Confessions of a Conjuror

by Derren Brown

  This happens in stark contrast to the discovery of old photographs of ourselves at the same age. The mental image we carry around of our classmates seems to age along with us, to the extent that when we as adults come across a photograph depicting us and our friends aged seven or eight, we are struck by how stupidly young we all appear. Could that really be J— whose collection of Star Wars figures I envied beyond words and with whom I argued over administrative aspects of the Worzel Gummidge Fan Club that we started together? And could that be P—, an older boy who I told my friends had bionic implants and was the subject of a very early crush? And dear Lord, surely that mop-haired taller girl cannot be M—, who my parents said was a bit ‘slow’ and who once showed her front bottom to a queue of us after a French lesson? The curly platinum-haired kid in shorts, who could draw excellent witches and was frequently congratulated on his handwriting, must be me. But we are all little kids there, with the same kid-hair and kid-faces that don’t match with the mental pictures I make of us from memory – here inside my head I realise I have been trying to see older faces of my own age, struggling to depict firmer expressions and sharper lines, to remember us as something we never were (and when I recently met with an old classmate, G—, decades after receiving the slipper for sticking the nib of a dip-pen into his buttock, I didn’t recognise him at all). Old photographs of ourselves are strange, for with them we see that our world really was a child’s world of childish concerns.

  Photographs offer the cold stare of limp reality, whereas the smell of pink soap shrinks us down like Alice and ushers us in through a side-door, where we now hate Mr White for shouting at us during football, where we are embarrassed not to know the price of a second-class stamp when Mrs Parker asks us and are furious to be sent to the headmistress to be called stupid (and end up getting the slipper again because we are caught lying when we only pretend to have reported to the terrifying blazered octogenarian lesbian, and therefore the punishment is increased. I can bring to mind the stinging slap of my plimsoll being brought down angrily on my outstretched hand in an instant; tears rolling down my face not so much from the pain but from the humiliation of having to walk into a class that she was giving and ask for the slipper; having to explain what I had done to deserve it; removing my regulation grey rubber gym-shoe in front of the silent, fascinated older children who were no doubt excited to be watching the rare treat of a naughty boy getting the worst form of punishment the school could offer; extending my hand palm-up and letting the old monster slam the plimsoll down, hoping that she didn’t catch my fingers, which would hurt the most. I was slippered eleven times at that primary school: mainly for simple insolence, once for the pen-nib incident, once for pushing B— into the frog pond).

  Holding the cards, complaining at the resurgence of the memory, that palm throbbed a little now.

  The restaurant was split over two levels, and the downstairs was my domain on Thursday nights, for that is where diners enjoyed their digestifs and the post-dinner entertainment hired for the evening. I was such entertainment: a jobbing close-up magician based in Bristol, a few years before a lucky phone call brought me a TV break and a move away from that green city of artists and therapists and tramps to a grey metropolis of actors and wankers and hedge-fund traders. After performing at one of the owner’s other restaurants I had been brought on board at the entertainment-planning stage of this sprawling new high-concept restaurant, and it had become my professional residency. A regular restaurant gig is priceless for a working magician. The clientele were also perfect for me: what the restaurant lacked in cosy corners it found in space for larger groups, so each Thursday I performed a few hours for corporate teams and groups of friends who sometimes booked me for their own private events, and in doing so supplemented my restaurant pay and allowed me to earn a comfortable enough living doing what I loved.

  Loved, certainly, but there is an aspect to working as a table-hopper that is deeply excruciating to anyone other than the most repellently unselfconscious of us. I was lucky in that most of the diners expected an entertainer to be in their midst, but approaching a happily chatting group with the offer of magic tricks was a necessary embarrassment with which I never quite made my peace. The experienced table-magician will be sure not to interrupt a meal and will develop his own ways of ingratiating himself with a table of diners. Hopefully, once the other diners realise his presence, and perhaps call him over, his job becomes easier; and he can make sure that certain tricks are interesting enough when viewed from a distance in order to quickly engender a feeling of curiosity in the room and minimise the awkwardness of introducing himself again at the next table. But rarely is it so easy, and the potential for self-loathing is enormous. On a good night he might come away feeling like a performing monkey, beckoned hither and thither to impress drunken idiots he would hate to meet under any other circumstance; on a bad night (after a group has politely but firmly expressed its lack of interest upon his approach and others have been clearly only humouring him) he might crawl home hating himself quite considerably – or at least until that night’s episode of Friends, recorded while he was out and now accompanied by a Highland malt, the chatter of his parakeet and a few chocolates, diverts his mind from such heavy concerns.

