Derren Brown: Archive
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From: uberman_21
Date: Mon Mar 10, 2003 2:42am
Subject: Sunday Telegraph 9/03/03 Can this man read minds? - Complete Version
Derren Brown has been astonishing audiences with his apparent
telepathic powers. Is it just a trick? John Preston spends a
bewildering day with the celebrated 'psychological magician'.
Let me make one thing quite clear at the outset. I am not, I think,
a particularly credulous person. Nor do I generally allow strangers
to go rooting about in the dark dungeons of my subconscious.
Frankly, I prefer those dungeons to remain properly bolted - to me
or anyone else. Especially me, come to think of it. Bearing all this
in mind, let us step bravely into the unknown.
I am sitting in the Bristol flat of the 'psychological magician'
Derren Brown. All around the walls are stuffed animals, including a
moose, a fox and a turkey. There is also - unstuffed - a parrot
which fltters about and occasionally alights on my knee. Brown has
asked me to write down three memories from childhood on three pieces
of paper. One memory is to do with an activity I enjoyed; one a
hobby I had; and one the name of a friend.
On my first piece of paper I have written 'Athletics'. On my second
piece of paper, not altogether accurately, given that the only thing
I can remeber making out of wood is a breadboard, I have
written 'Carpentry'. And for the name of my childhood friend, I have
put down his surname: 'Quartermaine'.
After I have done this I fold up my three pieces of paper and drop
them into a bowl. Whereupon Brown, a small and mildly demonic-
looking man dressed entirely in black, picks out each one in turn,
sniffs it and adopts a thoughtful expression.
"Now look into my eyes" he says. "And concentrate very hard."
There is no sound, except for occasional ominous plopping noises
coming from the non-speaking end of the parrot. First up is the
activity. "It's something to do with...yes, with running. But not
just running. More general than that. Lots of different activities.
Running and jumping. Is it Athletics?" At which I give a grudging
nod.
Now comes the hobby. "Mmm. Wood is involved definitely. Join.
Joinery? No, not joinery - but something like that. How about
Carpentry?" I nod again, even more grudgingly.
Finally, it's the name of my friend - the clincher. "Look at me
again and really concentrate now. Does it...does it begin with a Q?
Now, syllables. THree, I think. Is there a T in the middle? Ah, is
it like the name of that science fiction character? What was he
called? Quatermass? But not quite Quatermass, no. Is it
Quartermaine?"
So how does he do it? Well i'd like to be able to tell you, but my
journalistic integrity prevents me from doing so. All right, I don't
know. All I do know is that Derren Brown is brilliant inducing
gaping astonishment in his audiences. On his current Channel 4
series, Derren Brown: Mind Control, he guesses someone's PIN
number, makes a bookie pay out on losing bets and tells a man that
he plays golf, used to be a disc-jockey and has three terriers,
simply by touching his hands.
Yet with brilliance comes a certain amount of oddity. Or quite a lot
of oddity in Brown's case. Certainly, his flat is one of the
strangest places I have been. Along with the stuffed animals and the
parrot, there's a table neatly laid for two in the corner of his
living-room. Nothing odd about this - except that Brown lives on his
own is apparently single. Consequently, there's a rather creepy Miss
Havisham feel to it. Propped up on a small lecternin front of one of
the place-settings is a volume of Nietsche - author of The Will to
Power.
Various paintings by Brown himself are very much in evidence - good,
if sinister, squidgy faced caricatures of his heroes, including Jack
Nicholson and Bertrand Russell. There's also a self-portrait of
Brown looking sly and lecherous.
In the loo - that infallible pointer to the private self - an open
copy of George Bernard Shaw's Music Criticism Volume Two is resting
on top of the cistern, while in his monastic-looking bedroom various
felt-tipped reminders have been written on a board besides his
single bed. "Shoes are a bit gay", reads one. It's not clear if this
refers to a particular pair of shoes or is a more general
observation.
