Derren Brown: Trick or Treat
Well as much as I hate to turn the Skeptical eye on one of my own, I am afraid that Derren Brown’s latest show Trick or Treat on Channel 4 has compelled me to do so. Myself and The Charming Manipulator are both fans of Mr Brown as he makes no bones about explaining what he does is not, to Quote CM, “weegie waggie” but simple acts of suggestion and manipulation, in fact we are both going to see him live on 31st of May.
In his current show he has picked applicants and gets them to choose a card that either says “Trick” or says “Treat”, if they pick treat, Derren will give them a pleasant experience, if they pick “Trick” they will get a not so pleasent experience, but there in lies the first trick, CM was suspisious about the cards and through further invcestigation discovered that they are ambigrams, so it does not matter what they pick, Derren decides if it is a trick or treat by how he shows us the card, nice one CM.
The one tonight was for a trick on a girl. Derren decided to give the girl a “Weegie Waggie” Outer Body Experience buy showing her own death. Posing as a beauty salon they got a mould of her face and used it to put a mask on an actress playing her. They got her to drive somewhere, during the journey, Derren called her and put her in a trance. they then set the scene of a car accident. When the girl was released from the trance, she was witness to the crash, the other people involved in the trick were actors and told to avoid all contact with the real girl while they acted like the shocked other car driver, the police on the scene and ambulence crew that showed up. Sounds like it would be a pretty freaky experience for the girl huh?
We think that it was bullshit and the girl was in on it from the start. Firstly she does not attempt to interact with any of the actors, she says excuse me a lot to try and get there attention, but makes no attempt to touch them which would shatter the illusion. We are also told that the makers of the show carried out a Psych evaluation on the girl to make sure she would be able to take the trick, however there was no explanation on how they did this, it not like you can assess someone like that without them knowing!!!
Its not that I don’t believe that Brown has talent, I really like him and am looking forward to seeing his live show, and the other segments of the show were very good, its just that I felt that the main segment was poor and that the series in general is not up to scratch.
I do really hope there is a show where he explains how he has done all the stuff in the series as he has failed to explain any of it so far, and thats what normally seperates him from the other illusionists
GI
May 21st, 2007 at 3:42 am
I know what you mean about the girl acting a bit strangely, but why would Derren ever risk his whole career by using actors / stooges. He obvioulsy has loads of talent so why would he risk someone revealing all.
One reason why she never touched someone is that her feet were fixed to the ground (as Derren said). This trick was showed in the madame tussauds sketch this series. I imagine the actors where told not to get withing touching distance of her.
I also think the ’state’ she was in, is not neccesarily how you would react in real life. It’s more like a dream state, I have had similar dreams where I’m surprisingly calm in quite a horrific situation, or not being able to get anyones attention