  The potential for self-loathing comes from the unavoidable problem that one is engaging in a childish, fraudulent activity: although it has the capacity to delight and amaze, the performer is also a hair’s breadth from being justifiably treated like a silly child. It is, after all, just tricks. Much upset and controversy can be triggered in the magical fraternity by such disgraces as revealing a method or performing another magician’s effect (‘effect’ is the preferred word for ‘trick’, and comprises the plot that the audience should follow as opposed to the ‘method’ which explains it), and equally one may feel a quiet pride in using a method one has devised entirely for oneself, as opposed to one taken from a book drawn from the substantial secret library of the magical fraternity (annals that contain some of the most wonderful, obsessive and pointless texts we human beings have produced), but these considerations tend to seem absurd when viewed from a distance. Two old men arguing over bits of rope or who first shoved a card into his pocket in a certain way are the types of issues that can raise the temperature and lead to ungentlemanly behaviour at any magic hang-out anywhere in the world. It is perhaps the oddness and exclusiveness of the magic world that makes issues of perceived status so important to performers. Among fellow professionals, many have a huge reputation that is not reflected in the public arena outside the magic clubs and conventions, and which can lead to the most appalling bitterness. Even performers who enjoy wider success, not allowed to honestly express to their audience the joy of applying curious and unexplored psychology as well as of creating and employing deceptive methods, can be prone to aggrandising themselves to laughable proportions in a circular battle with their own guilty fear of being seen as a fraud.

  A peculiar instance of the precariousness of the table-magician’s self-imposed status can be seen at the unfortunate moment when a waiter approaches the table during a trick and interrupts the performance. The carefully controlled play of attention and relaxation which the performer has established is thrown into disarray, and, more frustratingly, the suspicion will arise (and remain) that the magician could have done anything while everyone else turned to look at the waiter. The up-until-then status-enjoying Svengali must defer to the restaurant employee and will probably freeze, feeling his anticipated climax slipping further away in direct proportion to the length of time it takes the waiter to carry out his task.

  Waiting staff must live in a world of frequent freezes. The arrival of a waiter has the same dramatic effect on conversation as the intrusion of a person into a lift already occupied by a nattering couple. There is at the table the curious ‘Parmesan Moment’ when the most animated chatter enters, sometimes mid-word, a cryogenic phase equal in length to the time it takes the waiter to shave hard cheese on to the plates of
the erstwhile vivacious diners. No conversation is too mundane, no babble too banal for it to be suddenly classified as anything less than entirely confidential once the rotary grater invades the periphery. If I were a waiter (and I would like to imagine that this idea has already been put into action), I would rotate the utensil as slowly as I could for as long as possible, speeding up perhaps for brief moments here and there just to abate the frustration of the silent parties and keep their annoyance beneath a verbally expressed level. It would be satisfying to think that cooperating staff members might, using discreet stopwatches, time one another attempting to set a record for the longest sustained Parmesan Moment before the party resumes talking, the cheese cube is entirely dispersed or a diner, set to explode, screams for the infuriating process to be curtailed.

  The oddness of the reverie that solemnly greets the cheese-bearing waiter is echoed by the strangeness of requesting a napkin and having it brought to the table with disproportionate reverence aboard its own tray, with much of the pomp and silver-service showmanship one might expect to be reserved for the arrival of the entrée. The curious presentation of the napkin is surely not necessitated by hygiene, as the waiter will handle the solitary cloth manually as he places it on the table with a final flourish, but rather by a delight in presentation that makes a white cloth on a tray rather more special than a white cloth flopped flaccidly in the hand. This is context; this is pointing the presence of the napkin by putting a clear space around it, rather like a picture, hung in a gallery, looks more special than the same picture propped or hung near other objects that interfere with its sacred periphery. The blurriest and most ill-composed of our personal photographs look quite passable in an album; indeed any one of these incompetent images could look like art if given centre stage on an otherwise empty page. The space around the subject seems to dictate its status (a perhaps counter-intuitive notion given the more familiar sight of celebrities and royalty surrounded by a swarming flurry of bodyguards, press-people and/or fans).

  A friend once showed me photographs from his holiday in New York which had been dragged and dropped from a digital library to a virtual album on his computer, after which, following a modest online payment, the album had been printed, bound and sheathed, and sent to my friend in the post. The result was astonishing: these nice but modest family snaps, mounted in what felt like a commercially produced art book, looked like the work of a professional photographer. Here the space around the pictures was not an accidental result of sticking the latter into a shop-bought album, but instead was the product of design, inseparable from the printed and arranged images, and their status was thus raised even further. The same pictures would have seemed far less noteworthy had they been shown without the framing of each page, and merely been ‘gone through’ by my friend holding the pile of 4×6s in his hand and transferring individual pictures from front to back in a cyclical sequence immediately identifiable as the holiday-snap-showing action. Or at least immediately identifiable to those of us not brought up having viewed photographs only on a computer.

  With the demise of the print photograph (and with the printing-out of sets of digital photographs, at least at time of writing, a sentimental throw-back we associate with mothers and the declining classes of the computer-illiterate), we have also lost a particular part of our mimetic repertoire: skipping from one photograph to another on a screen with a mouse-click does not provide us with a familiar gesture-set peculiar to the enjoyable activity of viewing our snaps and allow us to be transported back to fun or beautiful moments, and thus a modicum of charm is lost from the whole process. Inoffensive activities in which we can find the quality of charm because they involve unique and immediately identifiable actions include:

  Riding a bicycle

  Here a very particular set of actions is involved, used only when cycling; and given the fact that there are far more effortless modes of transport available to a person who wishes to get from A to B, that set of cycling actions can be seen as peculiar to the point of an almost redundant indulgence. The pedalling action therefore gives this choice of transport mode a kind of quaintness. When bicycles become obsolete, we will have lost a source of charm (a fact to which the following will bear witness: anyone who makes a point of riding one will be seen as an eccentric).

