‘I think he is probably the devil,’ said the work experience boy when I was going to meet Derren Brown, the magician, mindreader, ‘psychological illusionist’, what-have-you. ‘Because he does exactly what I’d do if I was the devil, which is pretend he can’t really do magic and that it’s all just a trick.’
Brown turns out to be an extremely nice man, so his evil telly presence must at times be a bit of an albatross for him. The thing is that, meeting him, you can’t help being aware that he is a genius puppet-master with strange powers of perception and the ability to manipulate people into doing the most extraordinary things. His most recent show, Hero at 30,000 Feet, had him hypnotising a man into seizing the controls of what he thought was a plummeting plane. In 2005 he placed another man in a real-life recreation of a computer game and made him believe he had to shoot zombies. Using the power of suggestion, he had a bunch of middle managers decide to rob a security van. His next stage show, due to open in the spring, is called Svengali, suggesting more of this sort of thing to come.
In the mahogany-panelled, book-lined sitting room of his beautiful London pad — two apartments recently knocked through to form one — I’m watching a scaly sea monster in a tank choke down a small blue fish that happened to swim past, and feeling a bit like that fish. What if I suddenly wake up in a warehouse wrestling the walking dead? This flat is quite something. Freakish taxidermy — a mother and infant monkey ensemble, a two-headed goat creature on the wall. There’s a baby chimp pickled in a jar. An enormous giraffe skull and vertebrae in the corner. Every time I lean forward on the sofa, a small stuffed Yorkshire terrier is asking to be petted.
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