Derren Frown

Attention: potential spoilers lie herein if you haven't watched last night's episode of The Events.




















So, my prediction/hope for last night's episode of The Events didn't happen. Instead of some huge Derren Brown twist or revelation, we saw Brown "fail" at his attempt to predict the outcome of a roulette wheel spin, thereby not winning a member of the public £175,000. But did he fail? Was it all planned? Did he get it one out on purpose? Did he succumb to the pressure from people who said he shouldn't have made it look like he got all six lottery numbers correct, as five would have been amazing enough and "more believeable"? Or did he genuinely miscalculate things in his brain so that he was one number out on the wheel? I don't know. But no doubt these and many other questions will circulate the internet in the coming days, along with the diatribes of disillusioned Brown fans and those who like to let people know they are superior to anyone who tries something a little boundary-pushing and doesn't quite manage it.

I don't know why Brown ended his series the way he did, or even if it genuinely didn't go quite to plan or Brown intended that to be the ending all along. But I have to admit that even I, who has staunchly stuck with the "events of misdirection" angle on the series, am now feeling pretty deflated by the series. It wasn't awful. In many ways it was very very good. But it felt very disparate, with the prerecorded segments, the on-location experiments and the live parts of each show not really feeling convincingly linked together. Essentially, compared to pretty much all of Brown's previous work it felt distinctly average.

I'm still living in hope that Brown is going to pull one more trick out of the bag and show what the series was "really all about". I'm not nearly as confident of this happening as I was before watching last night's Event, but Brown's message after the end of last night's show came up on his website remarkably quickly and felt a bit too clean-cut to be written by Brown after having just finished his most hyped up series on what can only be described as an anticlimax. I might be wrong, but I hope I'm not. I'm still a big fan of his. And, after all, with Derren Brown you really can't predict where the next piece of misdirection is going to come from.

Blogathon score: 3