Doris Stokes

40 Minutes was a BBC TV documentary strand broadcast on BBC Two between 1981 and 1994. The documentaries could be on any possible subject, the only connection being that they last forty minutes. Some documentaries in the original series were revisited and updated in a 2006 version, Forty Minutes On.

Doris Stokes was a Spiritualist superstar who publicly demonstrated - to the satisfaction of many thousands - that there is Life After Death, and we can contact those who have 'passed over'. At private sittings, in Spiritualist churches and in theatres and cinemas, the homely 65-year-old medium would chat away to 'the dead' as if they were next-door neighbours. Doris Stokes was not clairvoyant - she didn't see things or go into a trance. Doris was clairaudient - someone who works like a radio receiver tuning in to the other side, and picking up the voices of 'the dead' and passing their messages on to the living. Sceptics will undoubtedly accuse her of fraud, but to most of her audience, who are shattered by grief and who have failed to come to terms with bereavement by more conventional forms of religion or philosophy, Doris Stokes brings good tidings of comfort and joy, and a more solid contentment than can be found in a conventional church or through a bottle of tranquillisers.