I cannot wait for Derren Browns new show, which is a two part show that starts on Friday.
For those who don't know Derren Brown is an illusionist/mentalist who started off with a mind control and magic type show set on the streets with unsuspecting audiences. In recent years his shows have become much bigger and more controversial. He has manipulated people into doing things they believe they are doing for real, such as shoot and kill Stephen Fry, commit armed robbery, land a packed passenger plane and confess to a murder they never commited. He also done a series of live shows where he has predicted the National Lottery, held an obviously fake seance and played Russian Roulette where, infront of live cameras, has pulled the trigger of a gun aimed at his own temple.
His new show sounds like a simply staggering, ambitious attempt where he takes a man who has previously volunteered to be used in a future show of his, whom he describes as having a "lazy sense of entitlement" and aims to give him what he calls a "second chance"....by making him believe the world has ended.
There has been apparently months of preparation, including casting over a hundred actors, for a weekends worth of filming where, due to things like convincing legitimate news reporters to film stories and reports exclusively for the subjects benefit, and a genuine meteor shower that happened in August to firstly plant the seed that the end of the world could really be a possibility and then when he goes to sleep he wakes up two weeks later in the middle of an "actual" apocalypse.
His repertoire of psychological experiments and stunts includes everything from performing Russian roulette live on TV to successfully predicting the National Lottery. But as his projects get bigger and bolder, so does the role played by those taking part.
His next venture is a case in point. He begins a new series of specials with a two-part show, which is a journey into a living nightmare, where the planet has been devastated by a catastrophic meteorite strike, zombies roam the wasteland and he is one of a handful of survivors.
He said: “The show is about taking somebody who basically takes his life for granted, and suffers from that lazy sense of entitlement that many of us do, and giving him a second chance at discovering the value of what he has. So what we do is end the world for him.
“It’s over two episodes, which I’ve never done before. The first part is getting him to believe that this is going to happen, that the world is going to end, or at least has a chance of ending.
“It was based on a seed of truth, because there was a meteor shower around August, so we just used the idea that this shower was masking a much bigger potential collision.
“The end of the world happens. And he wakes seemingly two weeks later in an abandoned military hospital, in a post-apocalyptic world, and goes through a meticulously-crafted horror movie plot. The point of the plot, aside from being exciting to watch, is that it takes him through various lessons that are going to be useful for him, in terms of teaching him things that he needs to know. Are his family still alive? Is he going to get back to them?”
It’s a jaw-dropping concept that involved months of planning, hacking into his phone, controlling his Twitter and news feeds, having TV and radio presenters record special versions of their programmes just for him, and more than 100 actors.