Nothing Is Impossible: The Real-Life Adventures of a Street Magician (23 page)

In the second series, I taught people, so to speak, how to put the phone inside the bottle. Everyone always asks me about the
phone in the bottle, so I explain how to do it: I borrow someone’s phone, wave it and it shrinks to a miniature version of the phone, and then I can drop it into the bottle. When it’s in the bottle, I shake it, and it grows back to its normal size again inside the bottle, and I pass it back to them. That’s my ‘explanation’.

After series one aired, I really listened to what people were saying – what they liked, what they didn’t, the magic that really enthralled them and the magic that they weren’t so taken by. I’ve tried to play on the talking points and pick the types of magic that everyone really loves.

I get ideas for new magic everywhere. It used to be that I would be inspired on the bus or tube, though I can’t get them so much these days. Nowadays it’s riding around in my car, other times when I’m at the office. I won’t lie; the toilet is often a good place of inspiration for me too. The best way, though, is usually through chatting to random strangers. For some reason, people talk to me and finding out what people like gives me inspiration. I used to put coins into bottles, and then one night, some guy goes, ‘Do that with my phone.’ I was like, ‘OK,’ and I put his phone in a bottle. It’s been one of the most talked-about things I’ve ever done. A fan gave me a fantastic idea recently. He told me the best thing I’ve heard in a long time and it’s something that I’m working on as I write.

One thing that I try to do to stand out and progress is to embrace popular culture and modern technology. I took my magic to the DVD format, then to MySpace and from there to YouTube and Twitter. I was the first person to perform magic over Twitter, which I got Snoop Dogg involved in. I guessed which card he was thinking of. I guessed the three of diamonds correctly, otherwise that would have been embarrassing, with our combined ten million followers. Similarly, it was important for me to have an app for
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
while the show was on air. It’s about embracing the ever-changing world that we live in.
For me, it’s essential for both forming ideas and keeping my content fresh. If you don’t keep up, you get left behind.

SINCE I WAS
a teenager, I’ve studied the art of magic. The thoughts and theories have changed a lot over the last few years. Some people don’t believe that magic can be simplified. They think it’s much more of a fluid thing. There are many different types of magic.

You’ve got ‘appearance’, which is making things appear. One of my favourite moments from the second series was the scene in episode one with my nan. I did her crossword for her in about two seconds – I made the words appear in a flash. As usual she wasn’t impressed. ‘Oh yeah, I see,’ she nodded nonchalantly. One of these days I’ll do something that will really impress her!

‘Disappearance’ is obviously the opposite. You’ve seen me make coins disappear and reappear all over the place. In the second series, I even made myself disappear after a crowded event at an HMV store, leaving just a pile of clothes behind.

‘Penetration’ is passing one object through another. For example, when I push someone’s phone into a beer bottle. Another example is when I walked through glass in front of Rio Ferdinand. I penetrated through the glass and appeared on the other side of the window.

‘Transposition’ occurs when two things change places. This might happen when I, for example, take Coca-Cola and swap it with Sprite. This goes right back to the first magic trick Gramps showed me where you make red and green matches switch boxes.

The magic that has made a lot of headlines are my predictions. There was the thing I did with the Euro 2012 bet, but I’ve also used this when predicting the news on Scott Mills’s Radio 1 show.
I went to the Radio 1 studios a few days before with a locked and sealed safety-deposit box. I gave it to Scott and told him not to open it or try to tamper with it in any way. Two days later, I returned to the studios and live on Scott’s show I asked him to go through the pile of newspapers that were in the studio. I asked him to pick one and choose a positive, uplifting story that he felt compelled to read on air. He chose the
Metro
from that day (20 July 2011) and, after rifling through the paper, he finally picked out a story about a record-breaking mountaineer who had scaled Everest three times. ‘We’ve a lot to be proud of,’ read the headline.

At that moment, I announced that I had somewhere to go and I took off, leaving him with the key to the box. After I left, Scott opened the safe and inside was a sketch, drawn by me all those days before. It was of the very same story he had chosen and I’d drawn it as it was laid out on the newspaper page. I’d written the headline ‘A lot to be proud of’ and sketched the mountaineer in his red jacket with his ski goggles on his head and so on. Scott and his team were dumbfounded.

I’ve always done predictions with my friends just for fun. We’d make a little wager on things and over the years I got quite good at it. I have quite a sharp memory, so I use memory and mathematics to think, ‘
OK, this is going to be the outcome of this event
.’

