Thankfully Derren has also opened a west end run of this show this time, and the Home Counties Magical Society hopefully will have some interesting news about that event in the next few days.

Last year Derren didn’t do a run in Reading (possibly to do with the Reading crowd managing to, lets say deviate most of the effects from their intended outcome year!!) but thankfully he’d decided to give them another chance and return to the Hexagon this year. We had back of the flat stalls, center tickets, a very good view point. I think one of the nice things about Derren Brown shows is that the tickets are very reasonably priced (unless you pay the £200 odd on ebay!!) and the programs are a fair price at £5.. anyhow… On entering the theatre I instantly spotted a Malloy Master Prediction box hanging above the stage, that was quite exciting in itself, since I’ve been wondering how it worked (now I know!). The stage was set in the guise of a Victorian front parlour, think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, seances, mediumship and mystery, fitting the show very well

Before I go further, I should warn you there are some spoilers in this review, so.. if you’re lucky enough to have tickets to the remaining sell out shows.. go away.. come back after the shows run is over.. You’ll just enjoy it more…

The first few minutes of the show is a nice introduction via a projection screen, working round the idea of focus, and not noticing things outside your normal area of vision something thats come back to a number of times in the show.. It also introduces the box hanging from the top of the stage in full view.. This box… obviously is very important..

Derren starts the show with some wonderful effects, again his normal style of mind reading, as always executed without flaw (or.. where it is flawed, it’s flawed for a reason!!). these consisted of the game of Twenty Questions where he correctly ‘guessed’ at six audience members thought of objects, those on stage really looked totally baffled as to how he did it, in fact Derren did the ‘just think of the answers and dont say them’ method on the last person, which confused them even more!! This section was really nicely put together, and showed a slight change from the previous shows in that Derren was predicting what we were thinking of, as opposed to influencing us at the time, so six spectators down, on with more effects..

There was an excellent bank note serial prediction, the numbers obtained from a phonecall to a spectators son, which seemed to go wrong, ending up with the telephoned person having unknowingly predicted the banknote serial number.. To be honest I think this is the main effect from the show that stays with me. The serial number is, as far as I can see genuine, and I have no idea on the method for it, making it a lovely effect.

I think theres a few other things that stood out in my mind as excellent effects, the Question and Answer session at the end (a classic Victorian mental effect he described as ‘The Oracle Act’) was in my opinion perfection.. he executed it flawlessly (although some people say it was a little long taking up the entire second half) and I watched trying to track the various methods at work.. Derren in a nutshell asked audience members in the break to place questions in sealed envelopes into a glass bowl on stage, placing only their initials and row numbers on the outside.

He then picked envelopes, correctly guessing at things like names, or ages or sexes of the people that wrote the question. Once the person was found, they stood, and he started to answer their question, and in a lot of cases started to tell them more details about them, their lifes, illnesses and other personal or secret information that to all the audiences view, he wouldn’t know. I have to say this was probably one of the best executed Q&A’s I’ve seen.

Moving on from divining the questions in the envelopes, he started to pick up questions people were merely thought of, objects in pockets, personal items people were thinking about, and other seemingly impossible things. I can only imagine how amazing and gob smacking this must have been to non-magicians, this was also done blindfolded.

The show ended with the revelation of the box, containing a complete prediction of the outcome of a number of effects in the show, the thought of objects, the hobby of a spectators son who came on stage, and the description of the volunteer who came up at the end to open the box.

However you look at the show and the effects, there are two views… the views of the people around me that genuinely believe that Derren has ‘something‘ which means he can in some way read minds, or reactions, body language or predict things, and the magic view; that this is magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship, mainly showmanship, and flawless showmanship at that..

In either case, you cannot think anything else than.. Bloody hell thats clever..

I went back to the stage doors after the show, my copies of Pure Effect and Absolute Magic, (thankfully ones I brought when they were in print for Twenty odd pounds, and not the ones from eBay at up to £200 plus), were still unsigned and I wanted to see if he’d be so kind as to sign them. I’d been up in London at Tabula Mentis III during the day, and had a long chat with David Berglas before I’d left. He’d given me a message for Derren, so I was on a double mission.

After a brief wait, Derren came out, and was very friendly. He took time out to go over to a camper van to talk with a disabled audience member, and after the crowd had cleared we had a wonderful chat about the show, the message from David and even talked about Tabula Mentis. Books signed we headed off with a friendly wave from Derren and a shout of ‘thanks for coming’.

Of course if you’ve read down to here.. and you’ve off to see the show, and you didn’t heed my warning of spoilers.. you’ll still enjoy the show, since I’ve not listed everything that happens..

