Derren Brown
British illusionist, mentalist, painter, writer and sceptic.
Essential viewing... difficult not to be dazzled... boggles the mind - The Times
History is littered with examples of normal people being persuaded to act in deviant, criminal or irrational ways. How do you persuade someone to do something they would not normally be prepared to do? Some people might think of hypnosis. However, hypnosis isn’t really what it appears to be. It’s only a kind of play acting and no one would carry out an instruction to really commit a robbery any more than they’d murder someone if they were told to.
A lot of the justification psychics give is that ‘well, it comforts people’ and my feeling on that is, well, if they’re lies, who are you to decide that your lies are what people need to hear to comfort them. I think it’s a twisted logic. And I think that the reasons... if you’ve lost somebody dear to you and I’m trampling all over those memories telling you that they’re here now saying this and that, that’s none of my business. And if I’m just doing it because I can earn some money out of it... and when you watch these people at work so much of it is ego. Some of mediums at these spiritualist churches – especially the ones that aren’t so good – they just look like second rate stage hypnotists that you might see in a pub in Corfu. It’s horrendous. That I find really quite ugly.
Some people might think I could play Russian Roulette safely with a blank bullet. Our armourer took us outside to demonstrate the damage a blank causes at close range. (The demonstration showed the significant damage caused by firing a blank at a plastic bottle)
He’s a creepy one. – Reece Shearsmith
It’s Derren Brown, it’s Derren Brown, it’s Derren Brown, it’s Derren Brown. He’s very kind, he’ll read your mind, even if you’re blind, your thoughts he’ll find,
Some people believe that a person’s spirit is captured when they are photographed. I invite those of you who don’t believe that to take a photograph of someone you love a stab it repeatedly with a pair of scissors. Maybe they do capture something of the soul.
Under the guise of a motivational seminar, in which I teach my skills to a group of middle-management business men and women, can I get any of them to steal one hundred thousand pounds in what they believe is a genuine armed robbery?
(In answer to the question ‘How would you describe yourself in three words?’) Short and balding.
Now I know what you are thinking; “how did he know what was drawn in the envelope?” Clearly, I must have detected in his voice the accent of my home town, Bristol, so he’s only going to be thinking of a tractor or marrying your own sister. A tractor's easier to draw so Bob's your uncle... and your Dad. And you'd be right.
All of us can be influenced through psychological techniques. For example, if I say “don’t think of a black cat” what do you do? You think of a black cat because the command ‘think of a black cat’ was there in the sentence. Techniques like this can be used to influence people’s thoughts, behaviour, even their memory.
How wonderful that there are still people around who’ll put in the hours of thought and hard slog so that people like me can simply sit back and lap it all up without being blinded by fire and brimstone and a vast array of visible trickery. How wonderful that there are still those who rely on performance rather than props, on delivery rather than pure end-result. How marvellous to enjoy a mere handful of props and, to be crude, a truckload of talent. – MagicWeek
Music is arguably the most affecting of the arts; intelligible to all people yet untranslatable into any other idiom. To Schopenhauer it was a direct expression of the ‘world will’... and was good when he had guests over.
The Sun has come to represent enlightenment and salvation across many cultures. I think that if we remove such comforting concepts we are required to do more soul searching but eventually our eyes become accustomed to the dark and our lives become richer.
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.
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.
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.
Mind-blowing. His tricks are amazing - The Guardian
[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.
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.