The Great British Barrel Scrape continues. When the history of this strange summer is written, what will we look back on as 2020’s most desperate act of television scheduling? Celebrity Snoop Dogs? Replaying all of Downton Abbey from the start? The Luminaries?
Compared to some of what’s been served up lately, Derren Brown: 20 Years of Mind Control is a rich imaginative feast. The live trick at the start and the repeated vintage trick at the end weren’t available to previewers, but the clip show that makes up the meat of the evening was a 90-minute celebration of Britain’s preeminent mind control jockey. In the rundown of his career, taking in the stage shows and series and one-off specials, we see Brown holding a séance, stealing wallets, crawling in broken glass, playing Russian Roulette and guessing the lottery numbers. He tricks Simon Pegg into wanting a red BMX and unsuspecting members of the public into pushing each other off buildings, having a religious experience, shooting each other or believing they’re in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
Interspersed with the archive footage, however, there is genuine original material. I know, I couldn’t believe it either. Arguably his greatest feat of all. But by this point he is approaching national treasure status, and has the fans to match. Celebrities appear via Zoom to pay homage to the maestro: Claire Danes, Stephen Merchant, Simon Pegg, Tim Minchin, JJ Abrams, Michael Cera, Mark Gatiss, Stephen Fry, Dawn French. Cera talks about having dinner with Brown; Brown talks about having dinner with Glenn Close. It’s an interesting peek behind the wizard’s curtain: for all his vaunted rationalism and atheism, Brown is clearly an incorrigible luvvie. It’s reassuring that someone who can predict what colour you’ll paint your hallway still goes weak at the knees for a mid-ranking British celebrity.
More interestingly, Brown is interviewed at home, at a respectable social distance, allowing himself a bit of rumination on his career and, more importantly, giving us a glimpse of his gaff, which sits at the apex of murderous taxidermist, as we’d expect, and Hoxton web designer, which we don’t. As he chats, he gives away selective information about how he does it, but nothing too exciting. You know with Brown that you’ll never get a full story, but he remains a curious figure in the best sense of the word, a true showman genuinely in love with his material. He recounts a conversation with Teller, of Penn & Teller, that gets to the heart of Brown’s gradual evolution from carnival huckster to psychological puppeteer. Magic makes for poor drama, Teller tells him, because the magician is too much like a god. We need heroes to root for, even if they are members of the public who have been tricked into electrocuting a cat.
The programme is also a good chance to assess Brown’s shifting personal style. When he started out, with purple hair, tickly goatee and black trenchcoats, he had the bearing of a goth used-car salesman. These days, in a navy jacket and light blue button-down shirt, the look is “billionaire with a dark secret”. I suppose after so much prime-time magic and so many sold-out West End shows, that more or less describes him. Twenty years is a long time in hypnosis.
