When a toddler throws a tantrum, most parents would give anything to know what their child is thinking. Are they hungry? Are they ill? Are they angry or upset, and if so, why? If only we could read their minds.

Enter a slightly-built 41-year-old from Paisley with blonde highlights in his thinning hair. Derek Ogilvie is a man with a colourful past. He used to drive a Rolls Royce and own three of Glasgow’s most fashionable bars until a nightclub venture failed six years ago and he was declared bankrupt.

Now he has reinvented himself as a psychic who claims to be able to communicate telepathically with babies. Channel Five is screening a documentary series about his work this month, which is set to make Ogilvie the best-known psychic in the UK, and ignite debate about the gullibility of the British public.

Ogilvie claims to use his psychic abilities to tune into the minds of babies with behavioural problems, to get to the root of what troubles them. They cannot yet speak, but Ogilvie would have us believe they “talk” to him about complex relationship issues through thought.

Is he the answer to every hassled mother’s prayer? Or a cynical trixster who plays on parental anxieties? What’s not in question is Ogilvie’s perfect timing. Parenting is the new trend in reality TV, with programmes such as Supernanny and Wife Swap.

The first documentary in The Baby Mind Reader series tells the story of Ogilvie’s work with Emma Etwell, a 19-year-old single mum from Southend-on-Sea, and her 21-month-old daughter Teegan. The toddler screams constantly and has not slept through the night since the day she was born.

Within days of meeting Ogilvie, the family has been transformed. Teegan is sleeping through the night. Not only that, she has apparently told Ogilvie that she will behave better if she gets a trampoline and a princess costume, and she would prefer to eat fresh food instead of the processed muck she is usually fed.

Rather more alarmingly, she has also told Ogilvie that Emma was raped as a 14-year-old, and that one of the reasons for the toddler tantrums is that she too fears that she will be raped when she grows up. She wants her mummy to come to terms with this trauma so they can all be happy again.

All this from a 21-month-old girl who cannot yet speak, count, read, write or go to the toilet unaided.

Emma, however, is a believer. “I don’t want her living in my past. If I sort myself out then maybe she will sort herself out through that.”

To cap his time with Emma and her family, Ogilvie gets to the root of her relationship with her mother Wendy. He discovers telepathically from Teegan that Wendy had a miscarriage when she was younger, which led to a bout of heavy drinking. Wendy and Emma resolve their differences, and Ogilvie leaves a family apparently healed by his psychic intervention.

Phew! On the surface this may seem impressive — or rather too neat, depending on your point of view. Sceptics who have made a study of the work of psychics say much of it can be explained easily.

Jon Donnis runs a website called www.badpsychics.co.uk and has followed Ogilvie’s work. He has looked at three readings Ogilvie gave to people regarding their children, and he is unimpressed. “He uses an old technique called ‘cold reading’, in which he comes out with statements that are vague enough to fit almost everyone, but specific enough to convince someone of his apparent psychic ability,” says Donnis.

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