This was meant to be yet another article about Normal People, but I’ve just come out of a trance and found I’ve written something about Derren Brown.
“Derren Brown!” I scream, shaking my fist at the firmament. He’s always doing stuff like this. Ordinary people try and get on with their daily lives and then they find themselves waylaid by a fake zombie attack or being baffled into committing a crime or writing a review they hadn’t planned.
The first time the commissioners at Channel 4 knew about Derren Brown: 20 Years of Mind Control (Sunday) is probably when watching it last night. They probably thought they’d commissioned a cookery show themed on Normal People.
He has eldritch powers. Think about it – he’s even convinced us that “Derren” is a real name and not a mutated “Darren”. If Derren were a normal man he’d have spent a year hearing people say, “Derren isn’t a real name, Darren,” before slinking off glumly to have it changed to Magicman Sparklepants.
Derren Brown has eldritch powers. Think about it – he's even convinced us that Derren is a real name and not a mutated Darren
This is basically a long clip show in which “Derren” talks us through his career and celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Claire Danes sporadically emerge to talk about how confused he made them once. (The scenes of Danes from Homeland ranting before a wall of crazy string and clues was originally a documentary filmed after Brown had visited.)
Brown doesn’t seem to have aged much since his earlier shows, though his goatee and spiky hair have disappeared and now he is completely hairless like a Sphynx cat or one of the Mitchell brothers. A phantom goatee is implied by the shape of his face and the nefarious nature of his profession.
He also radiates smugness, which is better than hair, and among his gewgaws are a wooden Svengali, a realistic corpse and an evil puppet version of himself. You know, the three things you asked for last Christmas.
There’s some debate at the start of the show about whether Derren is a magician or a hypnotist or an illusionist. He’s definitely a “confuser”. People are left very confused by Derren, and he has funnelled this into a career.
There are professions people look to at time of crisis – “We need a doctor!” they cry. They rarely say, “I feel a little too much clarity about what I’m at. Get me a confuser!”
He clearly has great power, and, like all of his shows, this is somehow compelling and entertaining while also being unsettling and annoying
He has developed his craft over the years. He has moved from being a humble street confuser, confusing stallholders into taking blank paper instead of money and confusing passing rubes by telling them the hidden secrets of their hearts, to big television stunts like confusing an atheist into have a deeply religious experience or confusing an ordinary member of public into committing murder. (The actual death was faked.)
These latter examples are fundamental, self-shaking levels of confusion and have all the pomp and orchestration of show trials. Luckily, Derren has the legal argument available to all reality television: It’s a social experiment. You can use it in court now. It’s like diplomatic immunity.
In this programme, some of his victims tell how enlightening they found having their very sense of self confused for entertainment. I’m not convinced. I’m pretty sure that in the right circumstances I might commit murder (I have a Twitter account after all), but I’d prefer not to get confirmation of that in front of a few million people. Saying, “Thanks to Derren Brown, I now know for sure I’m capable of murder,” does not feel like the start of a happy therapeutic journey.
He clearly has great power, and, like all of his shows, this is somehow compelling and entertaining while also being unsettling and annoying. It probably says something about the optimistic and shallow 1990s in which he came of showbiz age (his first television show was in 2000) that he chose being a television celebrity rather than a stock trader or a member of a shadowy cabal that runs the government.
In the era whence he came, with great power came great frivolity, although give us another decade of pandemics and populism and we’ll be burning him as a witch.
Or not. Now that this is written I fully expect Derren Brown to turn up to my door pulling this review word for word from his pocket and saying, “Is this the review you’ve written?” at which point I will gibber with delight and bafflement and forget, once more, that his real name is Darren.
