If there is one guy out there who always pushes the limits in the field of psychology, it’s Derren Brown. He mixes several skills, to perform awesome shows that will keep you wondering and thinking for days. His television shows have consisted of becoming a well respected faith healer from scratch, making a regular person fly an airplane and much, much more. Derren Brown is not afraid to be controversial and pushing the edges of what people will accept. He has now made a new series called ‘The Experiments’ which has aired throughout October and November of this year on Channel 4.
At a very young age, Derren Brown became interested in hypnotism and manipulation. In interviews he has said that he wasn’t the most popular kid in school. He then started being interested in hypnotism to be able to perform it on the more popular kids to gave him a feeling of being in control. In the following years his interests grew larger then just hypnotism and also included things like card tricks, ‘magic’ tricks, Neuro Linguistic Programming and the art of creating illusion. This wide interest gave him a good knowledge of available techniques and made him able to become a more complete illusionist/mentalist. In his television shows he uses many different techniques and even combines them, to create very amazing effects.
Derren Brown has been very famous in the world of hypnotists and so called mentalists ever since the start of his television shows in 2000. He doesn’t yet have worldwide familiarity due to the fact that his shows air mostly in the UK. His first appearance in the US was only in 2007 at the Sci Fi Channel. The fact that some of his shows are on the controversial side doesn’t help his popularity neither. Some television channels are reluctant to broadcast the shows in fear of damaging their reputation. I don’t think that this matters much to Derren Brown as he mostly cares about giving his best performance. Going for a greater popularity would limit him in his freedom of pushing the edges, what made him so good and distinguishes him from the rest.
Most of Derren Brown’s popularity and fame comes from a television show where he played Russian Roulette live on English television in 2003. A volunteer put 1 bullet into a gun and Derren decided from the speech of the volunteer, in which chamber the bullet was located. The stunt ended well but there is still speculation if real bullets were being used or that the whole show was staged. I personally became very interested in Derren Brown when he went to the dog races for his show Mind Control. He was able to collect money from a losing ticket that he bought. Supposedly by using the power of suggestion, he was able to convince the lady at the payout window that he had the winning ticket. This boggled my mind and I have watched every bit of Derren Brown on Youtube and television ever since I saw that.
What I like so much in Derren Brown’s television shows, is the fact that he uses a very wide variety of tricks and techniques. Because he is doing this it’s always very hard to understand what he is doing and how he is doing it. Even for colleague illusionists it can sometimes be confusing which technique he is using since he constantly mixes so many of them. The best example of this are his theatre shows that he performs in England. He has made four of these shows in the past and is currently touring with his fifth tour. The theatre shows are more about tricks and techniques that were used in past times and have a different feel to them then the television shows. Most of the techniques he uses, have been around for long times but the television shows use them in a more modern way while the theatre shows makes you experience ‘magic’ as they did in earlier times.
You can’t help but thinking that the ‘trickery’ that Derren Brown uses in his shows might get old and repetitive after a while. The opposite is true. In the new show ‘The Experiments’ a complete new world is explored. It consists of 4 episodes where manipulation plays a big role. In every episode we get to see that regular people just like yourself, are capable of doing unimaginable and horrible things. There is an episode called ‘The Assassin‘ where somebody commits an assassination with the use of hypnotism, another person is manipulated into confessing a murder he didn’t commit in ‘The Guilt Trip‘ and a group of people is shown who are doing awful things to a random person in ‘Remote Control‘. There is also an episode called ‘The Secret of Luck‘ which is a little more happy where the feeling of being lucky is the focus of the show.
Like he has done with many of his shows, Derren Brown has again shown how a person can be manipulated and controlled. This transcends out of just hypnotism or illusions but will be interesting to watch for anybody interested in human behavior. If you aren’t already familiar with Derren Brown’s work, now is a good time to start. I don’t know many other people currently on television who are able to consistently make television shows that leave you on the edge of your seat the whole time with your jaw dropped on the floor. Somehow he has always been able to build the show up to a climax where you will be swept away and will change the way you look at things forever.
