Derren Brown: Showman, Channel 4, 9pm, My4.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-showman(link is external)

Writer, philosopher, showman and a must-see, Derren Brown opens your mind, pokes about and walks away, leaving you baffled. Showman starts with Brown taking the piss. Horoscopes. He shows a horoscope for a Sagittarian (that’s me) and asks if it hits the mark. I thought it did. Others in the audience thought so too. Us Sagittarians stood together, smarter than most, bolder than most, risk takers. He whipped the feet from under us by showing the prediction was really for Aquarians. Oops.

He’s kinda done this before, but it’s a new format. He flings a Frisbee. A member of the audience brings down a note, which was a fiver. It goes inside a sealed envelope. A member of the audience, in this case an actress Cush, (coincidence or is he playing us again?) somehow after successfully predicting how a coin would fall—heads or tails—too many times to be coincidental, writes the bank numbers on the fiver inside the envelope, in the correct order she’s never seen, which are only revealed when Brown puts a board with holes over it. Magical.

Auto-suggestion or hypnotism? Derren Brown is top of the game. He makes people forget their name, but there’s no need to hypnotise me for that. And he also blocks out the number seven from their minds. Making them count their fingers and coming up with eleven fingers. They know it’s wrong, but can’t figure out why.

Brown goes through a spiel about how his dad died during lockdown (RIP). He segues into a set in which a dad writes three things he loves about his son. Meanwhile, his son tries to win a giant teddy. I felt smarter than most, knowing how it would end. We all know the son will get the giant teddy, which he does, but we also know that he’ll have a choice between two boxes, or in this case, two balloons to burst and he’ll pick the wrong one. Brown will make him, but we don’t know how. This trick comes from an old show on American telly. When there are only two boxes or balloons left, the audience (suckers) believe it’s fifty—fifty, and they should stick with what they have. Statistically, that’s wrong. The odds are stacked on switching boxes when you’ve a chance. Brown knowing that put the box/balloon in plain sight, holding it higher than other choices. The boy gets it wrong. The audience it wowed. The boy gets his giant teddy as a memento anyway. Nice.

Mary, my partner, went to a psychic night in my local last week. I asked how it had gone. She said the clairvoyant she got was completely rubbish. She asked if she recently had a problem with driving. Funnily enough I’d a nuisance phone caller telling me the same thing. She wasn’t clairvoyant, just fishing for the thousands of folk each year that drive and have accident. Mary doesn’t drive. No accident there.

Brown’s ability to read his clients from the clues they gave him verged on the superpower. If he’d went to my local and been able to tell so much from a single piece of scrabble, a metal insignia, a pregnancy test, and something else that slipped my mind, was up there with Sherlock Holmes being about to pick out the right kind of tobacco from 1000 brands.   

Showman that he is, he ended the show with a kinda Billy Connolly moment, when the joke he told earlier finally gets the punchline it deserves. A fish really does go to heaven. Alleluia, atheist, moral philosopher and religious debunker, Derren Brown.