I've always had a real fascination with Derren Brown; the only thing I can't work out is whether or not he is genuine. I definitely believe in his methods that simply involve subliminal messaging and suggestion - hell, they worked on me and I was only watching a televised version of one of his performances from the comfort of my own living room.
There were a series of things he asked the audience to choose, i.e. a number, a type of newspaper, amongst several other things, and very confusingly I ended up choosing all the same things as the audience. He then revealed that throughout the show he had been dropping subliminal messages into his performance in the hope that the audience would subconsciously choose all the correct aspects of the trick to culminate in a startling, seemingly psychic, finale. I was having none of it - there's no way he had been dropping hints without me realising, it wasn't like the show had me under some kind of spell. Unlike the audience, I had the luxury of the rewind button, so I rewound to the bits of the performance that Brown claimed to have been misleading my subconcious.
I couldn't believe it.
Derren Brown had literally said out loud the things he wanted the audience to choose, nestled within seemingly unrelated sentences, but in such a way that you wouldn't even notice that what he'd just said didn't actually make any sense. Looking back on it, I just couldn't understand why my brain didn't realise that some of the things he had said were more than a bit strange. At one point, after saying the words Daily Mail (for seemingly no reason) he turned and winked, winked, into the camera. How did I at home watching the televised version not even notice that it was weird that he was winking?
From that moment, I was converted. He had completely and utterly baffled me, and the best part was it wasn't even magic. It was real life, logical stuff and it made scientific sense. He is in my mind without a doubt, one of the most intelligent people alive today in the sense that he knows how the human brain works so well that I would almost be frightened to meet him in person. I think if I ever had to answer the clichéd question: "If you could have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be?", my answer would be Derren Brown, hands down. I know it's kind of pathetic when you put it up against the clichéd responses, Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Hitler... but I don't know, there's something about Derren Brown that fascinates me, and I really, really want to believe that he isn't a fraud. Some of his tricks are so easy to stage, and I don't think I'll truly believe in him until I experience what he can do for myself and not from behind a television screen.