What's hard to gauge is how much of this is done for effect. But
while Brown's appearance - droopy moustache and tufty beard to go
with his all black garb - suggests a high level of self
consciousness, his domestic trappings testament to a more private
exoticism.
It's all a far cry from Purley where Brown was born 31 years ago -
the son of a lifeguard father and amother who once worked as a
model. As a child, he says he had no particular interest in magic.
When he was 18, however, he went to see a show given by a stage
hypnotist and came out convinced that this was what he wanted to do
with his life: "Above all, I loved the idea of being awestruck."
At Bristol University he studied law and German, but spent much of
his time hypnotising his fellow students. "People would turn up at
my door and I'd have a go at them. I would invite the good subjects
to come back and I'd always leave them with the suggestion that the
next time I clicked my fingers they'd go straight back under.
Anyway, this man came back one day. I duly clicked my fingers and
off he went. Except that I realised he wasn't the person I thought
he was at all, but someone i'd never seen before.
"That was a very important lesson - learning that i could get people
to believe in me at a particular moment. The confidence I was
exuding had transmitted itself to this man. More and more, I began
to sudy people's responses - finding out which buttons to press in
order to make them behave in a certain way."
Brown started performing magic in restaurants, going round tables
doing card tricks. "But as i went on, i started to push the
boundaries. I'd do things like approach a table with the Queen of
Hearts in my hand and try to persuade someone to identify it without
them realising what i was doing. Instead of just saying, 'Pick a
card,' I'd say, 'It's intersting that people tend to pick cards that
reveal a side to their personality.' Then i'd say, 'Don't pick the
Ace of Spades - everyone does that.' And so on. Gradually I saw how,
just by posing questions and remarks, I could administer an enormous
psychological push to make someone do what I wanted.
Brown, though, desperately wanted to make magic classy - to devise a
show that would appeal as much to the intelligentsia as to the not-
quite-so-intelligentsia. Tho this end he perfected a stage persona
that was a more suave and assured version of himself. On televsion,
Brown has a rather fruity voice, but in person this slips
occasionally and a few flattened south London vowels show through.
Magic began to take over Brown's life in unexpected ways. Around
this time he stopped being a Christian; seeing how illusions were
created effectively destroyed his faith. "I decided to take my
beliefs apart to look at them more closely, then i found they
wouldn't go back together again."
After writing a couple of books on magic for aspiring magicians, his
breakthrough came in 1999 when he was recommened to Channel 4 by the
Comedian Gerry Sadowitz. Channel 4 looking for a British equivalent
to the fashionable, if glumly narcissistic, American magician David
Blaine, commissioned him to do a one-off show. Now the Derren Brown
bandwagon is hurtling happily along. Later this month he goes on a
nationwide tour, another two television specials are planned, and
he's currently in discussions about doing a West End run next year.
What Brown is not and he's adamant about this - is a psychic. Nor
does he believe in thought-to-thought transference, ESP, or any
other New Age guff. Mainly, he says, he works with ingrained
patterns of behaviour. "What I am doing in its very basic form is
tricking you into giving away clues. Watching for unconscious
signals that allow me to make certain deductions." Although we may
like to think of ourselves as terrifically complex creatures, on
certain levels, it seems, we're suckers: hopessly credulous and
greedily gullible.
"It's not hard to implant an idea in someone's head," he says. "For
instance, if i'm doing a card trick and i want to create a false
memory in the min of someone, i'll play with the deck and ask the
person, can you shuffle cards? Most people get a little self
conscious at this point and explain that they're not very good at
shuffling. Maybe i'll talk about casinos and croupiers for a bit.
Mentally, by now they have already shuffled the cards, although they
haven't actually touched them. So when I say, 'Right, shuffle the
cards again', they're already accepting that they've done it once. I
can then use that false memory to do other things. But it only works
because people instinctively think in patterns and look for patterns
to follow."
