Profile on Derren Brown: Numbers up, but not the game

Published on Saturday 12 September 2009 19:47

The inane theories bounced furiously around the pop culture blogosphere

'IT MAY not work. If it doesn't work, it will be potentially massively embarrassing," said Derren Brown, on the eve of his attempt to predict the winning National Lottery numbers on live television. It worked, of course – magicians whose rabbits won't come out of hats struggle to make a living. But the resulting hype was arguably massively embarrassing for the British nation, which fell hook, line and sinker for a slick, televised magic trick laden with hype, psychobabble, and the hint of secret powers.

Three million people tuned into Channel 4 to watch the first of Brown's The Events, a new series of magical stunts by the man who gripped us by narrowly escaping death in a game of Russian roulette, with live bullets, in 2003. Just 30 seconds or so after the lottery balls popped into the rack on the BBC, Brown turned over a row of his own white balls to show the very same numbers printed in black on the back of them. Hey presto!

How did he do it? The old question became the stuff of water-cooler conversations, newspaper columns and web chatter nationwide. A simple split-screen trick? Laser etching? The inane theories bounced furiously around the pop culture blogosphere; it's clear that we love to be fooled, and then wonder how.

The hype was skilfully fuelled by the man himself, with his promise to reveal all – or at least part – of the trick. He later offered the implausible explanation that he combined the random guesses of a panel of members of the public.

How does Brown get away with it? For starters, he calls himself a "psychological illusionist". Born in London in 1971, educated at the Croydon school where his father coached swimming, he studied law and German at the University of Bristol. He began to practise close-up magic and conjuring, but it was a Bristol appearance by the hypnotist Martin Taylor that drew him in the direction of illusion and hypnosis. In 1999, he got his big break with the C4 special, Mind Control, subsequently recut into a six-part series.

His career has barely slowed since. Highlights include the Russian roulette live broadcast, where he claimed to predict which chamber of a revolver held the bullet, pulling the trigger three times with the gun at his head before firing the live bullet into a wall of sandbags. In Waking Dead, he memorably claimed to have kidnapped an innocent video-game player from a pub, putting him into a trance where he then played in a real-life recreation of the zombie game.

The English actor Andy Nyman has been a key collaborator, co-writing and co-directing Brown's best-known stage and television shows; the two won the Olivier Award for best entertainment show with Something Wicked This Way Comes in 2006. Nyman co-created 2005's Messiah in which Brown, apparently once an evangelical Christian, set out to fool American believers in everything from Christian fundamentalism to alien landings that he had unearthly powers.

Has Brown ever failed? He seemed to come close when he appeared in June with a sleepy-looking David Frost, now 70 and fronting Frost over the World on the Al Jazeera network. After the veneer of a couple of serious questions, Frost inevitably asked for a demonstration. Brown asked the presenter to think of one thing, and bring it to the front of his mind, with no props in sight.

Brown narrowed Frost's object down to a short word that started with "a guttural sound C, or G … The word I'm getting, this probably won't be right, is something like constable … what was the word?"

"Cigar," said Frost, laconically. But then he handed Brown a major success, when the magician identified a place he was thinking of as a city – Florence, or Milan. "That is impressive," says Frost. "It's Milan … That was spot-on. What a relief for us all."

Magic is most compelling when it persuades us that it's real, that a practitioner has walked the tightrope between simple card or coin tricks and true wizardry. Within magic, there is a long tradition of performers who claim to draw on extra-sensory perception, telepathy, or clairvoyance.

Brown urges audience members to silently shout words of images to his subjects, but has never claimed psychic powers. He describes his tools as "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship". But he has led the way for a new breed of magicians claiming psychological skills – a special ability to read people's thoughts and reactions through body language, from pupil dilation to breathing, say.

It puts Brown more in the Uri Geller mould, perhaps, than that of the legendary Harry Houdini. The best-known public magician of the pre-television era, Houdini was famous for escapology. While his advertisements suggested that sometimes he could "dematerialise", he never claimed supernatural powers; he described in books how he opened handcuffs with careful pressure, or hidden picks, and expanded his limbs to get wiggle room from his bonds.

One of Brown's biggest heroes is not Houdini but Chan Canasta, the Polish-born practitioner of mental magic who died in 1999. He made his first of 250 appearances on TV shows in 1951, mixing card and memory tricks with psychological techniques, and embraced the idea that the odd mistake made a show stronger. Like Brown, he was an accomplished painter.

Brown's The Events air on C4 in the coming weeks and, in the second show, he pledges to render some viewers immobile, effectively sticking them to their sofas. It's another great television draw.

Ambiguous, questioning, sharply good-looking in a slightly Rasputinish way, Brown has been cast as the first post-modern magician. He's just as annoying as the likes of Paul Daniels, say, but definitely better dressed. He's witty, sarcastic, trendy and out of the closet. He came out as gay last year, saying he was in a "perfect" relationship with another man, and dashing the hopes of millions of female fans, according to the tabloids.

Like "death-defying" David Blaine, Brown has mastered and manipulated the small screen. Television was supposed to kill magic but live, or supposedly live, stunts have made Brown's career and he has become a TV phenomenon. He turns the camera on the audience, using the responses of spectators to bolster the trickery. His clever, punchy, one-off ideas also make perfect YouTube snippets.

The lottery trick perfectly captures the particular skills of Brown and his collaborator, Nyman.

"The lottery numbers was a great idea; in a sense it didn't matter how it was done," says Dr Peter Lamont, a former professional musician who is now with the Koestler parapsychology unit at Edinburgh University, and who has worked with Brown. "It's what people have always said, if you can predict the future, why don't you predict the lottery numbers? They have sat down and said 'let's do it'."

You've been Googled

His first stage appearance was in Bristol as "Darren V Brown". The V stands for Victor.

• Brown owned a parrot named Figaro, and is now a patron of the National Parrot Sanctuary, near Skegness.

• Taxidermy is a passion and his collection includes a stuffed baby giraffe.

• In his show Seance, Brown created the illusion that a group of students contacted the dead, but does not believe psychics can do so.

• In 2009, a book called Portraits was released containing a selection of Brown's paintings and bizarre caricatures of celebrities including Amy Winehouse.