by Dynamo
I’d been on Richard and Judy and thought, ‘This is it.’ I was presented an award by Will Smith, the biggest actor in the world, and thought, ‘This is definitely it.’ Meeting Prince Charles, having the support of Coldplay, playing to 1.3 billion people at the EMAs, levitating Lindsay Lohan, appearing on Jonathan Ross… Every milestone I reached just didn’t seem to take me any further than where I’d already been. I was on the cusp of achieving my ambitions, but I could never quite get past that tipping point. I was disillusioned. I was down. I was close to giving up. Close, but not quite.
The story of getting Dynamo: Magician Impossible, my first TV series, made is a long and convoluted one. But the way things finally worked out still mesmerises me.
Along the way I heard all sorts of things from the TV people. ‘This kid’s amazing, we’re gonna make him a star!’ ‘Oh my God, how do you not have your own TV show already? Get this kid a series now.’ Or, on a bad day, ‘We really like you, Dynamo, but we just can’t see how you’re going to work.’ I don’t know what was worse: the flat refusals or the empty promises.
I’d read somewhere that Leonardo DiCaprio had over fifty auditions before he finally won a part in a major motion picture. I knew the Beatles’ demo had initially been rejected by four different record labels. Will Smith had waited two years trying to hustle his way into a TV studio. Even my friend, Tinie Tempah, had been working for six years before he got a record deal.
But I was so disheartened.
Deciding to take fate into my hands, I decided to do everything possible to get my TV show – The Art of Astonishment as it was then called – made. I realised that a brand-new show reel could be the most important tool that I had. Because I’m a visual artist, and people want to see examples of my magic, I knew I had to make a show reel that would demonstrate exactly the type of TV programme that I wanted to make. If people didn’t get my vision for my show, then I’d make it myself and prove my ideas were worthy of investment.
We compiled all the footage, everything we’d shot over the years – from the levitation I’d done in Singapore with Lindsay Lohan to my appearance on Jonathan Ross. It took Dan about four months to cut it, it was so painstaking. We treated it like we were making a TV show, even though it was only six minutes’ long. But we’d seen other magicians’ show reels and they weren’t particularly inspiring. We wanted something that was engaging and well paced. So we spent a long time developing and creating what we thought would be the ultimate magician’s show reel.
We took it to all the right places and showed it to all the right people, but no one was interested. Dan was good at keeping me positive, telling me that we had to keep going and we’d get there. And actually a lot of good things happened because of the show reel. I went to LA to hook up with Snoop Dogg to appear on his TV show, Fatherhood, which I filmed with his kids on Sunset Boulevard. I did Ashton Kutcher’s Aplusk online show with Ashton and Kim Kardashian. I met with top Hollywood talent agents who were full of the whole ‘We’re gonna make you a star, kid’ spiels. But ultimately, nothing came through. No one would give me a TV series.
I returned to London and went back to private gigs and hustling my way around nightclubs. I felt like I’d tried everything within my powers to succeed, but perhaps it was time to accept my lot in life.
Little did I know it then, but finally, things were about to change. A disastrous meeting, an auspicious dinner and a case of coincidence finally got us back on track.
One day, I was performing at a private party for a producer from Working Title Films who had worked on, among others, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Fargo, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Notting Hill and so on. It was out in the countryside and you had extremely powerful media and political figures gathered, landing in helicopters and roaring up in the latest Ferraris and Porsches. I did some magic for this guy called Nick and he was so into it. ‘I need you to meet my wife’, he said excitedly. Nick was married to a woman called Christa D’Souza, a journalist on The Sunday Times. ‘She’ll definitely want to interview you for the newspaper,’ Nick said. So Dan and I, who were sharing a flat in north London at that time, invited them both round for dinner.
