Earlier this year, Roushan Alam caught up with TV mind-master Derren Brown whilst he was performing at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Roushan asked Derren questions about his life, latest work and future plans in a rare and exclusive interview. You can listen to the five parts of the intervew here, or simply read the transcript at your leisure.

Remember to tune in to the next episode of "The All New Roushan Alam Show" this Wednesday, 7th October, between 5pm and 7pm. Listen online at ICRadio.com.

Part 1

RA: Derren thank you very much for inviting us backstage.

DB: A pleasure, hope you like my dressing room?

Yeah. Lovely dressing room. Do you have any outrageous demands when you're on tour? What do you like on your rider?

Um, do you know I don't even know what's on my rider? When I'm on tour I do ask for some water ? if they don't mind ? because that's sort of quite important to have a lot of water. And that's it. I realise that there is actually a request for orange juice as well but I just give that to my roadies. But I'm afraid, no white lilies or any weird, weird J-Lo stuff.

I'm slightly disappointed by that because in my mind I wanted you to be flamboyant and extravagant, you know?

Well no, there is very little room for that on touring really. I think a lot of those things generally, those stories you hear, are created by the press people around the star in question; I don't think they really go on very much. And if they do I guess a lot of it, if you're surrounded by a bit of an entourage and are surrounded by people that are constantly telling you that you're very special, then I suppose you could start to go a little bit nab but I think that they're generally created. You know, you could get one person who sort of asks for one thing somewhere or could we maybe get some flowers because we've got some people coming over or something like that happens once and then suddenly its a big myth. So I'm a bit of sceptical of those sorts of things.

Fair play. You famously start off your shows by saying that you combine magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship, making what you do quite hard to define. Now imagine you're at a dinner party and someone asks you, ?Derren what do you do for a living?". What do you tell them?

Ummm, that I edit the Funday Times! That's what I used to say because it's one of those things that is difficult to say anyway. I was having a conversation today with someone who didn't't know me at all and was asking exactly what it is that I did and its difficult to say so I normally try and avoid it because the other thing is, of course, for years now I've been doing (since I was 20 and I'm 38 now)...

...you don't look a day over 21...

...bless you. But its 18 years of having the same conversation each time. With most jobs people say "oh, right OK" whereas With what I do generally people want to know a little bit more because it sounds intriguing. So over the years, unfortunately - without sounding churlish, I've developed a dread of people asking that question because its not only difficult to answer, but...

...my advice would be to say that you work in IT because then no one ever has any further questions...

Yeah. I'll take that from you.

Right, lets go back to the beginning.

The beginning?

Laughs. The second language! The start for you. Where did the interest come for you? Where did it start and where did it go from there?

I was at university at Bristol - I was studying law and German - and there was a hypnotist performing at the Students' Union and I went down to see it. I happened to see a poster for it, went to go see it with a few friends and then that was it. It call kind of changed. His name was "Martin Taylor" and it was a very good show. It wasn't your sort of image of people dancing around and taking their clothes off. It was actually intelligently done and he had questions and answers and stuff afterwards and I was just, er, it was amazing. I sort of got a sense of what it was and how it was working and just was so intrigued by it. I basically borrowed and stole every book that I could find on the subject and spent my first year practicing it and had any number of students wanting to be guinea pigs. Then I got into doing close-up magic: card tricks and so on. Then actually it was magic that I earnt my living from after I graduated - I didn't want to be a lawyer or a German, it turned out - so I was doing the magic for years and hypnosis sometimes but what I wanted to do was combine the two into some sort of kind of psychological thing. I realised that the best sorts of magic tricks were the things where it was people's minds that were being read, rather than just cards disappearing out of sight. I just veered more and more towards that and tried to learn some of the psychological things I'd learnt from hypnosis and turned it into what I'm doing now... whatever its called.

Having gained an interest in what I'll call an art form, how did you then decide that this was how you were going to present yourself or that this was how you were going to perform, compared to say a lot of other people who are arguably in the same field as you? What was the thought process behind that?

