URI Geller comes on stage backed by a glitzy video presentation.

Television appearances from the days when his name was on everybody's lips and endorsements from his celebrity mates Michael Jackson and magician David Blaine blare out.

So there's a slight sense of anticlimax when the third-full Albert Hall he emerges to reminds you that he is no longer at the height of his spoon-bending fame.

"I wish there were more people in the auditorium," the Israeli psychic admits to us but he doesn't seem fazed. In fact, he's a bit of a trooper.

Geller's main theme for the evening is that all his skills - bending spoons, mending watches, guessing which colours people are thinking of - aren't about his mental powers but ours. At times it feels almost like a positive thinking seminar.

"This evening isn't about spoons and watches," he says. "It isn't a show, it isn't even a lecture, it's an experience."

But you feel that for every person who's there out of genuine belief in his psychic abilities there's a sceptic like me just waiting to be convinced.

Certainly the spoon-bending was impressive, an experiment where he tried to get us to bend our keys by shouting "Bend!" yielded one woman who claimed hers had (although even with the aid of a video screen behind him it was hard to tell from where I was sitting.)

Shouting "Mend!" at watches to make them work yields slightly more impressive results.

"My watch hadn't been working for three months but now it's fixed," Andy Talbot of Chorley Old Road,

You can't help but like Geller though. He has plenty of charisma and an easy sense of humour and his life story - including stint as a male model and a solider in the 1967 Six Day War - is fascinating.

But when he tells us how he gained his supernatural powers as a four-year-old when he saw a mysterious ball of light floating in his garden and a beam shot out and hit him, you begin to understand why he's friends with Michael Jackson.

Roger Williams