It is risky doing predictions because once you commit to it, you can’t change your mind. Lots of times, my magic doesn’t always work out how I had envisaged it in my head, but I can easily freestyle my way out of it. I have so many ideas to hand; I rarely know what I’m going to do at a gig anyway. Lots of times I use props on the spot or even create new magic as I go along.

With predictions, however, there’s no freestyling your way out of trouble. I don’t really like creating too much hype either. I prefer to let the magic be strong enough on its own, and then the hype comes anyway. But with predictions, the minute you leave an envelope with someone and say, ‘All right, that’s the prediction in there, open it in a week,’ then you have expectation building for a whole week. If they open the envelope and the prediction is wrong then you’re left standing there looking ridiculous.

I’ve only really done two major predictions in my life: the newspaper article sketch on Scott Mills’s radio show and the Euro 2012 accumulator bet.

For me, predictions are more nerve-racking than walking on water, but the predictions I’ve done have gone amazingly well. I think they add to the legacy I’m trying to create and they fit in with my style. I would never do something that’s not me just because it’s an impressive piece of magic. I’m very careful that I am consistent in who I am and what I do.

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK
me why I think the first series of
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
was such a success. I’ve thought about it quite a lot.

One difference with the show, and this is a really important thing, was that we didn’t want to pre-promote what I was going to do. Every other magic show announces its intentions: ‘I’m going to do this; you’re going to be amazed.’ And when you do that, you build expectations.

With the River Thames, we didn’t tell anybody what was happening. I went down to the river at 9.30 p.m. and just started walking. The bystanders who were there were people who just happened to be walking past. We didn’t advertise or promote it; we just did it.

A few days later, pictures of me standing in the middle of the river in my bright red jacket started to emerge online. Within an hour, it had gone global, with the story cropping up in Australia, India, Germany and South Africa. I watched it spread around the world overnight. People could feel the authenticity, so we got people’s interests piqued straight away. It was mad seeing news articles come up online in languages from countries I’d never even been to.

Television has lost a key demographic; generally speaking, it has lost its young audience. Because the whole industry is fragmented, there are far fewer people watching each television channel, there is far more competition, advertising space is worth less, and I think because of that, the quality has been pushed down. The cost of making television programmes is high, so they’re obviously very careful about what decisions they make, but some are not in tune with current trends. No one wants to take a risk on the unknown and unproven.

So I think that the other, really pertinent reason for the success of
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
was that we were making a show that was relevant. Yes, it’s a magic show, but the music we were choosing, the people who were in it, the places we were going to and my own story was relevant to people in my age group. I was talking to my peers in a way that they could understand and relate to, and in a way that no other show was really doing.

Not only that, we weren’t producing it on the cheap. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, here’s a little niche thing for you guys.’ This was a proper, big-budget TV series that felt like a movie. I said from the outset that I wanted to give people something of real value; that for me is always the starting point. The amazing thing is, as I think
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
has shown, once you create a show that has that quality and that detail, then you stand a good chance. We really put ourselves on the line, because we could have lost a fortune by approaching it that way.

There was nothing else like
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
on television. Because of the way programmes are commissioned, we were lucky we got through the door – there are many brilliant people out there who could be doing similar things, but they aren’t able to get their first break.

As soon as people saw that
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
was a hit, every channel that had turned us down in the past started to come back. But I didn’t want to seem like I was just jumping ship. ‘Thanks for the money, thanks for believing in me, thanks for everything, but I’m off to a terrestrial channel.’

I didn’t want to give the impression I was selling out. I had formed a good relationship with UKTV, and I had also been granted a certain amount of creative freedom. We also realised that we were by far the biggest thing on that channel. We were
The X Factor
or
Big Brother
of UKTV. And that’s a very rare position to find yourself in. If I had gone to a bigger channel, I’d be right down the pecking order. I would rather be at the top of that chain than further down it.

The second series of
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
was an even greater success; our viewing figures hit the 2.1 million mark, becoming Watch’s biggest-ever television show and the third most-watched show in its time slot – including the terrestrial channels.

Now, of course, when you get a big hit like ours then suddenly you find that everyone else starts trying to replicate its success by commissioning magic shows. But what they don’t realise is that it’s not a gimmick. It’s not just about having somebody who’s kind of cool doing magic. It’s about the ten, fifteen years of work that I put in to really understand my craft. It’s about the thought behind it; it’s the story behind it. You can’t just fake it.

I hope now that TV production companies might change their approach to making programmes a little bit. It might actually
open the door to other new talent, because it’s a shame that television can be so conservative.