The Adjustable Productions Business Blog

Prior to last night’s Derren Brown “How to Win the Lottery” I had already pretty much decided on how I thought the illusion was done. Five minute into it and after his initial claim that he did actually “predict” the numbers, I knew it was bollocks, and that he was about to go through a convoluted explanation involving directing a bunch of unwitting stooges being guided into producing last weeks numbers. Luckily, about 10 seconds later a fire alarm went off in my building and I did not return to watching the programme until the last 30 seconds, where he more or less summed that up the solution of aggregating the predictions of 24 people, and then made a nonsensical claim that he may have tampered with the machine.

The fact is that it was a camera trick. It had been a little hard for me to tell because I had only been able to see the video of the stunt on youtube, which to a degree masked the false jitter and zoom effect which had been used to cover it up. The bricks serve as a good reference for computer software to insert a pre-recorded image of the left side of the screen over the actual action. This allows a stage hand to alter the balls. You can see one of the balls appear to raise on the plinth just as the numbers are finished being read out as the fixed image is crossfaded to the live image.

Derren Brown has fallen for one of the pitfalls of modern magicians. Up until now he has had the image of being some kind of modern wizard. Crucially, people have tended to believe that he has some kind of special knowledge or even power to help him achieve these stunts. The problem with this trick is that it is simply too unbelievable. He has crossed the boundary where most people will say “hang on, that is impossible, it MUST be a fix rather than a trick”. From this point it will be a lot more difficult for him to get people to believe he is doing something that he isn’t, and his whole credibility will be affected.

That does not mean he is not skilled at what he does. David Blaine, one of the best palmers and hand magicians I have ever seen on TV, did the same thing. He got to the point where he would walk up to a stranger on the street and have tattoos of their wife on his chest. Logically that means that the “stranger” was either an actor, or perhaps more likely to get the genuine reaction the shot was carefully planned, researched and executed so that it looked like it was a spontaneous thing. Either way, it was too daft to be a straightforward bit of magic, and it tarnishes everything you watch with him afterwards because instead of thinking “oh, there is some amazing slight of hand going on here” you are thinking “this is possibly an elaborately planned ruse made to look like slight of hand trick”. You lose faith in what kind of deception you are watching.

And I really think that Derren Brown has done the same thing here. A man that can actually pull off some very clever mind tricks has resorted to a relatively simple camera trick to do something we all know is impossible and used an explanation we know can not work to explain it. The sloppiness of the actual effect has rather given the game away, and now it breaks the impression that many other aspects of his tricks are have genuine ingenious practical solutions, and suggests that technology might play a role in a lot more of them.

I may have a slight advantage over most people in that I have a personal contact in Camelot that assures me that any suggestion that the draw was unaffected by this stunt is not true. I also know of one of the production team on the Derren Brown show, who I can not see being involved in any elaborate trickery. But judging from the response on the internet in general, it seems most people did not need to have this knowledge to decide that the whole thing was a load of nonsense. I guess the only way Brown could turn this stunt as a frustrating (but well viewed) failure as a piece of entertainment would be to somehow incorporate it into the later ‘Events’. But at the end of the day, the seams are showing. We get it, you can steer people towards picking certain numbers, you can shoot lots of videos to integrate it into a show. A lot of us knew this was coming on Friday night. Please, do something more believable so we can enjoy you as illusionist, Derren Brown. I almost feel as if that will come across as a Snoopy reference, but it was not intended.