Derren Brown

Some people like to talk of intuition as a way of knowing truth; that gut reactions are as good as evidence based facts. It’s a really silly way of thinking...

Every day when you leave your home you give away more than you could ever imagine about who you are and what you do.

I am embarrassingly incompetent at football or any kind of team sport. I’m so bad it would anger you.

(DVD introduction) Well, welcome to your very own DVD of me, DVB, and ‘Mind Control’. If you weren’t expecting me and thought you were buying Reginald Perrin, then press eject now before you begin vomiting. Otherwise, please, please ensure that you are sitting in an extreme level of comfort, preferably in pre-worn slippers and, I trust, with your extended family around you. If you have seen the film ‘Signs’ and would like to wear the pointy tin foil hats now would be a good time to put them on you can’t be too careful. Well, pphhh, goodness me, er, it’s been a meteoric rise over these last years. The money and sex are exhausting and I have you the viewer to thank. Thanks. We’ve put together some of the pieces from the specials and series in glistening digital format, each pixel hand picked and gently polished and brought to you in wide-sound, surround-screen enjoyment. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I’ll enjoy the royalties from this, which is enormously. If you don’t like it and HMV won’t take it back because you’ve got sticky all over it then the disc makes an excellent beer coaster or wheels for a space truck or can be immense fun just putting it on your finger and [waggling it], like that. But I hope you do like it. When I first started developing these techniques I had no idea that they were going to prove at all popular and for all my nancing about and staring I’m actually really excited to have a DVD out and can’t wait to go and find it in Discount Books & Puzzles next to the Dizzie Gillespie CD box sets and disappointing erotica. I hope you like it and if you do, please go and buy another one.

If you approach any psychic with any sort of scepticism you’ll see through pretty much all of it unless they happen to get lucky.

One area which shows how unknowingly predictable we are, is the way we decorate our houses. We all feel we make unique and distinct choices, yet we all conform to a cultural standard.

Remember how you used to try and make kids turn round at school by staring at the back of their heads? And how they used to go home early crying with blood coming out of their ears?

This week, we’re in Whitby on the North-east coast where my great-uncle, Count Dracula, first touched British soil in the shape of a big dog.

In 1883 a relatively unknown Italian magician and alchemist called Alessandro Donnini chose the streets of Venice for an incredible treasure hunt. He asked the count Giovanni Francesco to hide a necklace anywhere in the district of San Marco, and Alessandro's task was to find it. All of Venice was invited to watch and place their bets as to whether or not he could do it. Alessandro used a method called muscle reading. He had the count hold on to his wrist and felt for any tiny unconscious clues, as to which way to go. He found the necklace in just over an hour and a half. It was a triumph, and all the townsfolk went fucking mental.

In each episode of this series I will offer an applicant a blind choice of either a pleasant experience, a ‘treat’, or a darker ‘trick’. They won’t know which one they’ve chosen and they may not know how or when it will happen to them.

For me, the most enjoyable aspect of going out and performing is that I never know how susceptible people will be to my methods.

Every week we go to the supermarket and every week we allow ourselves to be manipulated by the packaging and layout of the goods.

(speaking of Blackpool) Ah, I remember I used to come here as a child and it’s still really... shit, isn’t it, let’s be honest.

The Ouija board is a really interesting phenomenon. It works by something called idiomotor suggestion. You do actually push the glass yourself you just have no awareness of doing it.

In the next episode you’ll see two people draw a picture of an angel and notice when they do that they draw the angel from a particularly secular perspective. And I’m certainly not one to begin to criticise the religio-artistic viewpoint of my two charming volunteers but it does make you stop and think what spiritually vacuous times we live in when two young people instinctively draw an angel with a halo attached to the back of its head with a stick.

This program fuses magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. I achieve all the results you’ll see here through a varied mixture of those techniques. At no point are actors or stooges used in the show.

Mind-blowing. His tricks are amazing - The Guardian

Shopping Malls: Modern cathedrals to spending money. They’re designed to disorientate us and make us stay longer than we need to. Every brick is there to manipulate us to buy.

There are people who have the ability to wake up a minute or even seconds before their alarm goes off or to know what time they’ve woken up without even looking at a clock. Now, thank God, I don’t have to get up in the mornings but the potential of the body to keep such accurate time is remarkable.

[Magic] can be poorly presented and surrounded by naffness, and often amounts to little more than childish attempts to fool you. I guess it’s largely to escape those associations that I’ve gone the route I have.