Derren Brown : Hero at 30,000 feet

spottyelephant wrote: »

No, I definately agree there. And that's my point - he's incredible at detecting social cues and behavioural psyche, but for a lot of his shows he then wrecks it (for me anyway) by using this person that is either A) an actor, or someone who's mind resides WAY outside of the normal suggestibility or influential boundries, which completely disassociates the whole effort of his piece for me. And i would almost wager that he accentuates these extremities as a ratings thing, which is dissapointing because leveraging his skills without these tactics are, for me, much more interesting.

His live show I was thoroughly impressed with though, because planting actors would have been extremely hard due to his throwing the frisbees (or whatever they were).

In Something Wicked This Way Comes he throws a stuffed monkey, and then gets the audience to throw it. Definitely no staging there.

Yeah, maybe, I've never been able to watch any of his shows and think "yeah, that's 100% an actor." There's been ones where it's crossed my mind, but as I said-- there's very little negative exposure on Derren floating around out there online (other than that scouser medium he had on a few months ago). I think that if he used actors regularly, as in, more often than not, it would've been leaked by now considering he is relatively high-profile in the UK and his field lends itself to the type of people who would look for faults and lies. He's actually got a pretty clean record.

I'm not saying he's never used actors, either, it's likely that he has, but I think a) he's capable of doing it to regular people even if it is an actor used in a show, and b) that someone would've sold out by now and it would be known that he does.

He's been in the business for 10 years and has met a lot of controversy, but always comes out the other side. I think that's quite telling, considering what he does for a living.

I also find it interesting that he does stick to just showbiz, god knows that man could do anything he wanted to. He probably really could control the nation. :P

King Felix wrote: »

I'd love to replace Rupert Murdoch and the likes with him and let him influence the world to do good.

I'd love to see a government consisting of Stephen Fry, Penn & Teller, Derren Brown and, for entertainment, Hunter S. Thompson.

For anyone interested actually there's a pretty interesting Richard Dawkins interview with Derren (well, Dawkins interviews him) up on youtube currently where he gives some insight into cold reading and a variety of other things.