It's like magic, but crushingly dull

I really don’t want to jump on the “Derren Brown is an absolutely massive twat” bandwagon, but we all sometimes have to do things we don’t want to.

Of course, nobody actually expected him to reveal exactly how he pulled off the lottery trick in his special C4 broadcast on Friday night. But I’d at least hoped for some insights into the techniques he used to throw us off the scent. As has been widely discussed, there was a lot packed into that original 10-minute broadcast, in terms of what he said, what he didn’t say and the setup itself (two wobbly cameras and a bare studio etc).

What we actually got was an hour of flimsy ‘experiments’ and embarrassing pseudo-mathematical, pseudo-psychological guff. “I could spend the entire hour explaining how Deep Mathematics works…” said Derren. Actually, that’s not a bad idea - why don’t you?

We learned absolutely nothing, apart from (possibly) a coin-flipping parlour trick. The only people who could possibly have believed Brown’s line were the 24 poor schmucks given the full benefit of his (clearly effective) powers of manipulation, whose collective “wisdom” correctly predicted the winning numbers.

But – and let me be 100% clear about this – it’s not a problem that he faked it. It’s just a trick and there’s no way he could have revealed his prediction ahead of the draw, simply because he didn’t know what the results would be. That’s a given.

The problem is that there are several perfectly mundane and obvious explanations for the Lottery trick, which have been dealt with (and reproduced) in great detail elsewhere online. Few people believe in magic, but the trick denied us even the challenge of working out possible solutions. The question of ‘how’ is now largely redundant, so where does that leave us?

Disappointed with the “event”, certainly, but more disappointed with Brown himself. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the man: I like magic tricks and dislike people who claim to have actual psychic powers, which makes Brown’s shtick very appealing on paper. But it’s always made me slightly uncomfortable and now I realise why.

He’s very smug about psychics, spiritualists and other charlatans of the brain and constantly bangs on about how much hard work he puts in, reminding us that it’s a skill rather than a gift. But in a sense, this is his greatest piece of misdirection, because he’s still asking us to indulge in precisely the kind of magical thinking a more traditional performer would. The fact that Brown’s ‘powers’ are dressed in a more acceptable (but wafer thin) veil of self-conscious almost-science does not mean they require any less of a leap of faith in order to work.

Although the lottery trick was clearly achieved through technology of one kind or another, I desperately wanted there to be more to it than that – some mental slight of hand which just convinced us he’d picked the right numbers. But ultimately, this was a trick requiring no special insight or skill – it was something any of us could have planned and executed with enough resources.

Just like David Blaine’s transition from close-up street magician to That Guy on the Pillar, Derren Brown has been forced to abandon the ideas which made him interesting, in the pursuit of spectacle.