Magicians - the new breed.

[peter]

In the UK magic shows are undergoing a bit of a renaisance. Fitst we has David Blaine and Derren Brown and recently we have had a crop of new additions the latest of which have been a UK asian guy named 'Dynamo' and an almost vaudeville style escapologist cum showman named Jonathen Goodwin. Now these last two are both really good; really, really good. Goodwin performs acts of daring that literally have you on the edge of your seat [catching knives plunging toward members of the audiance in mid-air, attaching himself by chains to cars falling of precipices with only 30 secs to undo the padlock etc] and 'Dynamo' performs the literally impossible in front of your eyes [one trick was to walk around a UK supermarket with a group of people walking behind him and then disapear from his clothes, which just crumple to the rock solid floor in front of everyones eyes - another was to pour a hundredweight of fish from a randomly chosen bucket in a random spot in a SouthAfrican township, yet another to impail himself on a randomly chosen javelin [right through his guts and out the back] in front of an olympic gold medal winner on a sports track].

Now don't get me wrong - this makes for great viewing, but there's a problem. These guys are just too good. When mind-reader extaordinaire Darren Brown gives his absolute assurance at the start of the show that all the illusions you are about to see are achieved without any pre-contact or with audience members or use of actors, we believe him. But it occures to me that this just be the only trick he is playing. If you don't buy this line - then everything he does from that point onwards is explained away without the slightest problem.

Similarly with Dynamo and Goodwin. On one occasion Goodwin is on a ranch in the USA. He has a 'monkeys fist' leaded rope weight in his hand and we get a big preamble about how, with training and practice, in fact humans are really good at distance judgement. He gets the ranch owner to throw the weight and then guess how far it has travelled - forty or so feet and she guesses six or so out. He now tells her to spin out a distance for him to throw the object. "Sixty feet two and a half inches" she says. He throws the weight the exact distance to the half inch and it's very impressive - unless the film was edited so that her 'guess' [that was in fact made after his throw had been made and measured] was placed before his throw was made. And this is the problem. My step-son who also loves a goog old magician act, was talking about these guys and he said "They've either got to be using actors and editing - or they really are magic." These new breed of performers have overstepped the mark as to what you can do and still leave the element of doubt, crucial to the trick, in peoples minds. These feats could not be performed in front of people who were not 'in on the act' and thus it is only us, the tv audience, who is deing duped - and possibly in the most cynical of ways. If this is indeed how these tricks are done - with editing and pre-prepared 'audiences' then all the magic dissapears in a puff of smoke and the tricks become not even clever in the slightest way. If this is not the case, then these guys are trully.....magic!