I also forgot to say how much the poster (Illustrated by Kerry Donovan) reminded me of the Thurston and Ask Alexander posters from their careers;

A thoroughly wonderful show, as always with Derren. It was an excellent evening, and well worth the money I highly recommended going if you can still get tickets.

There’s no arguing that Derren Brown has brought the art of mentalism screaming back into public view over the last few years, with a number of hugely successful TV series behind him, The psychological illusionist has amazed, confused, entertained and in some cases shocked the public with his abilities to mix magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship to create something very clever and unique in todays entertainment world.

The System which aired last night on Channel 4, was the latest of the hour long specials, joining previous specials such as Messiah, The Gathering, The Heist, Seance, Russian Roulette, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. In The System Derren plants the seeds that probably everyone wants to believe in, that there is a sure fire, guaranteed way to predict the outcome of horse races, and win every single time.

The show was fairly enjoyable, from a pure ‘magic’ point of view there was very little in there except for one section involving a nice prediction, given most have probably already already seen the show, this involved four people shuffling and taking a large envelope, then freely choosing photos from about 500, they then selected a order in which to stand (each of them having a number stick to their chests). Derren correctly predicted the order they would stand in (ala a chair prediction), then pointed out the initials of the name on each of the polaroid photos matched the initials of the person that selected it, and also matched a photo in that each one of them held in the envelope they were holding (a nice double kicker prediction). Then explaining the odds of this happening, he revealed that the odds (14 billion odd to 1) were also listed on the back of the photo (each photo of the four making up 3 digits of the 12 digit number).

The rest of the show was purely then around the journey of one woman, who, receiving anonymous race tips from Derren, moved from merely confirming that the horses won, through placing small bets, to finally placing £4,000 on the final race.

To be honest, although the show was good, an excellent concept, it left me slightly flat, from the outset it was fairly obvious what The System was, and how it worked. The ability to predict 6 races without failure, from one viewpoint is simple, and Derren explains this at the end of the show.

Given that his ’system’ is explained, I don’t see a problem talking about it here.. however, if you’ve not see the show, you may want to stop reading now..

The system is very straightforward, based around the simple idea of ‘if you do something often enough, it’s bound to come out in the end’. This was shown to be true very early in the show, where a coin was tossed repeatedly, each toss coming up heads ten times in a row. Now basically if you tried this, you end up not succeeding.

However Derren explained, and showed towards the end of the show, that actually if you tossed a coin repeatedly, over and over, for as in this case over nine hours, you would given the odds, end up with a successful run of 10 heads in a row eventually.

So, how does that relate to correctly predicting the outcome of 6 horse races? Well, again, in the show Derren explained the process they used to get the film of one person winning all 6 races with the predictions they gave them. Objective productions had almost 8,000 people that applied for the show. Those 8,000 were divided into lets say 5 groups.

Each one of those groups was assigned a different horse within that same race, for instance, in the first race predicted, group one, got horse one, group two, horse two and so on… One horse in that race had to win, so for the group that had been assigned that horse, the tip was correct. For the other groups, they lost, and it was explained to them that the system obviously didn’t work. They then went away blissfully unaware of the others taking part.

The people in the winning group, were then divided again, into separate groups for the next race, each group again, getting a different horse. Just as before, one group would have come up trumps by receiving the correct winning horse, the others, would have been told the system had flaws and gone away thinking nothing of it. This continued for each of the groups, until finally six people remained.

Each of these six were filmed at the penultimate race, believing that they were the only person taking part in this, as did the viewer, not knowing about the cover all your options method being employed. Of those six people, one would again win..

The final kicker here is that Derren invited this last person to bet a sizable amount of money on the final race. The single mother of two scraped up over £4,000 (ironically she actually borrowed £1,000 from her father and the rest from a loan company!) to place on the final race, but it was only after Derren placed the bet on the horse, did he reveal true method of The System to her, basically admitting that this wasn’t any sort of system, but pure logic in that you can cover all options with enough outlay…

..The horse didn’t win, but with a final twist in the tale, Derren asked her to look at the ticket, to reveal that he’d changed his mind at the last moment to a different horse, the winner, netting her over £13,000 of winnings.

As to how he did actually correctly predict the final horse… well that’s the secret that wasn’t explained and obviously isn’t going to be discussed here..

The show itself was a different turn from previous shows, very little suggestion or mentalism as such (unless you count the section with the photographs), it was more about how we perceive things, and how a single view of something (without all the facts) can distort, and provide us with the belief that something is possible (the prediction of all the races without fail) when, in fact, it is not..

Derren Brown can be seen on tour starting 26th February 2008