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Derren Brown: The Events, C4
Derren Brown talks to Benjie Goodhart
Doing
an interview with someone who can’t talk freely about their latest project can
be problematic. Especially if you’re interviewing them about, um, their latest
project. But when the person being interviewed is Derren Brown, the
extraordinary psychological illusionist, you have to accept that normal rules
don’t apply. You can also be sure that, when the series does come along, you’ll
spend much of it with your jaw on the floor. This is the man who has done much
to make the world of magic and illusions cool again, following the hackneyed
routines of a generation of TV magicians in ill-fitting brown velvet suits.
Here, Derren Brown reveals (a little) about his new series, and explains why it
will have viewers stuck to their seats. Literally.
Your new series is called The Events. What’s the concept?
The last load of TV work has been almost mini-dramas based around participants:
Trick or Treat was always someone else’s story. Or it was TV specials of
the stage shows that I’ve done. I wanted to do something a bit different for
this series, to come up with something fresh. I wanted to go back more to the
performance-related stuff, back to the roots of what I do.
The series is based on the idea of performing for an audience, and doing quite
high-concept stunts in each episode. So the series is four one-hour episodes,
and each one of those hours is very multi-layered. There are some elements that
are pre-recorded, some elements of the programme are live, some elements are
with an audience in a theatre, and they all lead to a big single event in each
episode. It’s quite ambitious and potentially a career breaker.
Much of the series is still clouded in secrecy. I’m told you’d have to
brainwash me if you told me about the first programme.
I’d have to send you off to a deserted island till after they have gone out and
your family too.
Right. Let’s try and avoid that eventuality. What can you reveal about the
first programme?
Over the last year I’ve been writing a lot of erotic poetry, and I’ll be
reciting that, live, into the camera, for between ten and 12 hours.
Nice. You’re not actually going to reveal anything, are you?
No. Unfortunately, if it got out beforehand, we’d probably be stopped from doing
it.
Okay. Maybe you can tell us more about the second Event. I hear you’re going
to have people stuck to their sofas.
Yes. The second show is a piece of media which will be played to the viewing
nation, that will have the effect of rendering them immobile. Not all of them,
but it will basically stick a lot of people to their seats. It’s safe, it won’t
work on everybody, but it’s applying what I do one on one with people on stage
and turning it into a piece of technology that can then be broadcast – and it
has never been done before.
It’s just a cheap way of maintaining viewing figures, isn’t it?
Well… nobody will be able to move away from their telly, so they’ll have to
watch!
Do you think people will be freaked out, if they’re suddenly unable to get
off their sofas?
I think there’ll be quite a wide range of responses. I’m sort of experimenting
with mass influence and suggestion in the current live show that I’m doing, and
this idea came from that work. It’s perfectly safe, though. People will be able
to call into the show – we’ll be telling people to keep their phones within
reach – and I’ll be talking to some of those people during the show, so I’ll be
able to find out how viewers have reacted.
Reassure me that you’re not then going to leave people stuck to their sofas
for ever.
No, they won’t be. If their TV happened to break, or I died suddenly, after a
few minutes people would be able to stand up again.
The Events 3 is entitled How to Be A Psychic Spy. What’s that
about?
There was a sort of psychic arms race which ran alongside the Cold War, which we
are all sort of dimly aware of from the CIA conspiracy theories, and work like
Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats. It’s playing on that.
There’s one particular area, which is remote viewing, where things can be
supposedly viewed and described even though they remain hidden. So a remote
viewer, as some believe the CIA were using, would be able to view a document in
Russia while sitting in Washington. It continues to this day. We have one of the
world’s best remote viewers on the show, demonstrating it.
It’s an interesting area for me, because obviously I’m sceptical of anything
psychic, and so what I’m then going to do isn’t psychic but it plays on a
similar theme. There will be a large, nationwide interactive remote-viewing
experiment, to see if the nation can see something that is hidden from view. So
everyone will be at home drawing what they think the hidden object looks like.
If it works, it won’t be proof of psychic ability, because the methods I’m using
won’t be psychic. We’re just trying to do stuff that hasn’t been done before,
and this is certainly the first of its kind.
There will be layers to it and there will be an online element to it, so people
will be able to do this in the build-up to the show on the website
www.channel4.com/derrenbrown. And all of the results will be collated. We’ll
also have people there with us trying to do the same thing; it won’t just be
viewers at home.
There’s a lot that could go wrong with these ideas. Mass participation, live
transmission, it sounds like a recipe for disaster. Are you nervous about it?
Yeah, particularly the first Event that we’re doing. If that one goes wrong,
that could be a career-breaker.
You’ve just finished a run of live shows. Is that what you enjoy the most,
the buzz of performing live?
I do really enjoy the live stuff. But the forthcoming TV shows are, for me, the
most exciting things yet, because they’re so layered and have so many different
angles to them, including live.
Do you tailor your live/TV material very differently? Is the whole process
different?
Yes, it certainly has a different feel to it. The live stuff is just
two-and-a-half hours of me, so it has to be a bit different, a bit more
humorous. It’s probably more fun than the TV stuff, which is more concentrated
and darker.
