This week, Rossia television started a new show called "Phenomenon," which is hosted by the spoon-bender Uri Geller. It's a competition between various mystical performers, who channel their psychic energy into winning a car. In addition, Geller gets his spoons out again, for old times' sake.

The show was first broadcast on NBC, and the format has now been sold to other countries. In the Russian version, Geller says a few words of Russian, but mainly speaks through a translator. He also has a Russian co-host, Denis Semenikhin, who used to present an exercise show on Domashny channel — suggesting that none of the big-name presenters wanted to be upstaged by a spoon.

For those who haven't seen Geller for a few decades, he looks exactly the same. And his spiel hasn't changed much, either. At one point, he asked the viewers to place spoons on their televisions and then call in (35 rubles per minute) if anything happened. The camera cut to some pretty girls who were frantically scribbling down messages, although the most exciting thing that they reported was that one 6-year-old boy managed to bend his spoon. It was all a bit of a throwback to the late 1980s, when a man called Allan Chumak used to appear on Soviet television and "charge" jars of water with healing powers.

In any case, my spoon refused to bend to Geller's will, although it did get quite hot from sitting on top of the television.

After some people took a long, hard look at his spoon tricks, Geller started calling himself a "mystifier" in the West. But he apparently didn't tell that to Rossia, which calls him a magician and a parapsychologist on its web site. And during the show, he talked about believing in miracles and how "everyone has the sixth sense." To be fair though, when he discussed the competitors, he talked about their presentation skills, not any supernatural powers.

The Russian performers were a strange bunch. There was one called Sergei, who looked like an accountant and asked actress Zhanna Epple to wind yards of tape around his eyes before he held her wrist and guessed what she was holding. The items were donated by audience members sitting in the front rows, so he probably had a good look at them first; but in any case, he got two out of three right.

Then there was a woman called Yelena, who read an actor's brain waves to tell what song title he had written on a piece of paper. She then played it on the piano, so luckily it wasn't anything by Napalm Death. She was followed by a man called Roman, who guessed numbers and wore a Moschino suit that redefined loud. After that it started dragging a bit, so I only caught glimpses of some knife tricks and an act involving lots of girls in bikinis.

The show lasts 1 1/2 hours and has only five competitors in each episode, so it's not exactly enthralling, even with girls in bikinis. Still, never mind, only eight weeks to go.

The audience included some famous people, who were supposed to check for any trickery and provide a voice of reason. They included actor Mikhail Dorozhkin, who said straight away that, "I have believed in miracles since my childhood," and a former Miss Universe, Oksana Fyodorova, who hyperventilated as Geller promised to stamp his fingerprint on a spoon. "If you do that, I'm going to faint," she warned. She didn't, but Uri revived her anyway with a quick kiss.