Naturally some people will be better subjects than others. But even
the tricky customers are not being half as tricky as they imagine.
Quite the reverse, in fact. "If i ask someone to pick a letter of
the alphabet and they're perfectly amenable to the whole thing, that
doesn't give me much to work with. But i know that the guy who
says, 'you can't do that to me' will think of Q or Z because he's
trying to catch me out. He's actually more responsive because he's
over-responding.
What Brown plainly possesses, as well as great natural flair and an
obsessive nature, is a jumbo-sized memory. When we go out to dinner,
he puts on a full-length black leather coat, then phones for a mini-
cab on his old-fashioned bell telephone. Their first two numbers are
engaged while the third is booked up. He then tries a fourth - all
once without looking at a phone book. When I remark on this, he
says, with no hint of boastfulness, "If this lot had been busy, I
could just have kept going."
At a Bristol pizza restaurant various people are standing by the bar
waiting for a table. Derren - greatly encouraged by me, it should be
said - approaches two couples and asks them if they'd mind taking
part in a couple of tricks. The girls, Melanie and Jane, gigglingly
agre, while their boyfriends, Ant and Steve, look edgily suspicious.
Derren tells Melanie that he will give her £50 if he fails to pick
which fist she's holding a pound coin in, four times on the trot. He
duly succeeds. By now Ant and Steve look slightly less suspicious
and are craning forward in their seats. Derren then asks Steve to
hold out his hand, shut his eyes and say how many times he touches
him. In fact, Derren doesn't touch him at all; he touches Melanie
instead. "How many times?" he asks. "Twice," says Steve
unhesitatingly. "Wow!" says Melanie, her eyes shining with
excitement. "That is really weird!" She's right, it is really weird -
and seemingly inexplicable. But when Derren asks Jane to put a
pound coin in her fist and again picks the right one four times in a
row, it's noticeable that Jane follows exactly the same sequence as
Melanie - left, left, right, left.
Does everyone do that? I ask him later. "Umm, not everyone." But
damn near everyone is the clear implication. This behavioural
pattern business, however, only goes so far. What it surely can't
explain is how Brown 'guessed' teh name of my childhood friend. Nor
does it explain how he manages to make a group of Oxford
students 'transmit' the image of a tractor to another student
sitting with his eyes closed at the far end of the room.
We leave Melanie, Jane, Ant and Steve with their jaws swinging loose
and set off for an altogether swankier establishment - the most
expensive restaurant in Bristol, in fact, where Brown has booked us
a table. It turns out he likes nothing better than to eat fine food -
preferably on his own. Quite often he comes here by himself, a
solitary sensualist lingering lovingly over each mouthful.
"I'm not particularly dark you know," he says at one point. I am not
so sure about this. Behind Brown's carefully erected 'winning
manner', there's something eerily detached about him. But then he
does lead a strange life: both seeing through people and bending
them to his will. That must be pretty isolating. It also hints at a
wish - or compulsion - to make others do his bidding.
When i ask Brown if he is a very controlling person, he bends and
writhes his neck and steeples his fingers. "I like things around me
to be just how i like them. That doesn't, i hope, extend to making
people behave in a certain way. Not when i'm not performing anyway.
It's more about havinged. 1ildhood friend. Nor
does it explain how he manages to make a group of Oxford
students 'transmit' the image of a tractor to another student
sitting with his eyes closed at the far end of the room.
We leave Melanie, Jane, Ant and Steve with their jaws swinging loose
and set off for an altogether swankier establishment - the most
expensive restaurant in Bristol, in fact, where Brown has booked us
a table. It turns out he likes nothing better than to eat fine food -
preferably on his own. Quite often he comes here by himself, a
solitary sensualist lingering lovingly over each mouthful.
"I'm not particularly dark you know," he says at one point. I am not
so sure about this. Behind Brown's carefully erected 'winning
manner'