After the interview, I did some new magic that I was working on, and, once again, I blew them away, firstly by taking away Nick’s strength, then by pushing Christa’s phone into a bottle. Nick, who is the managing director of the theatre producer Cameron Mackintosh said, ‘Look, Dynamo, what do you want to do? Where are you trying to take your magic?’ I said, ‘I want to make a TV show. It’s called the The Art of Astonishment but we can’t get funding. I want to integrate the magic I do with the story of my life so far and make a four- or six-part series. That’s what I want to do.’
It turned out that Nick had a good contact at Universal Pictures. Before they left, we played them the show reel, which they loved, and Nick said he’d forward it to his contact. Pretty much straight away, Universal got in touch with us, offering us a distribution deal for a DVD. They said, ‘We’d love to do something, but in order to do the DVD, you need to have a TV channel on board first.’
We were back to square one. It was really frustrating. We had a major DVD investor who was willing to put money in. We had all of the ideas and we had the knowledge of how to make a show that we thought could be a big hit. We had everything in place apart from a TV deal – that was the last piece of the puzzle. Dan went back to the same people we’d been talking to over the years – production companies, TV channels – pointing out that we had backing for the marketing and distribution of a DVD to accompany the series. There were no takers. We got the same old knock-backs with the same old excuses: ‘We’re just not sure it’s a format that will work for us.’
‘OK, I HAVE someone interested in potentially making a TV series with you guys. They don’t have much budget, but maybe you can work something out’.
It was April 2010 and Dan had received a phone call from a contact connected with my Channel 4 show, Dynamo’s Estate of Mind, back in 2006. It was a low-budget, one-off special that followed me around the country as I performed magic for everyone from Har-Mar Superstar to Coldplay. The meeting would be with a TV executive.
‘What do you think, D? Is it worth it?’ Dan asked. ‘It turns out they have even less budget than the TV show we made four years ago.’ He was concerned that this might be yet another waste of time, but I decided to try to stay optimistic. ‘You know what? Let me just go and talk to them. I’ll meet anybody, let me just see what they’re saying.’
I had to go to a booking on the day of the meeting, so Dan went without me. The executive had a scruffy office in north London. The meeting started off badly, and went downhill from there.
‘So, “Dynamo”, right? I’ve never heard of him. Tell me what this guy’s about,’ said the exec, slouched in his chair, feet up on his desk. Given that I was fairly well known in TV circles, this came as a surprise to Dan, but he took it on the chin.
‘I don’t want to tell you too much about Dynamo, because I can’t do proper justice to what he does,’ he replied. ‘I think it’s better if you see what he’s about.’
Dan set up the show reel on the guy’s computer and it played through the big screen in his office. It opened with an incredible montage of Will Smith and Coldplay reacting to my magic, but when Dan looked over, the guy was twiddling with his BlackBerry. He wasn’t even watching the screen. He looked up for a couple of seconds, looked back down, and kept on typing.
I love social media. I can stay in touch with my followers wherever I am
He ignored the show reel to the point that his screensaver kicked in. ‘Mate, do you want to fix that?’ asked Dan, as pictures of the TV executive’s holiday whirred around the screen. ‘Hmm, oh, yeah, yeah,’ said the exec, absently touching the mouse. So far, he had paid about four seconds of attention to my show reel. He just sat there on his BlackBerry. At one point, he even left the room to talk to someone outside.
After six minutes of the guy barely tuning i
n the show reel ended. He turned to Dan. ‘So, most people think magicians are assholes, what makes this guy so different?’ The guy’s rudeness and arrogance was actually almost comical. ‘If you’d just looked at the show reel, then you might have some idea,’ Dan retorted.
The exec got quite shirty about that; he really thought he was a big cheese. Taking a deep breath and masking his irritation, Dan explained to him that we wanted to make a show that comprised close-up magic with big stunts where we would have a big finish at the end of each one. What would make it different was that it would be a narrative-based show. It would be following me through my life and my attempts to share magic with the world. It would be about me as much as it would be about the magic. It was pretty much how Dynamo: Magician Impossible would turn out some two years later.