I think, unlike being a comedian or something where there's a lot of people already doing it, one of the advantages of it - I think if I was just a straight-forward magician it'd be a similar problem - I think that because there's not already a lot of people doing it, although there's more now, when I first did this I started doing TV and there were four people in the country doing anything remotely like what I do. Now there's considered quite a lot more because a lot of young magicians are going down that route a lot more rather than traditional magic, which is indeed very flattering. But there weren't many role-models so I think you just sort of do what you... It has to come from inside you though. The personality when you perform has to be you, it has to be yourself but just theatrically tweaked so its a bit easier to grasp and a bit more interesting, I suppose, than you normally are. And then the style just came from what I felt would be the best way of doing it. I didn't want to pretend to be psychic, I didn't want to make people believe in all of that... It just sort of found itself, probably over the first couple of years.

When you do your TV shows now or you write a stage show now, what becomes your priority? Is it to demonstrate the techniques that you use or is it more to entertain? Is there some sort of a balance there or...?

Yeah. It's always about the hook. It's always about finding a plot, an idea, which you use... which people can describe as a single sentence and is really interesting. So, like "The Heist" for example, you know? It's about getting people to commit what they thought was an armed robbery... or somebody wakes up in the street and sees themself in a car crash. They're always things that feel short, sharp and you get it very early... what it is. And that is very important. And then after that's it's "how on Earth am I going to do that? How am I going to make that work? What tools would I have to use? Because there's only a limited number of tools and devices, I guess, that I'm using and it's about finding more and more ways of doing them or presenting them. So it's always about the hook, first of all.

Part 2

RA: This is IC radio and I am backstage with Derren Brown at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Now Derren a lot of your earlier work was controversial. For example the Russian roulette, which attracted a lot of complaints and criticism from the public. Does that ever phase you in terms of what you're trying or what you're trying to achieve?

DB: No, the Russian roulette was definitely designed as a publicity stunt. It was designed to attract a lot of attention to myself. After that, that's never been the kind of "aim". I think what's happened since then is I've just kind of found things that I've found interesting or important and that would be dramatic and that would be watchable. And sometimes that's involved a bit of controversy, but it's never been about controversy. The Russian roulette was the only thing designed to make headlines.

RAThe year after that was the séance. As if you hadn't had enough, that attracted something like 700 complaints, didn't it?

Yeah which at the time made it, I mean - this was before the Jerry Springer thing - at the time it was the most complained about show in TV history. It was only about 700 complaints or something, which is not a lot, whereas the Russian roulette got, you know, 20 or something.

Is that slightly disconcerting? Given that more people were worried about you waking the dead than putting a bullet in your head?

Yeah, it was interesting because the complaints... maybe it was a bit more for Russian Roulette... I think that all but about 20 of the complaints for the séance were made before the show went out. So it was people's anticipation about what it was going to be. It was quite interesting. It was either Spiritualists who were just concerned that I was going to make a mockery out of their religion, or it was Christians saying that I shouldn't be seriously contacting the dead because it could be dangerous and all the rest of it. So it was both sides, one saying that I was going to be trivialising it and the other saying that it was very dangerous - but all before the show went out.

Which I suppose is a bit hasty for one of your TV shows given that you tend to have one final card to play up your sleeve.

Yeah as it turned out there was that. I sort of made it clear at the end of it that it wasn't a real séance, but I suppose that was early days and that people didn't know quite where I was going to go with it.

Part 3

RA: I mean, you yourself have often been described as a sceptic. You're sceptical of things like psychics and spiritual healers ? yet at the same time you have your own sceptics. How do you respond to that and I guess how does that work, because it's a bizarre concept?

DB: Um, I think, it's one of the reasons I like doing this live and in theatre. Most of the scepticism comes, understandably, if you watch anything on television that seems impossible to explain - the very fact that you're seeing a picture with a frame around it so that you know there's things that you can't see - there's being a little image in the corner of your room, which is how you represent things to youself - small images far away and things are not certain - it's very different seeing something live and up-close in a theatre. So, um, I think that short of just assuring people, as I always have done in the shows, that I'm not just using stooges. I couldn't have gotten away with that for 10 years, and equally what you see isn't just something that's created in an edit suite because I definitely wouldn't have gotten away with that either, because otherwise all of those people of the years would've been watching it and going, "well that's not what happened when they filmed it". On the other hand, that scepticism I understand. That's just the nature of doing anything on television, so there'll always be a bit of that. And then there's a bit of scepticism from people that slightly misunderstand what I do or they think that I...

