Pushed to the Edge DVD

I have not seen anything about Derren Browns Pushed to the Edge DVD mentioned on boards. But to be honest I do not even know where to look. It could spring board some discussions on philosophy - morality - law - television and more.

For example were the camera shots and angles almost too good? Was this entire DVD staged and scripted and none of it was even remotely real? I suspect it is so - but I suspended my disbelief to watch it on you tube anyway mainly to fill in an hour waiting for all my test code to run in work

Law and morality. I do not know much about law as I have admitted many times in the past. Specifically I do not know how much _intention_ figures in law in - say - the differences between murder - attempted murder - or manslaughter. But in the video we see people actually committing an act intended to be murder. Is there not legal implications in that?

Moral television is an interesting area of discussion too. Were these people effectively tortured mentally for our entertainment? I can not imagine I would have come out of that experience unscarred - even if I was persuaded to go _half_ the distance those people did.

But I also find it interesting to see in action something that has always nagged me - which is that many of our "evil" people or criminals do not start out bad and do bad things - but end up in a horrible place due to a culmination of tiny choices - each of which probably even seem "right" at the time - which led them steadily down a path they could not get out of. And it is interesting to imagine how we might judge those people differently had the events in the DVD been real and we only heard about them in a news paper story after the fact.

Harrowing television though - even if it was scripted and not real. "Entertaining" is not quite the right word for the experience. Even with the "Weekend at Bernies" references they kept working into it.

Ken.

Mod-Moved to the Television forum. Please read the charter before posting.