l
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.
I remember thinking that one would have been so much better had there genuinely been a mystery from the start as to whether the special was real or not, it was framed as the pilot of a new light entertainment show with Derren acting like a Noel Edmonds type throughout. But instead it had an introduction from Derren explaining that it was a fake show and a test on the studio audience - making me wonder if the plan
was
to originally make it seem like a real programme, only to either get cold feet about it in case viewers complained or C4 bosses intervened and made them add the intro.
The mystery wouldn’t just be what would end up happening to the contestant, but whether Derren had “sold out” and turned into some cuddly mainstream light entertainment host - a pastiche he did on that pretty well.