Penn & Teller’s Magic and Mystery Tour – Angel – tape 2598

Here’s something for the magic fan, with three episodes of Penn & Teller’s Magic and Mystery Tour on Channel Four. The duo travel to various countries, watching street performers, and trying to find practitioners of some of the classics of magic. It has the oddest title sequence, with animated Penn and Teller and a theme song that tells the story of the show.

The first programme is in India, looking for the famous Indian Rope Trick. It’s been described in various ways, but the trick is supposed to be that a rope magically uncoils from a basket, like a snake being charmed, a child climbs to the top, the magician follows the child to thee top, hacks him into pieces, then puts him back together magically.

While looking for someone who still performs the trick as the stories tell, they meet plenty of other performers with strange acts, like the man who can play two horns from his neck.

They do find someone who can perform the first part of the trick, and they watch it being performed. The grisly mutilation and subsequent restoration isn’t part of this trick, though.

In the end, they stage their own version, but theirs is more of a confidence trick on local tourists than an actual presentation of the trick. Here’s the whole episode.

The next episode sees the pair go to Egypt to find some practitioners of the cups and balls trick.

This episode features something fairly rare – Teller speaks, talking about how he was trying to demonstrate some of his techniques with the Chinese linking rings, to an Egyptian performer who spoke no English.

He also explains how one of the magicians – who happens to be the grandson of a famous Egyptian magician who worked in Los Angeles years ago – showed him a trick where he thought he could see all the sleights that he would expect in the cups and balls, and expected all the balls to be under the middle cup, but the magician, knowing that Teller was looking for this, had fooled him, and the balls were still under the original cups. An early example of Penn & Teller Fool Us, I guess. And I love that Teller had to take the time to explain that to the audience because we wouldn’t see any of what he was seeing, and he was so excited. People being excited about the things they love is my jam.

There’s some Snake Swallowing.

They also look at some hieroglyphics which are supposed to show the cups and balls.

The final episode goes to China, where the bulk of the episode takes them to a magic school and sort-of theme park where lots of magicians perform card tricks, coin tricks, ball manipulation, all the skills of magic, but there’s absolutely no visitors, and the whole place is below zero, unheated. It’s like a parody of what a communist regime would do.

At the end, they get a whole audience to perform the ‘National Magic Trick’ by doing the vanishing and reappearing handkerchief.

After this, recording continues, and there’s a random episode of Angel – Blind Date. This is towards the end of season one, in case anyone is trying to keep track of the random order these episodes are coming up.

There’s a blind woman in town, but she’s also a deadly assassin.

She’s in court, being represented by Lindsey, from Wolfram and Hart. But when Lindsey is told that she has another mission coming up, one that involves children, it’s too much even for his evil heart, and he comes to Angel for help.

Angel needs some help with the mission, so he goes to Gunn, who was introduced recently in a previous episode.

The break-in at Wolfram and Hart goes ok, but Holland Manners knows that Lindsey was working with Angel, and offers him a chance to rethink his priorities.

Lindsey decides to help Angel save the children.

And rather than have him killed, Manners offers him a promotion.

After this, there’s the start of some motorsport in Chequered Flag. The tape ends after a  few minutes.

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