‘Well, what kind of things does he do that would be interesting to film?’ the exec yawned.
‘Well, for instance, this week he’ll be ringside at the David Haye fight,’ Dan replied. Haye had just won the world title – he was a big deal and this was a huge sporting event.
‘No, I don’t think there’s enough mileage in that,’ the guy replied. ‘I’ve got a better idea: we do a show where he does the tricks and then tells people how it’s done. Like, he robs a jewellery store and then reveals how it’s done. He…’
Dan couldn’t bear to hear anymore. ‘Look, let me just stop you there,’ he interrupted. ‘We’re not interested in any of those ideas. We don’t want to expose anything, that’s not what we’re about.’
At that point, the meeting pretty much ended. ‘Well, I really hoped I’d see some cool stuff today but…’ he shrugged. Dan just laughed. The person who had been the go-between and set up the meeting, was a little embarrassed at that point.
Dan stood up. ‘I look after the greatest magician on the planet,’ he said defiantly. ‘I’ve got a six-figure deal with a major distributor on the table. Just because I’ve come to this meeting, don’t be so naïve to think this is my only option.’ And, with that, he walked out.
Truth be told, we didn’t have anywhere else to go. But he wasn’t about to let them know that.
‘HOW DID IT go?’ I asked Dan when I saw him that evening, but he didn’t need to answer. The look on his face said it all. It seemed like every door in the UK TV industry had been closed in our faces.
‘Look, D, I’ve been thinking about this on the tube the whole way home,’ he said. ‘We’re going to do this ourselves. We’re going to raise the money ourselves – we’re going to make the show ourselves. If we can only raise ten grand, we’ll make a show for ten grand. If we can raise fifty grand, we’ll make a show for fifty grand.’
I got really fired up. ‘You know what, you’re right. Let’s go for it,’ I smiled. ‘We’ve got a bit of money in the bank; let’s go hard on the private bookings, raise some more cash and hire our own crew. Forget everybody else. We know we’ve got a brilliant idea. Let’s show people.’
We’d done Sports Relief a few months before, where I’d turned lottery tickets into cash for the charity for Davina McCall and Robbie Williams. The producer of Sports Relief was a man called Martin Dance who was a really nice guy, very supportive, and we had got on well. I always look out for people who I think are honest and straight talkers, people I think won’t speak rubbish to me. I phoned him up. ‘We want to make our own show and we want to make it independently. Will you come on board as a producer?’
It turned out that Martin was working at a TV production company called Phil McIntyre. What was interesting about that was that my first ever stage show, An Audience with Dynamo, had been promoted by Phil McIntyre. It was just a little show that I did in 2007 mostly for family, friends and my supporters.
Phil and Martin introduced us to a lady they were working with called Lucy Ansbro. It turned out that Lucy had worked in the same department at Universal that we were talking to about the DVD. It all seemed to be falling into place. We had a meeting with her, and got on really well.
‘Can you help us pitch this programme?’ we asked her. ‘We’ve been shafted by a lot of production companies; we’d like to make this as a co-production with you and Phil. It’s the only way we want to do it.’ Fortunately, Lucy was fully up for it and she started to help us look for someone to make the series. She’d heard of at least one channel that might be interested.
Fashions in television come and go, and now channels had started looking for magic formats again. I was at the front of the queue.
This was around the same time that the BBC commissioned a series called The Magicians. I had been asked to do that, as well as two other similar formats that had been developed. But I always said that I only ever wanted to do my own programme. I didn’t want to be a magician on a show in which I wasn’t the main focus. Not because I’m arrogant or because I think I’m better than anyone else, but it was the vision I’d always had. And, I knew that doing those sorts of shows wouldn’t further my magic. If you look at those series, it’s hard to remember any of the magicians’ names as individuals. No one knows who they are.