Have you done stuff in your shows that manifestly hasn’t worked?
Yeah, of course. Whenever that happens on the TV show we tend to keep it in
there. A lot of the stuff we do is never going to work 100 per cent on
everybody. Some of the things, if they’re more like magic tricks, you know will
work pretty much all the time, but if it’s got more of a psychological basis,
it’ll depend more on the person you’re doing it with, and you can’t always rely
on that. Part of the skill, particularly on stage, is handling people. On stage,
I have no choice as to who comes up, it’s completely random, so then it’s about
managing the situations. I might have to change the skills and methods I’m using
depending on the person who I’m working with.
What defines that suggestibility in someone? How do you know who will make a
good person to work with and who will be less receptive?
Well, it’s not always suggestibility that I want. Sometimes, having someone
who’s very sceptical and a real challenge is easier for me to work with because
they become a lot more predictable. If you want someone to think of a letter of
the alphabet and they’re really playing along and want it to work, it could be
any one of 26 letters, whereas if someone says “All right, I’m thinking of one,
I bet you can’t get it,” you know it’s going to be Q or Z because they’re trying
to catch you out. But when it is suggestibility I’m looking for, which is maybe
half the time, then it’s an emotional openness I’m after. People who are
generally open and can’t really hide their feelings very well tend to be good
subjects.
You’re always at pains to point out that you don’t have any mysterious
magical abilities, and you’ve worked very hard to do what you do. Does that
essentially mean that, with the right amount of dedication, anyone could do what
you do?
Yes, absolutely. I think being musical is a good parallel. Anybody can be
musical, but not everybody will put in the work. When they’ve looked at what
makes people musical, it’s 10,000 hours of practice. What appears to be a talent
comes down to those 10,000 hours, but in order to put in those 10,000 hours
you’ve got to have a lot of environmental things in place like having parents
that are supportive, you’ve got to start seeing a piano teacher at the right
age, and you’ve got to have the sort of personality that makes you obsessive
enough to want to put in that kind of work. What I do is much the same. It’s
taken a lot of work, but it’s nothing that is out of anybody’s reach at all.
Is there an element of what you do, being able to read people’s emotions and
have an insight into what they’re thinking, that’s a curse?
I think, to be honest, what I’ve always done when I’m not working is just switch
that off. I couldn’t go through my life being that guy on the TV. It would be no
basis on which to have a normal conversation. So I think I switch it off so
much, that the only times I would switch into that mode would be if it was going
to be helpful. Talking to a friend who’s upset about something and knowing an
effective way to help them with that, or if somebody’s trying to sell me
something, and it helps me deal with that more effectively. But no, it isn’t a
curse. I’ve found my way of dealing with it and giving it a role in my life.
So you don’t automatically know if a friend is lying to you?
I’m probably going to be more perceptive than the next person with those sorts
of things, but that’s not something I really think about. That’s very low level
stuff. We’re all quite good at knowing when our friends are lying to us anyway.
It’s not the same as, say, some of the memory stuff I do in the show. That is
quite intense, if I was going through life working at that level, I wouldn’t be
able to function.
A lot of what you do involves hypnosis. You have a very good understanding of
it. Does hypnotherapy work? You know, the Paul McKenna books that are meant to
help people lose weight or sleep better?
That was the route I was originally going to go, using hypnotherapy as a
therapeutic tool, before I decided that I enjoyed performing more. Some people
swear by it, others say it has no effect on them at all. My gut instinct on it
is that there’s nothing magical about it, either on stage or in a therapeutic
situation. There’s nothing that happens under hypnosis that can’t happen
normally. Someone eats an onion on stage thinking it’s a juicy apple, and it
looks amazing, but in fact you can pick up an onion and, if you don’t think
about it, you can eat it just fine. It’s the same with pain, if you don’t think
about it you don’t feel it as much as if you’re concentrating on it. In a
therapeutic situation, yes, you might be able to give up smoking or get over
phobias, but I think that’s because for some people those changes are quite
easy. The people that it works well on would probably have similar results if
they simply had the support of a good and intuitive friend.
Whenever you are reviewed, the word that comes up again and again is ‘scary’.
Why do you think people find what you do scary?
One of the reasons I switched from doing card trick magic into
mentalist/psychological magic is because it’s more interesting. It’s more
interesting to have your thoughts read than your card found. Depending on your
feelings of control, that can either be a fascinating thing or a threatening
thing. When I started out, I went around lots of tables in restaurants, and I
tended to find that women would find it really intriguing, whereas guys would
really find it a little bit threatening. I think some people just don’t like the
idea of having someone in their head. I think that’s the flip side of why other
people find it interesting.
Of all the things you’ve done, what are you proudest of?
If this series goes well, I think it would be top of the list. As of now,
because those things haven’t been done yet, I’d probably say The Heist.
That’s probably my favourite. But as I say, if these stunts for the new series
go well, they’ll be right up there. They’re certainly ambitious enough.
©
Benjie Goodhart, 2009