As in your purpose and objectives?

Yeah. You know, they think that I am psychic and that they don't believe in any of that. But, well, I don't believe in it either. That's kind of the point!

I suppose that is in keeping with your principle of sort of coming out and saying "I don't have any psychic abilities yet I can do what they do at the same time"?

Yeah, absolutely.

I guess your point is that they're fake then?

Yeah! My thing is that I don't believe in any of that. I think that how you handle your disbelief is a different matter. You can aggressively debunk things, but I think that the trouble with debunking, for instance, is that it's not very entertaining and it's a bit witless and negative, and therefore you can become very embittered if you become one of those people that just lives to debunk the psychics and it's not necessarily that interesting to watch. So what I have always tried to do is incorporate that into what I do so there is a sort of agenda there - a subtext of kind of making people think more about those things - not just accepting...

Like questioning what we see as opposed to...

Yeah, its questioning and it does come from a very sceptical stand-point but I've tried not to make that the be-all and end-all of it because it's not all that entertaining. And the thing is that if you went to see a psychic who told you everything about yourself or you watched a psychic bend a spoon or something and I told you, "well here's how they do it. Here are the tricks they use", that's not going to make you not believe in the experience you've had. That's going to make you go "well that's how other psychics do it, but certainly not how the psychic that I saw do it" because you've kind of committed to it - believed in it - and it's something you've taken on board. Particularly if they were telling you about yourself. You'd feel foolish to go "oh, right... it must be rubbish". So simply spelling out how people do these things doesn't make them go away or stop people believing so I just think there are more creative ways of doing it.

Which is what you're famous for. I suppose the question that is burning most in my head now and the question that you're least likely to answer and, I imagine, that everyone listening will be asking is just how do you do it? I imagine you get asked this all the time - alongside "what am I thinking?".

That and going into shops and I'll ask "how much is this?" and they say "well you should be able to tell me". There are certain things that keep coming back at you. There's no on answer. The whole thing of saying, you know, its a mixture of magic, suggestions, psychology, mis-direction and showmanship - you've got them written there? I think that's it?

Yeah. Magic, suggestion, psychology, mis-direction and showmanship.

Thank you very much, haven't said it for a long time... it's that that is sort of the answer. You know, some things I do are relying on suggestion. Some things are like conjuring tricks. Some things are a bit of both. Some things are sort of, hypnosis... I mean, it's not that I've just got one thing that I do. I was just a hypnotist then maybe that would be easy to answer. I could explain to you how hypnosis works. Some things involve particular personalities. Some things depend upon people being very open and suggestible. Some things, if somebody is challenging me then that makes them easier. Sometimes it's nothing to do with what the person's like... It's more like a mechanical trigger. So it's difficult to answer, but not because I'm coy about it. I mean, I don't like explaining in detail how a particular thing works because it just takes the joy out of it. It's because there is no one thing, its lots of different skills that I have just brought together over the years.

Part 4

RA: What does Derren Brown do in his spare time?

DB: Derren Brown doesn't have a lot of spare time. Actually, some people do that don't they? Refer to themselves by their own name which is really weird...

It's a sign of going mad, isn't it?

Yeah, it's a sign of massive arrogance. So... I only get about a week off a year.

A week off a year?!

Yeah, that's about it. I haven't had a week off at all this year, though. It's constant. The TV take up 8 months each year. The touring takes up 4 months of the year. So, aside from the fact that it is varied and interesting, it would probably be a bit too much. So, there's not a lot of spare time to fill. A lot of that time I just don't want to do anything, because sometimes it's just nice to relax. But I paint. That's kind of my main thing and I've just brought out a book of my paintings that I do, which is a really exciting piece. It's just years and years and years of painting.

It's like caricatures that you do or something?