  Climbing stairs

  Houses of two or more storeys have a particular charm that perfectly lovely bungalows and single-storey flats do not. This is in part due to the necessary architectural inclusion of stairs, and the fact that their presence invites a unique and immediately identifiable sequence of actions. A stair-lift is charmless, as sitting is a commonplace posture, and (perhaps literally) bypasses the stair-ness of stairs and therefore their inherent charisma.

  Placing a stamp on an envelope

  Written communication will become entirely charmless when no unique actions are involved and all communication happens electronically.

  Preparing a tube of toothpaste

  or other substance for first use by unscrewing the cap, then turning over the cap and screwing it back on the other way round, whereupon a pointed cone in the centre of said cap satisfyingly penetrates a small circle of foil covering the mouth of the tube. The minor charm of this activity is heightened by (a) the barely noticeable amount of suspense experienced as one twists the contrary crown towards the foil and awaits the moment of penetration, and (b) the almost completely imperceptible tactile feedback received as that instance is reached and the tiny silver disc is annihilated by the effortless and cruelly disproportionate force of your physical might, channelled into the tiny, rotating, advancing cap.

  Reading a book

  Like a napkin borne with great ceremony upon a tray of unnecessary proportions (to make the diner feel that even his face-swab is deemed sacred by staff lost in fawning wonder at his decision to eat and wipe himself within their walls), a magician at a table will create physical or psychological space around an item he wishes you to treat as important. At the same time, the genuinely important item – the fake coin, the special card, the hand that conceals a palmed card – is apparently ignored by the deceiver and where possible pushed to the side among clutter, as he knows that if he does not give it status you will probably not think to do so yourself.

  Perhaps the magician wishes to create the illusion of a knife passing through a twenty-pound note, and will achieve this by using an ordinary note but a special knife bought from a magic-shop or built to his own design, which creates the illusion of penetration but in fact causes no harm to the note through which it apparently moves. He could borrow the note to prove to all that it is unfaked, but the better magician might, after moving aside cutlery and crockery from the table, purposefully cast suspicion over this innocent element by producing the twenty from a special pocket in his own wallet (a special pocket is the note’s own special space), and then placing it flat on the table, the clear space around it signifying its importance. The knife, meanwhile, has been casually sneaked in among the other cutlery as he swept the objects aside, and lies surrounded by table objects, denied the space, the display and therefore the significance bestowed upon the entirely blameless currency. Keeping his gaze fixed upon the money as he picks it up, the magician takes the knife with his other hand (as if it were any suitably pointed object from the table) and thrusts it through the note. He appears to withdraw the blade, and the small audience see that the paper has remained unharmed. They are incredulous, and stare at where the hole should be in the centre of the note. The magician keeps their attention focused by slowly placing the twenty again on the table before them, returning it to the space he has cleared for it, a designated table-top performance area from which it would be rude for the spectators to remove the money they wish to examine. The cleared region around it has made it the primary object of focus, and without saying anything the performer has allowed all their suspicion to be directed towards an innocent item.

  In the same gesture of placing the note back on the cleared table area, t
he knife has been replaced to the side, and without pause the magician’s hand casually slides across and hovers above a different, similar, nearby knife. This small move is missed as the note is the centre of attention and the spectators are waiting to be allowed to examine what they now suspect is a special note. He then gestures for the money to be examined, which they grab willingly; and as he sits back, he lifts the second, guiltless knife, which is under his hand, and places it in the space previously occupied by the note. So now he is using the same space to give a (but not actually the) knife importance, and moments later when they realise that there is nothing for them to find in the note, they turn their attention to what they presume is the knife used in the trick, snatch it, and examine it thoroughly to no avail. A trick knife might be the rather disappointing physical solution to the beautiful illusion, but without the magician’s deft use of space to focus attention and manipulate status at a wordless level, it would be far less likely to create an effective mystery.

  The pristine, white-linen-covered tables that constituted this restaurant work area and which caused my heart to hang heavy were echoed by the coffee-ringed, cheap pine or melamine café tables that populated much of my playtime. The slopes of Bristol host a thriving café industry, and like any arty type with his days free, I was usually sat in one of them. Something in the limp, camp, damp aesthetic of the tea-sipping flâneur appealed, and still does, although the dandyish teahouses of my graduate years have given way to the Starbucks of my professional period. There is a particular joy, well worth mentioning, of having one’s favourite table in such regular haunts. Today, though my time is largely filled with work, I still seek out and jealously guard favourite tables in favourite cafés around London. I hope it does not sound too preposterously flaccid to say that there is a singular bliss in settling down at one of them for a day’s reading or writing at the start of a free weekend. Such pleasures I find self-affirming and oddly moving, most probably because they bring with them a wash of nostalgia for those years in Bristol.