SELLING A MAGIC show to a TV company is very difficult. It went a little bit like this:
‘Hi, I’m Dynamo. I want to make this show where I’m going to walk on the River Thames. Then I’m going to fly from one building to another, walk through a window, and I’m going to predict the future, live, on Radio 1. Oh, I can’t tell you how I’m going do it, but if you pay my company Inner Circle Films a certain amount of money, I’ll make it happen!’
‘So, what are we paying for, exactly?’
‘Well… you’re going to get all that. River Thames, teleportation, Radio 1…’
‘Yes, but can you give us a breakdown of the money that you’re expecting us to spend?’
‘Well, due to the secretive nature of my magic I can’t go into detail about what it’s for. So, actually, no, I can’t really tell you what I’m spending your money on, no…’
‘Right. Er, right.’
The conversations always went that way, so it was a hard sell. Luckily, this was where my years of experience and hard work paid off. I don’t think UKTV had ever seen a pitch like ours, because we had prepared for this for ten years. We were, if anything, over-prepared. By that point, because we were ready to do it ourselves, and were up for creating a pilot ourselves, we knew everything about the show. I knew what we wanted to do, down to the last detail. I was super-ambitious.
We also had an added incentive to dangle in front of them. ‘By the way, Universal Pictures want to support the project.’ So they’re like, ‘We’ve got this magician who’s on the top of his game, he knows exactly what he wants to do, and he’s already got Universal who want to put money into it, right from the off. This is a no-brainer.’
They gave us the green light. Now we just had to actually make the show.
FINALLY, AFTER YEARS and years, we had a deal. We were ready to sign on the dotted line. I was so excited, so happy, I couldn’t believe it was happening.
We knew if the show didn’t do well, we’d be screwed. If The Art of Astonishment was a flop, it would really impact on us all. Dan and I might never work again. Because of what we wanted to do – walking on the Thames, flying to LA etc., – we were spending so much money that no one else would ever be interested in us if the show wasn’t a hit.
The original title, The Art of Astonishment, which was the title of a magic book by a magician called Paul Harris, also had to be changed. UKTV pointed out that the name was too long for the listings info that you get on your digital box as you’re scrolling down to see what’s on. They wanted something short and snappy, which we understood. Dan suggested Magician Impossible, a name that he’d mentioned to me a while ago. We thought it could work and the channel loved it.
We had a deal and we had a title, but that was just the start. Now we had to actually do what we said we would do. As always, we were making something out of nothing.
No pressure.
WE SET UP a sma
ll office space on Oxford Street and we squeezed everybody in there – director, producer, production crew, runners, the whole lot. After two weeks of preparation, we started shooting. We had a really good team, but no one had ever made a magic show like this, on this scale. There had never been one like it before in this country. All of us went in there pretty much unprepared, pretty much blind, but somehow sort of knowing what we wanted to do.
It was a gruelling seven months. The production period was crazy and the number of things that went wrong was just nuts. One of our crew members got mugged at gunpoint in Miami. My friend and driver from the show, Gilera, wrote off our car on our way to the Snowbombing festival in Mayrhofen, Austria. Then, the first time I tried to walk across the River Thames, disaster struck.
The heavens opened and there was torrential, end-of-the-world rain. I pretty much had my foot on the water, the covert cameras were set up to film, but it was raining so hard that no one was there to watch it. Without the reactions of passers-by, it wouldn’t work. The magic would be lost.
The problem was, not only did we have to pay for an extra day’s filming, but we only had one more day left in the schedule to film. The deadline for series completion was that weekend.
It was disaster after disaster.
But we all loved it – the team spirit kept us together. And thankfully the rain stopped, and the next day we got our shot.
When you make a TV series, there’s pressure from the outset because there are so many external forces to take into account. You have to go out and film the same pieces of magic over and over because there are so many elements that need to go right simultaneously. You have to get a good reaction from the spectators, the camera guys need to capture the magic in the right way, the sound guy has to be happy and not have to stop everything because yet another low-flying plane overhead has disturbed the sound. There are so many different aspects that go into two minutes of screen time.