Derren Brown

Performing the magic, for me, is not about convincing anyone I have amazing abilities. It’s about providing a journey which comes to a place where the brain starts spinning. And of course, the best brains spin the most.

(Whilst having his makeup done) This is the makeup process. I’ve been here since half past five this morning. So would you say you’re bringing out a beauty that’s already there? How does it work? How do we hide the bald patch?

Here's a place you'll never go: Monte Carlo on the French Riviera. As a massive celebrity, it's like a second home for me. If I just want to piss off somewhere for six months to a year to get away from tramps and fans I tend to come here in one of my big fucking expensive yachts.

A good communicator affects our physiology. The power of voice can entrance us – even induce or remove pain.

Hello and welcome to Mind Control Night. Three hours of watching my smug balding head so make sure you have plenty of night time snacks, depilatory cream and really good drugs to hand.

Now for Heaven’s sake go to bed. Don’t worry about how it was done just go straight to bed. Leave the washing-up and get into bed fully clothed. If any of you want to know how any of it was done, please feel free to write in to me at my home address which will come up on the screen in a moment and I will give you a full and honest explanation of anything you may ask.

Russian Roulette should not, under any circumstances, be copied. It is extremely dangerous.

So, what I do is a mixture of genuine psychological technique as well as all the chicanery and showmanship of the magician but it was enormously tempting to see what a clinical psychologist would make of it.

Being open minded isn’t about accepting things mindlessly. Being open minded is about having the information and then making the best decisions you can. A chap called Ian Rowland who wrote a good book on cold-reading made the point that if you’re a chef and you think, ‘well I know if I put poison in this soup and give it to these 200 people it’s going to kill them but, hey, I’ll be open minded’, that’s not being open minded, that’s just being ignorant. That’s just not working with the information you’ve got. So we have information on things like placebo effect and information about cold-reading. These things exists – false memories and anecdotal [evidence], all those things that are important – and taking that on board is just about being able to make better decisions. That’s about being truly open minded. Ignoring them and putting them to one side in this pursuit of easy answers and ‘intuition is the be-all and end-all of truth’, that’s not being open minded at all. I think that’s very narrow minded and certainly to laugh at people who say that evidence is important, I think that’s hypocrisy of the worst kind, to call them narrow minded.

Memory tricks, amongst other things which I’ll show you, have got me banned from a lot of Casinos in this country.

While on TV Brown downplays his role in proceedings – which may be a sleight of hand in itself – here his personality is to the fore, helped by a witty script and some unobtrusive direction. And what comes across strongest, aside from the unfailingly impressive feats of memory and suggestion, is a wryly self-aware sense of humour. Here he knocks the ponderous, self-aggrandising stunts of closest peer David Blaine’s into a cocked hat. – The Stage

Language is a gift that puts lyrics to the music of our lives. Without spoken language we wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I love you’. We’d have to say ‘uuurrrgghh’ or hold up a sign. And whether it’s one person’s gentle English or another’s muddy, arrogant French, it’s our language that makes us unapproachable and difficult to understand.

We form many of our political opinions through reading papers and unconsciously absorbing the rhetoric of the journalists. Later, we spout the same opinions as our own. This parallels the way we respond to any authority and it’s something politicians understand well.

There are three things I noticed about being thirty-three: Failing memory, hair loss and failing memory.

Under British law, you’re not allowed to fire a live round unless you are a qualified armourer. This is why the live game has to take place overseas.

Animals can also be ‘hypnotised’. Flip a rabbit on its back, hold it firmly in position with its head back for a couple of minutes, and you’ll find it will become perfectly motionless and unresponsive, until you clap your hands loudly above its head.

’By a man’s boots, by his trouser knee, by his cuffs, by his coat tails, by all of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.’ Words spoken there by Sherlock Holmes, I believe... although it may have been Westlife.

I hated sports at school and hated my sports teachers. Still do in fact - especially Mr Broomfield. He remains an insult to retarded, overbearing megalomaniacs to this day.

One of the techniques that I use to imitate psychic phenomena is photographic memory.

Fingers: We’ve all got them and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about them.