David Blaine: Frozen in Time – Derren Brown Mind Control – Gallup Extreme Magic: Live On Tour – tape 2868

A tape of magic today, starting with David Blaine: Frozen in Time. I don’t know quite what to think about Blaine. His street magic stuff is usually great, but his big ‘stunts’ like this one leave me puzzled. I’m unsure if they’re actual magic, or just stupid endurance stunts. I went to look when he did his ‘sitting in a box’ thing next to the Thames, another of these stunts that just seems a bit pointless.

But at least there’s some of his street magic tricks, mostly fairly simple tricks which are helped enormously by the large reactions of the people he’s showing. I say simple. This trick, where he takes someone’s wedding ring, appears to drop it down a grill in the pavement, then finds it sealed in a small bottle just up the street, I was looking for the moment when he passes the ring to an assistant who can get it sealed up in the bottle and place it, but he does definitely drop the ring. So my guess is that he has someone under the grate to catch the ring, and a way to get the ring into a bottle and put it out on the street a little way back (where nobody’s looking because they’re all looking at Blaine). Not remotely simple, but as Penn Jillette says, imagine how much work you’d be prepared to do to make an effect work, and a magician will do ten times that amount, which is why it’s often so hard to imagine how these are done.

Some of the tricks look a bit more complicated to set up, needing some prior knowledge of the audience, like the one where he has a picture of a man’s girlfriend on his stomach. That can only work with a lot of preparation.

As for the big centrepiece stunt, the ‘standing up for days in a block of ice’ stunt, it left me cold. I’d have enjoyed it more if, when the time came, he actually disappeared, rather than needing to be cut out.

Staying with the magic next for Derren Brown Mind Control. I love Derren Brown, I can watch him endlessly. I’ve seen him live. And I wish I knew how half the stuff he does here is done. He likes to make a big thing about the psychology behind it, but I do know that mentalism is an area with a huge array of techniques that can simulate having mind powers, so there’s almost certainly nowhere near as much psychology involved as his presentation suggests.

I think this must be the first of his programmes that I watched, because the trick at the end, where he gets a random punter to think of the name of a random celebrity out of nowhere, and then he reveals that the painting behind him is of that person, really blew me away, because there seems to be no way to force a particular choice here.

And it’s always nice to see Professor Richard Wiseman.

Keeping with the Magic theme, the last programme here is Gallup Extreme Magic: Live On Tour. It features Robert Gallup who, I must confess, I had never heard of, and don’t remember seeing on other Magic programmes. His show is a combination of on-stage large prop illusions.

And close-up street magic.

He does a trick where he has a case full of CDs, the TV host picks one at random, then Gallup plays an escape during freefall where they throw the same set of CDs out of the plane, and he grabs one of them after escaping from chains, and it’s the one the host chose. But my favourite bit is where he has five of his favourite CDs, and it’s Phil Collins, Seal, RIght Said Fred (or ‘RIght Said’ as Gallup calls them), Live (whatever that is) and U2. It’s not an eclectic mix, is it?

There’s a nice bit of cultural difference when he has a little Chinese boy help him out on his Chinese tour, and after the effect is over, he puts his hand up for a high five, and the little boy has no idea what that means.

After this, there’s a short programme, People’s Britain which looks like it’s part of something on the E4 website.

The tape ends after this.

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