Yeah, that's right. They're portraits. Yeah, and they've just brought them out. Which is really exciting news. I put it on tables and stand back and look at it and put it on shelves and browse through it. Yeah. I'm really excited about that. So that's just come out. So that's been my main hobby. Erm... I love Viz.

Favourite film of all time?

Favourite film of all time? It'd be difficult to name one. For years it was "Wings of Desire", which is a film by Wim Wenders.

I've not even attempted that.

Well, you know... as an arty student you may. That's how I discovered it. But, in recent years I suppose I love Magnolia.

Kate, our technician, is nodding in approval.

Definitely a Magnolia fan. Yeah. Difficult to name favourites. I suppose they change a lot. But yeah, I love movies. I don't watch TV. I don't have a TV.

Do you not watch TV?!

No, I don't.

What about your own stuff on TV?

Well I just see it in the edit suite. That's it. By the time it goes out, I've seen it.

You know what happens in the end anyway, I suppose!

Yeah. But I'm one of those people that just gets DVD collections of things that I hear are good and missed, so I watch them. I'm watching Dexter at the moment.

[b]That is actually very good!

Yeah, I'm sort of... I'm not completely sold by it. Maybe I've just seen too much TV on these things or know too much about the devices, but I've only seen about three episodes. I did watch Lost... I got to the end of the first season and quite enjoyed that.

You did quite well to get that far, to be honest, with Lost!

Yeah, starting again with a new season when you just know that, like with any of these things, it's just going to go on and on and on... it's just kind of insulting. So, erm, I don't. I had the TV taken out and had a fish tank put in, which is more fascinating.

That's brilliant! Erm, would you ever consider doing reality TV? In fact, would you consider your own work to be sort of reality TV?

Sometimes... like, the Russian Roulette. That was around the time that reality TV had only just really taken off and people were starting to find it a little bit revolting. Now, it's just kind of a given that people find it revolting. I mean, the time at which we did the Russian Roulette was a sort of... part of it was sort of reasonalist in my mind. There was a slight sort of comment on that world of what would people watch, what would be good entertainment. I get asked a lot, but the requests never get to me. They get turned down. I haven't even done any TV interviews for four years.

Will we see you on Strictly Come Dancing, maybe? Can you dance?

I can! I used to do ballroom dancing. At university, that was my "thing". I got trophies and everything. Yeah, Cha Cha Cha. But I'd rather put that gun against my head and shoot all six barrels into my brain. I don't have that thing of needing to sort of... I don't do TV interviews. I'm not on TV that much. I like what I do to be just, sort of, be good. Somehow I don't really enjoy TV as much. I love touring. TV is a huge amount of work, and although I'm very proud of the products it's so much work that by the time you've come to do it and you're at your last stages of writing it and putting it together and you've had to scrap the whole thing and start again that it just seems stressful. So, I just don't like that world very much, so I don't imagine I could get dragged into doing that sort of show. I say that now... but maybe in five years. Or adverts. You know... "Mind control looks easy but for a lot of people, bowel control can be a real problem". I don't know what I'll be doing five years from now!

Finally, have you seen the current series of Big Brother on TV at all?

No, I haven't. But I'm aware that there's someone on there that looks like me and I'm anticipating a question.

His name's Freddie, and there's conspiracy theories that you're him. Is that part of your next TV stunt, maybe? Could you confirm or deny that?

I will neither confirm nor deny that. That may be me... It's difficult pulling that off and getting here in the evenings to do the show, though. That's the tricky part.

What I was going to say was that I don't know how you can pull that off.

Well, I don't quite get the resemblance but other people assure me that it is...

It's the entrance shot, when he wears the hats? And he comes in with the hat on?

I don't wear hats like that.

Yeah, that's true.

Part 5

RA:You're in London playing a residency of over 30 days. Is that right?

DB: Yeah, we've just extended a few days so I think it's just going until around the 21st July. It's about five weeks.

You're giving Michael Jackson a good run for his money, aren't you?

I am. I didn't like to draw his audience away, really. He's probably a little bit annoyed. I've stolen his glory.

Well if he keeps cancelling gigs then you won't have a problem.

I'm only on stage for 15 minutes as well. That's the other thing.

What can people expect from your show this year? What's different?

