The last time i saw one of his TV tricks was when he was going to predict the lottery numbers live on tv as the draw was going live and somehow got all numbers right!
Spoiler alert for how it was done (it's on-topic for the forum, really):
It was a camera trick. Derren Brown was on one side, a frozen shot of some balls on a rack was on the other. Fake camera motion was added to make it look like less like a splitscreen. After the lottery numbers were drawn, an assistant put the right balls in place and the splitscreen was faded to a fully live shot. The fake motion was already fairly obvious, but one of the balls didn't quite fit in the rack so it shifted position during the fade.
There's a lot less to Brown's effects that he leads you to believe, and personally I find it a lot more disingenuous than standard telly magic - he's effectively claiming special powers that he doesn't really have (at least, not to the degree apparently demonstrated). Just as someone pointed out that it's not against the rules to broadcast a fake advert, it's also not against the rules to say you don't use camera tricks or stooges and then use camera tricks and stooges (e.g. the zombie video game one).
Just read up on tonight's special, didn't watch it, but the probability of anything being left to actual chance is basically zero, however it was arranged.
Anyway, rant over.
The most interesting thing he did, for me, was that special where he ostensibly ruined the guy's day/week via hidden cameras and so on, with each thing voted on by the studio audience, only for it to end when (apparently) the guy got hit by a van in the middle of the road. But that part was a trick on the audience, and a commentary on the cruelty they had happily inflicted on him, up until that point, in the name of entertainment.
Last edited by davidhorman on 17 August 2020 12:50am - 2 times in total