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I didn’t watch Derren Brown playing Russian roulette ‘live’ on TV the other night. The moment I read it would be delayed by a few seconds so the Channel 4 top bods could pull the plug if something went wrong it all seemed a bit … well … pointless.

I didn’t actually want to see a man blow his brains out on live TV, of course, but if you know it’s not going to happen then it wouldn’t be any more exciting that watching a man do the same with a toy gun.

Or blanks.

Which of course he did. After all the congratulatory media coverage following the event, police on Jersey, where it was filmed, have revealed that there was no live amunition used at any time. According to quotes from Lenny Harper, Detective Chief Officer for the States of Jersey police on Sky News:

A prop company brought a number of props to the island and they included a quantity of blank ammunition. There is absolutely no way that the State of Jersey police would allow anybody to put themselves at risk and shoot themselves dead… This programme was made by a TV company very experienced in pyrotechnics, in making smoke and bullet holes appear. It was no different to film which uses special effects.

But according to a story on The Guardian:

At the launch of the show last week Brown claimed the stunt would involve a “real gun with a real bullet and a real head”.

So perhaps it was a real gun and a real head, but does a blank constitute a real bullet? Brown’s spokespeople seem to see very little difference between live and blank amunition:

A spokesman for Brown declined to comment but said if the illusionist had fired a blank round into his head “he would have died anyway”. (Source: Sky)

So if a blank would have killed him anyway, why not just use real amunition? And if a blank would have killed him anyway, how can the police have let it go ahead while maintaining that they would never have allowed anyone to knowingly kill themselves?

Somehow I feel cheated - even though I didn’t watch - and I can’t really work out why. After all, we know magic is not real. Rabbits don’t really appear from hats. Mind readers can’t really see which card you are thinking of, and magicians don’t really saw ladies in half in glittering boxes.

But then this wasn’t put across as being magic, was it. It was ‘mind reading’, and I suspect that that subtle difference may have done him more harm than good. If it was called magic we would have expected some trickery and slight of hand. But this was not, and we didn’t.

I, for one, certainly won’t be watching any of his future shows after this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2003 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.