to be asked to retrace the steps of the Ripper but says: “Two nights before I had a dream about Jack the Ripper, that I was watching him kill all these women.

“We were put in a car blindfold and driven to a location and asked where we thought we were and what we were doing here. I said ‘I think we are here to go on the trail of Jack the Ripper’. I didn’t know anything about him at all. But we were asked to walk through an archway in Whitechapel and back to the time of Jack the Ripper in 1888.

“I got very claustrophobic and my kidneys started to get very painful. Tony read out a letter and it was the first letter from Jack the Ripper to the vigilante committee, when he sent it with half a kidney from a victim and had eaten the other half.

“I thought ‘Great, it will be interesting to see if I go round the corner and I am disembowelled’!”

The contestants also investigate the location and brutal death of what was thought to have been the Ripper’s first victim. Asked to guess the exact spot where the crime occurred they were each instructed to act out the stabbing of the fifth victim’s murder.

Says Claire: “I enacted the stabbing and Tony counted the number of knife blows. He counted 39 – it was the exact number. And it was the exact spot.”

During the series the team also visits a grave in Highgate, London, where dark secrets are revealed about a woman’s past, and makes contact with her grandfather who tells her that her aborted baby is well in the spirit world.

But Claire, who classes her self as psychic medium, says she is still learning about her powers and how to use them, and is understanding of why some people may be sceptical about the whole practice.

She says that first and foremost she is a mum and not a witch. And she says there are many charlatans practicing mediumship who take advantage of people when they are at their most vulnerable.

“I’m not going to get my crystals out and have angels hear my chakra,” says Claire.

“I’m very down to earth and believe that 80 per cent of times there is a rational explanation for happenings. But if messages can be passed to me, I’ve got to believe in that other 20 per cent.

“For whatever reason I can do this, and I don’t know why.”

Claire is hoping to hone her psychic talents and use them in a professional capacity, but for the time being her raw talents are being pitted against a steelworker called Kevin, an accountant, an animal lover and a painter and decorator in Psychic Academy.

Tony will choose his finalists after putting them through a number of tough psychic tasks. But only one student will be selected to become his apprentice.

Will it be Claire? Of course, only a psychic could tell you that.

• Psychic Academy is screened on the Bio channel at 9pm tonight.