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Derren Brown Investigates
Benjie Goodhart
talks to Derren Brown
Derren
Brown seems like a man possessed of mystical powers. But, he’s the first to
point out that his illusions and stunts are simply a cocktail of magic,
suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. Far from portraying
himself as some sort of psychic, he is often at pains to explain the trickery
behind his illusions.
His understanding of the tricks of the trade make Brown the ideal man to explore
the claims of others who work in the field of the paranormal, and in his new
series, Derren Brown Investigates, he does just that. With an open mind and an
expert eye, he examines the work of three men whose work exists in the margins
of science and reality. Here, Derren explains more…
Your new series, Derren Brown Investigates, is taking you in a new direction.
Explain what the series is all about.
The background of it is that I come from a place where I have a fascination of
the whole paranormal idea because I replicate it and immerse myself in it with
what I do. But because I liked to take toys apart when I was little, I prefer to
pull these things apart and find out how they work – particularly when the
public could be potentially exploited or misled. My own work has taken me into
an area where I have knowledge of how things can be faked. So I’m looking at
three practitioners of the paranormal, and what they do. I’m not going in with
any aggressive scepticism, but with a sense that I would love this to be true,
and please show me the evidence that it is. I’m sceptical in the true sense of
the word, as opposed to being cynical, where you’re just not going to listen to
evidence. I’m going in with an open mind.
Each specific programme deals with a different subject. Tell us about each
one.
There are three. There’s a psychic medium from Liverpool, a ghost hunter from
Philadelphia who goes out and deals with hauntings and arranges exorcisms, and
finally there’s a sort of human development course in Holland that uses psychic
development as part of it. It claims to be able to help blind people see through
the development of inner visions. So I went along with a blind lady from England
to see what that was all about. In the first two I’m spending a week with each
individual making the claims, and just being part of their world, and following
them around and talking to them about it. The other one is slightly different,
because it was more of a course that we were attending, and then I’m talking to
the people who are giving the course, and the various characters around it.
Did you genuinely want to encounter stuff that you couldn’t explain?
Oh, completely. I think that’s what you want more than anything when you’re a
magician. If you just set out to disprove then it’s just as blinkered and
pointless as if you insist everything you see is true. You have to have a
genuinely open mind. But extraordinary claims do need extraordinary evidence.
That’s a very important axiom. If I say that the unicorn in the park is a real
unicorn, and everyone else says it’s just a statue, my level of proof that I
come up with to say it’s a real unicorn must be extraordinary. The burden of
proof is on the person making the extraordinary claims. Someone just saying
“Trust me” just isn’t enough. The problem is, when it’s something that you’re
desperate for, when someone comes along and says, for example, I can communicate
with your dead relative, you’re not really in a position to be balancing up the
evidence. If you’re desperate, that’s the last thing you’re going to be thinking
about when someone is saying they can give you what you want.
So, in the case of the medium, if he’s going round telling people what they
want to hear, and he is bringing succour and comfort to them, is there a sense
in which no-one is being hurt and you should just leave them to it?
I don’t want to give too much away about the documentaries, but yes, that was
one of the things I really struggled with. Any form of comfort is comfort, and
hope is hope, regardless of whether it’s false hope or false comfort. So it is
tricky. Having said that, the other side of it is, if the practitioner knows
that what they’re doing isn’t real, does that make a difference? Or do they
themselves absolutely believe they’re doing it for real? Does their motivation
matter? And maybe alot of people go along and feel comforted and maybe don’t
take it that seriously afterwards. But equally there are a lot of people who get
hooked on it and go week after week after week and spend more and more money.
And the medium or psychic or whoever it is, is involving themselves in quite a
profound and intimate level with that person
Is it possible that the practitioners actually believe what they’re doing
themselves?
Yeah. As a sceptic you go in thinking “He’s either absolutely for real or he is
a fake.” But there’s a middle ground, where he isn’t actually talking to the
dead but he completely believes that he is. So the question of what ‘real’ means
becomes a bit more blurred. Spending time with the medium and the people he was
talking to, the concept of ‘real’ became a bit more subtle. You can’t climb into
somebody’s head and know what they’re thinking. All you can do is test it,
design a scientific test and see how well they do with it. That’s the only
answer.
Considering they were going to come under a lot of scrutiny, why do you think
the protagonists decided to take part in the series?
I suppose, ultimately, these guys decided to do it because of the publicity. The
reality is that even if we did a show that completely exposed someone – which
isn’t the point – but even if they took part in a show that did do that, they
would still benefit from it. People get exposed all the time, and it doesn’t
affect their careers at all. There are always people ready to believe.
At the end of each programme, you had to give them your take on what they do.
Was that uncomfortable, or did you relish the opportunity?
Oh, I found it hugely uncomfortable. There are different outcomes to each of the
three documentaries, but it is tricky if you’ve spent a week with somebody and
you’ve got to know them, and got to know their family in some cases, it is
difficult to then call them to account. It’s not about the one individual, it’s
about the field that they stand for. But it’s nice to have that personal element
to the documentary as well. But that meant it was uncomfortable. It varied how
much I wanted to pick up the individual on what I’d seen. In one of the shows, I
don’t do that. I don’t confront them at all at the end. With him it just felt
like “It’s his world, this is how he finds his validity and his sense of self,
and it didn’t seem appropriate for me to have a go at him. In the documentary I
was able to talk about how all these things were working and coming about
without the paranormal explanations, but it didn’t feel right at the end of it
to have a go at that one individual.
Do you think that we should have legislation regarding things like people
making money from acting as, say, a medium?
There is legislation, but I think the reality is it just doesn’t make a
difference. At the end of any medium television show there’s a disclaimer saying
it’s all entertainment. But they go by so quickly it almost doesn’t really
matter. I couldn’t be any clearer in what I do that I’m not psychic, but the
amount of people that still believe that I am is enormous. The emotional impact
is always going to be stronger than the intellectual impact of a disclaimer. I
think one thing that should happen is that churches should have to pay tax. It’s
a huge reason for the way faith healers get away with what they do, and other
bodies that are all about claiming church status, the status of religion, just
as a way of not paying tax. I think that would help solve a lot of the problems.
Having done this series, did you enjoy it, and is it something you’d like to
do more of?
I absolutely loved it and I would love to do more of it. We’ll have to wait
until this one goes out and see what people make of it. I’m sure all the
believers will accuse us of being biased, and using selective editing to make
people look bad. In fact, it tends to be the opposite. So I’m sure people will
say that, but for me it was very important to make these films absolutely
balanced. I was genuinely hoping to see stuff that I couldn’t explain. But I
loved doing this, and I’d love to do more along that vein, and if not, maybe
something else that still inhabits that world.
Derren Brown Investigates is on Channel 4 on Mondays from 10th May at 10pm.
© Channel 4/MagicWeek 2010