Erm, a whole lot of laughs!

What, like Cilla Black?

Yeah, that's what it is basically. It's the life story of Cilla Black. Well, if anyone's seen previous shows, it's largely similar in that it's a lot of audience participation. There's a kind of more light-hearted first half and a slightly darker second half. You've seen it yourself. Did you enjoy it?

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

He thoroughly enjoyed it. That's nice to hear! Thank you. It's all based on audience participation, so it varies from night to night. But some things aren't. Some things are set. I'm throwing frisbees out to choose people. Erm, there was a couple of things on recently... previous shows have been on TV. So there was an evening of wonders. That was the previous stage show. And before that was the one where I was walking on glass. So... this is the fourth stage show and it's selling out slowly, so I'd say get in there!

I love that. That was flawless. A seamless plug. Absolutely shameless! You mentioned the level of audience participation. Does that take a certain level of control away from you, in that it could go wrong?

For me, that's the fun of it. The whole thing we write and rehearse in two months. There's me and Andy - who I write with. We have a month to come up with the idea, then we have a month to rehearse as best as we can. But there's really nothing you can do once you've got people up on stage. There were a few preview nights and it changed a lot, because some things didn't play as well as we thought. And then it sort of finds itself as the tour goes on. So I've toured for a couple of months, and I suppose that two weeks into it I felt really kind of settled. And then yeah, things... it sort of varies every night. Things don't always go according to plan, and some nights are just better than others because it relies so much upon the people who come up and join in.

Has it ever gone wrong?

Erm, in this show... not drastically. In the previous show I did, a guy came up and there was a film I played to the audience (this is the show where I was walking on the glass, but it didn't make the TV edit in the end although it might have been an extra on the DVD). It was a subliminal film and it would make four people stand up and come up on stage when they'd watched it, but they didn't know who they'd be until they watched it. And some people would find themselves standing up and coming up on stage and this guy came up and he just started vomiting. It was proper exorcist style projectile vomiting and he just didn't stop. Just over and over and over again. Over himself. Over me. Over members of the audience. Over the stage. Then some of the ushers came up to clean it up and he was vomiting all over the ushers.

I wonder if most people thought it was part of the show? You know?

Yeah, there's always the sense of "Brilliant! How do you do that every night?". And then the guy was taken back to his seat, and doing the same all of the way back to the seat. But that was a weird show, because I was doing the glass thing and there were people just feinting. There were people shitting themselves. Literally, shitting themselves. It was a pretty odd response. I can understand squeamish people feinting, but that was a particularly odd response which I didn't anticipate. In this one, so far, it's been fine. But we've got another year for some weird stories to happen. Nothing too... Check back again.

RAJust one last question. You haven't been on TV for a while. Will you be back on our screens again soon? Any plans?

Yeah, it's all just getting together for September. Normally stuff has gone out in February, March and April. That's when the tour is going on. This year it's all going out later, because it involves some live elements. It's going to be four one-hours, called "The Event". Or "The Events". They'll be going out in September. They're sort of reverting back to the sort of... I was trying to avoid the sort of "look at me, aren't I clever" sort of thing later on as I focused more on the sort of thing where people are taking part. This is definitely going back to the "aren't I clever"! Four big stunts. And I've also been making some documentaries. They were going to go out in September, but I think I'm going to make some more and they'll all go out next year.

When you say "documentaries"...?

They're based upon me spending time around people making paranormal claims. Psychics, ghost hunters, mediums, that sort of stuff.

So is that similar to when you went to America for Messiah?

Messiah... sort of. But it's a bit more kind of... I just spend a week with one person, they're an hour long and I'm going in with an open mind. There's a lot of... to be a true sceptic, it's about asking questions. There's cynicism where you just put your fingers in your ears and don't believe in anything. But to be a sceptic, although it's a dirty word amongst mediums and psychics, it should actually mean that you're just very open to evidence and that you just ask questions. So that's really what it is. I'm going in and visiting these people with a very open mind. I would love it to be true, but we'll have to see if the evidence stacks up. They might not be out until next year, though. They might be a little way off yet.

OK. Thanks very much for having us!

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