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Derren Brown Investigates

By Gregon

British mentalist-magician par excellence Derren Brown returns to the small screen this week with a new show, the rather unimaginatively titled Derren Brown Investigates. Over three weeks (starting tonight), Brown will work with and examine the claims of a medium, a ghost-hunter, and a paranormal ‘healer’. Here’s the trailer:

I’m a big Derren Brown fan on many levels – not only is he a great showman, but he seems to be a deep thinker as well – and so I enjoyed reading what appears to be quite an honest and thoughtful blog posting on his website about the series, his stance towards paranormal claims and trickery, and the development of belief systems. Despite being an outspoken skeptic, Brown claims that he has…

…approached these documentaries quite openly: as a magician, and someone steeped in the world of the paranormal, I would love to find something that I can’t explain.

That’s some TV that I would like to see. However, my hopes are not high – on a previous series his promised testing of a remote-viewing ‘expert’ managed to avoid completely every expert I was familiar with (his producers even managed to find a guy named Wayne Carr…). And from the preview of the first show, it seems they once again haven’t gone out of their way to test an expert.

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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5 Comments

  2. Brown is a showman first and
    Brown is a showman first and sceptic second, his bullheaded approach to the paranormal is laughable and like most hardcore sceptics he refuses to study properly the amount of evidence in front of him, why on earth he has to go all the way to America to learn about ghosthunting is beyond me when he has more than enough evidence in his own backyard.
    The whole thing stinks of ratings and celebrity and dressing it up in a pseudo scientific blog to impress the heathens is just part of his trickery.

    Go back to scamming the public with fake sceances and lottery predictions Derren and leave the real investigations to people who have a clue.

  3. Channel 4 again
    Repeating the same pattern as the Dawkins anti-religion programmes … pick the easy targets, suggest that these are truly representative, CONvince the masses.

    Wasn’t it Channel 4 who hustled Dawkins along to confront Sheldrake only to run home again when Sheldrake made the outrageous suggestion of actually taking a look at the evidence?

    On Derren Brown, I sometimes wonder whether he really understands the true nature of the mind games he plays. He tinkers with hypnosis and perception but does he really understand how it all works? Does anyone? For all we know, he might be offering some really good evidence for “the paranormal” while believing it to be well crafted trickery.

    I didn’t watch the show, by the way … was too involved with the politics on the other channels.

    Dave

  4. media
    anything and everything you watch on TV is controlled. I take anything I see with a grain of salt.
    The only truth out there now is what you can filter off the NET. This is why all governments are moving to censor the NET. It’s the last vestige of true reality we have left.
    Naturally they didn’t use “experts”, how are you going to make something look bad if it looks good. Easy, use the worst possible example as being the best.
    99% of the gullable sheeples swallow it up as reality and truth. I was astonded to learn the other day that people actually believed reality TV as being true…..my god!
    I had a friend the other day excitedly describing how that “man against nature” guy was surviving all this freezing weather and eating maggots and crawling in a sheeps carcass to ward off the cold. I looked at him and asked,”what about the camera men”. He looked at me with a dumb look and didn’t know what to say.
    Television is all crap, designed to make you stupid.

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