Derren Brown TV review — trickery meets touching storytelling

The illusionist Derren Brown has built a career on manipulating minds, but has also proved adept at melting people’s hearts. In his latest show he combines impish trickery with a sincere post-pandemic meditation on what matters in this “rigged fairground of life”.

For those who didn’t catch the tour or West End run of Derren Brown: Showman, Channel 4 is now airing a recording of a recent London performance. The title refers to PT Barnum, the circus impresario and notorious fraudster who was the subject of the 2017 film The Greatest Showman. “I think you’ll find this show just a little camper,” he jokes. It’s this ability to appear at once playful and unnerving, accessible and enigmatic, that makes Brown a consummate showman himself.

Over 90 minutes he serves up the usual psychological mischief and sly misdirection. Viewers who know Brown primarily for his attention-grabbing TV stunts may find some of the routines involving coins and cards, numbers and names, comparatively quaint, if still largely inexplicable. But often the big pay-off is almost secondary to the craft of the set-up: the disarming storytelling, the rhetorical flourishes, and the careful building and subverting of expectations. It’s one thing to be left feeling dumbfounded, another to feel consistently beguiled along the way.

Watching at home, distanced from Brown’s thrall, it’s easier to feel equally sceptical about his methods. Throughout the show, he pauses to tell digressive anecdotes about his childhood and his awkward relationship with his father. Instinctively we try to suss out where he’s going with all this, what mind games he’s playing. Well, more fool us.

The effect is less spectacular, but more honest and touchingly bittersweet than anticipated. As the philosophical themes and personal stories neatly come together in the final section, we see mouths that had been agape finally close and a few tears begin to stream.

★★★★☆

On Channel 4 on April 23 at 9pm and on All4 thereafter

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter