Like millions of others, I sat down to watch Derren Brown predict (correctly, as it turned out) the National Lottery numbers on Wednesday night.
After doing so, he promised us that he would reveal how he did it on Friday in an hour-long special.
Since then, there has been a collective outpouring of.. well, irritation, at how the explanation he gave doesn’t really seem to cut it. Apparently it was all about maths, teamwork, emotional involvement, and calculating averages.
Bollocks, in other words.
While there are a vocal few who cling to the belief that Derren DID actually predict the result, and so therefore should be given credit for doing it, most realise that he didn’t, and that it was a very clever trick. It is this group of people who are a bit miffed that he didn’t come on telly on Friday night and admit that it was a very sophisticated split-screen effect that took a great deal of planning, and some extremely good live (and risky) direction, but that is all. No maths, no possibility of failure (apart from with the execution of the trick which, presumably, had been rehearsed until perfect) and no mystical powers at work.
So should he have ‘fessed up’?
It’s a tricky one. Unfortunately for him, there was a ’smoking gun’ that rather gave the secret of the trick away, in that it is possible to tell, albeit only at one point, that a split screen effect is in use. A still shot of the predicted balls was, after the balls had been drawn, replaced with a live shot of the now-correct balls, which had just been placed there. The real balls, however, had not quite been positioned correctly to match with the still shot, and so at one point a ball rises up slightly out of place as the shot changes from still to live. Had this ball been a fraction lower, the effect would have been imperceptible and the debate would have been much more open. But modern audiences have sophisticated knowledge of TV techniques, and so the solution has been identified much more easily than Derren might have hoped.
Which leaves his follow-up show looking, well, a touch patronising? Dishonest? Irritating?
There is no doubt that we love being duped by magicians, illusionists – call them what you will. Most of them do not proclaim to have special ‘powers’, and Derren Brown is no exception to this – indeed, he states at the start of every show what his techniques involve, and often proclaims not to believe in psychic ability and so on.
But we also love magicians to be a bit fallible too. We like them to be clever, yes, and realise that they have the advantage over us every time, but when it gets to the point where we are being made fools of, they start to lose their audience. Which I think is what has started to happen here.
The Friday show was very entertaining. Before showing us his version of the Lottery ‘explanation’, he performed some great tricks that baffled and astounded as one would expect from Mr Brown. Even the explanation, which involved a group of people being made to believe that they could predict the lottery, was entertaining in its own right.
But there’s a difference in seeing a group of people on the TV being made fools of, and then realising that the magician isn’t crediting us with being able to see through this.
In a way, Derren probably couldn’t come clean anyway. Although he admits there is no real ‘magic’ going on, his whole act is to create the impression that there is. This has the result of creating a slightly odd paradox that doesn’t allow the option of going on TV to admit it’s just a camera trick, and actually it’s not possible to predict the lottery at all.
He can, it seems, reveal the true answer when the set-up is elaborate – and clever -enough to warrant it. In a previous show, it seemed that he was predicting the result of horse-races every single time, with the result that a woman was winning bets on every race. The ‘reveal’ was that actually there were hundreds of people who had also been chosen and hadn’t won on every race. The programme only focussed on the one woman whose result had come up each time – creating the illusion to the audience that all predictions were successful.
He also revealed how he managed to win several games of chess with grand masters by simply using their moves against each other, and not playing a single move himself. Again, a genius conceit that is clever and interesting enough to be revealed.
And that is the problem. In the lottery trick, there was not enough of a ‘wow’ factor in the reveal to warrant an hour-long show, and so one had to be constructed. The audience had higher expectations as a result of previous reveals, however, and so they are now pretty miffed.
For me, it doesn’t matter. I can still sit here feeling quite smug that I know how he did it, but revelling in the trick itself, and thinking how nerve-wracking it must have been for him to have carried it out. (Just think – it only needed a ball to be dropped, or someone to be out of place for the whole thing to have been ruined).
Next week, apparently, he is going to stick us all to our sofas so we can’t stand up.
Let’s see him do that with a split-screen…
