It’s now 10 years since Derren Brown was plucked from obscurity as a close-up table magician in Bristol to become a television hypnotist. To celebrate this, Channel 4 devoted an evening to the Bristol University graduate this weekend. Catch up here on 4od.
A documentary, entitled Derren Brown: Behind the Mischief, was a fascinating glimpse into the life of the man who has become the foremost magician of his generation, someone who is endlessly provocative and who has brought old-fashioned theatricality onto out screens and into our theatres.
Brown worked as a table magician at Byzantium restaurant on Portwall Lane opposite St Mary Redcliffe church for two to three hours every Thursday for a decade after he graduated from Bristol in law and German.
In the documentary, he talks to Stephen Merchant inside the restaurant, which still employs table magicians to entertain diners.
Merchant is only one of several celebrities with Bristol links who pop up in the programme alongside Bill Bailey, Simon Pegg and Matt Lucas – whose plastercast head Brown keeps in a toilet at his home.
Brown returned to Bristol and to Wills Hall in Stoke Bishop, where he first started practising hypnotism on fellow students. He gleefully broke the rules and ran on the grass on the quadrangle, and then said that the people that he could most easily hypnotise in those early, exploratory days were the “sporting, rugger types”, basically your stereotypical Bristol student, something that Brown – who we saw a photograph of sitting in the corner of his first year room wearing a bow tie – was not.
Brown saw his first hypnotism show during his first year in Bristol and perfected his magic to such an extent that on graduating, he did not become a lawyer but a magician, specialising in close-up magic and slight of hand.
What happened next, after 10 years of making a living as a magician in Bristol is well-known. Brown’s shows have been classic water cooler moments: surviving a game of Russian roulette live on television, convincing a member of the public to hold an armed robbery, predicting the lottery and of course his astonishing stage shows, which he describes as his first love.
Derren Brown is bringing his Svengali show to the Bristol Hippodrome for four nights in 2011 between May 29 and June 1. Click here for more information and to book tickets.
