Channel 4 @ 9pm Monday 25th... Derren Brown

Dave!

Derren Brown's new show about faith healers is on Ch 4 at 9 tonight.

Derren Brown: Miracles for Sale (T) The entertainer investigates the reality behind America's faith-healing phenomenon, and chooses an unsuspecting member of the British public who is prepared to adopt the guise of a pastor. The selected person then tries to perform healing `miracles' in Texas after six months of learning, in an experiment to see whether he will be accepted.

Enjoy...

Dave!

Starting!

antiskeptic

Popcorn at the ready. I see he's plumped for Benny 'the hair' Hinn as illustrative of his subject. It bodes well.

++STOP PRESS ++ STOP PRESS ++

It looks like Derrens plumped for a 'believer in God' to do the dirty deed. Move on all you anti-theists, there's nothing to see here.

Dave!

tis very interesting so far Still another ~1 hr left It's great getting an insight into the production of the show... not the faith-healing part of it, but the behind-the-scenes problems that Derren and Channel 4 have to deal with.

ShooterSF

Small crowd

antiskeptic

Full time score .. 9/10

Not a bad preachette from Pastor James either..

ShooterSF

Good show and he did well not the alienate religious believers watching the show as that wasn't the real issue. Something atheist Ireland has missed the mark on before.

Dave!

ShooterSF wrote: »

Small crowd

Woulda been bigger if they didn't have moral qualms about using the Christian PR company! Still I don't think the plan was to save everyone by putting on the live shows, that was more of a stunt than anything I think. It was probably more about spreading awareness wherever the TV show ends up being shown, at home obviously. But tbh I don't think that most people watching the TV show would have had much time for faith healers anyway.

If they were up for it, it could have been good if they built on that live show and grew the following a bit more by putting on more shows, and then gave them all that message (don't hand over money) at the end. But I think they all had their concerns about misleading people anyway.

The current show could probably have been as effective if they just did the hidden camera stuff, and talked to people who were fúcked over by faith healers, etc. The live part was interesting, but probably didn't serve much purpose.

I found it most interesting to see the behind the scenes stuff, fighting with the preacher, etc!

TheBigLebowski

It's clear what happened here. C4 obviously just picked out somebody who had ACTUAL healing powers from their auditions and got them to do the show. WAKE UP people.

Dave!

What are the odds!

The Mad Hatter

If anyone missed it (like I did), it's on 4od here, now.

Penn

Thought it was a pretty good programme (though not as good as the one he did about psychic mediums). I liked how respectful he was towards peoples faith while exposing these faith beakers as cons.

My only wish was that he actually confronted the guy at the end who did the shoe trick on Derren, even if they had arranged an interview with him so as not to confront him in front of the people in the crowd

Waking-Dreams

It was good to see the ‘Trinity’ group in Texas getting involved with the project because there tends to be a noticeable lack of faithful people taking a proactive role in exposing these hucksters.

kylith

Just watched it now. A good show but part of me was hoping for something with more bite. I would have liked to have seen some faith healers challenged, interviews with people who were conned, things like that. Still a good show though.

MagicMarker

Watching this now, I'm not liking the cringe factor!

Nailz

kylith wrote: »

Just watched it now. A good show but part of me was hoping for something with more bite. I would have liked to have seen some faith healers challenged, interviews with people who were conned, things like that. Still a good show though.

Well in fairness if Derren challenged any of the faith healers in Texas it would have ruined their agenda and they wouldn't have been able to do their show because they would have their (fake) reputation smashed — therefore rederring their work pointless. Derren's shows are awesome though, he's great. I thought it was quite funny that the black faith healer preached homosexuality as a sin with Derren standing two meters away.

Zillah

MagicMarker wrote: »

I'm not liking the cringe factor!

This is a serious problem for me. As soon as they get to Texas I just feel like turning it off.

MagicMarker

Zillah wrote: »

This is a serious problem for me. As soon as they get to Texas I just feel like turning it off.

I turned it off, couldn't watch the last 10 minutes where he was doing the ''revival''.

chin_grin

This is why I don't trust TV anymore (or did I ever?!). This was heavily edited to skew the viewers opinion on "oh isn't this bad, but it's good what we're doing". I agreed with that, but not having the constant will he/won't he battle throughout.

I found the last speech to be very poignant, but again it still reeked of a man saying another mans words (heh.............). Also him revealing his final message to a handful of people gave it some comedic value rather than it's intended attack on healers.

I do like Derren Brown, but I just think it was the stations' meddling that it got edited so it felt more like a Jeremy Kyle show than a documentary.

(*ps hi, just started following this forum.........I'm Agnostic by the by!)

pH

chin_grin wrote: »

(*ps hi, just started following this forum.........I'm Agnostic by the by!)

Do you know you're agnostic or just believe you are?

Dave!

chin_grin wrote: »

This is why I don't trust TV anymore (or did I ever?!). This was heavily edited to skew the viewers opinion on "oh isn't this bad, but it's good what we're doing".

I don't really agree... In this show you could see that Derren, the fake preacher guy, and the production team had to tackle alot of moral conundrums for this show. They had to do stuff along the way that they weren't comfortable with, for what they considered the greater good.

chin_grin wrote: »

(*ps hi, just started following this forum.........I'm Agnostic by the by!)

Welcome!

chin_grin

pH wrote: »

Do you know you're agnostic or just believe you are?

Really................? I post in here and this is the first reply I get? What do I need to prove something to you? Where are the hoops I need to jump through for you?

EDIT:

Dave! wrote: »

I don't really agree... In this show you could see that Derren, the fake preacher guy, and the production team had to tackle alot of moral conundrums for this show. They had to do stuff along the way that they weren't comfortable with, for what they considered the greater good.

Oh, don't get me wrong I did enjoy the documentary as a whole, but just the editing of the "he's having doubts, oh no he's back again" was killing me!

Dave! wrote: »

Welcome!

Thanks!

Nodin

It was rather naive for them to presume that they could declare 'Hey, I'm a fellow believer' and get into the larger churches. They'd be very careful that a visiting preacher was doctrinally compatible (believes in the right Jesus). Even had they pursued the deceit of the Texan intermediary, they would have arrived in much the same position, as eventually he was going to want a certain level of proof that they would not be able to provide.

robindch

Dave! wrote: »

Derren Brown's new show about faith healers is on Ch 4 at 9 tonight.

Anybody seen Kumaré:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865425/
http://www.kumare.org/home/

Along much the same lines -- man sets himself up as a religious guru, acquires a following, then strips off his robes at the end. It's got 8.3 up on imdb.