PC503 Ideas and Opinions Blog

Radio/TV

Derren Brown's prog Remotecontrol
I wrote this for the comments section of Derrens blog, I tried to post it twice but the moderator wouldn't post it another discussion
- Talking of people believing the media.. the Gameshow wasn't as good as normal.
- I seem to be in a tiny minority who wasn't taken in. It's telly for God's sake and telly has so much fakeness it almost never gives us a true picture of the world People believed the prog which ended with an innocent member of the public getting run over was real and lots on Twitter thought it was live
- didn't think it worked, lame compared to normal DB. Telly isn't real life so I watched never with the thought "this is true", nor "this is false" but rather accepting "I don't know".
- The prog was supposed to show how when anonymous the mob become nasty, but it wasn't like the Standford expt. The audience didn't come up with evil ideas & become a beying evil mob, they were led with questions : obvious the "nasty answer" was the most interesting; Ooh a guy gets run over on live TV maybe yes, maybe no, it didn't upset me. "Smash up the TV ". This is the first time with DB I thought "stooge", et voila the producer had gloves and safety goggles with him.."fix" I say. (Derren posted emphatically on his blog, there are no stooges and evrything he says has to go by the C4 lawyers) They could have told him to find his stash of porn or something. So after that I was leaning towards not believing.
- At the beginning DB says "Everything you will see for the next 50 minutes is unfaked" so maybe after 50 minutes the fakery started ?
- Strangely after the show I did have a strange feeling of everything being fake on TV and there being no reality, but that is the truth 90% is distorted or fake and only 10% true..
- 2 sociologists comment, seems they took it way too seriously

The 3rd show was Guilt trip

- A guy was manipulated into walking into police station & confessing to a murder which hadn't happened. I couldn't see any fault. At the end Derren is seen panicking cos the subject has left the building..however the subject is then shown to be in the village police station, however since this was actually part of the pub rigged up with cameras so Derren's panic was acting.

background on DB wikipedia

- The 4th prog was about Luck - He set up a fake legend a village dog sculpture brought luck, convinced a bloke who was unlucky that he wasn't take opportunities then he stafed a show where people could bet as much as they wanted on the throw of a dice .. That guy put up the most money.. and DB amazingly fixed it so that the dice came up on the right number. - Did you figure out how he did it ? get a dice to land on a predicted number ... clever, but stupidly simple

Derren

- We by are deceived by others and ourselves all the time. So the point is not to explain every trick everytime, but to instill in the audience a skill in thinking that & to learn to look at things from alternative angles & not take everything at face value. When things seem magic, whether it's electricity, voodoo, psychic etc, they are not really magic.

- Like most tricks there are different ways of doing it, you don't need to weight the dice or use magnets. He probably did this trick the first time in the schoolyard but this time as ever DB's team had excellent presentation.

- opportunities take them, but you make your own bad luck as well as good luck. It wasn't a LUCKY show for TV psychic Sally Morgan she took the opportunity to be on TV to get extra publicity .she was shown arriving saying she could feel the spirit of the owner etc. ..The DB team cleverly doing simply what Merseyside skeptics had been trying so hard to do ..incidently DB's blog today "Sally Morgan, yes by coincidence I met her, I think it was a long time ago" .

.. that's the second time she has been busted recently. Paul Zenon on 'This Morning', ITV1 on Tuesday 27th September told us where to find the video of her on Youtube coming offstage and taking off her earpiece ..Zennon said always record a psychic session and you can see when they get it wrong

- I was under the impression that DB is only the front man for a team of magicians after I heard one of them on the radio. Andy Nyman is credited as the non performing co-writer

- Amazing story of Randi running a 4 project which destroyed American parapsychology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha

Keith Barry
- Another mentalist on Quest Thursday and Saturday. Works in a similar way to Derren, claiming to use clever ind reading techniques, but probably often using simple magic tricks ... interesting, but not as good as Derren

- The interrogation bit was good.. He told the thieves they could lie or tell the truth ..He asked the same question again and could so work out when they were lying

- There are 4 blogs ... travel and then I eventually edit and filter off material into
Current 503 Ideas and Opinions Blog, ideas index 2, Irrational World Blog

TUNISIA TRAVEL BLOG PAGE .. TRAVEL INDEX ..Old ESSAY INDEX
<-- PREVIOUS PC HOME OPINION BLOG INDEX
note/comments
 NEXT -->