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 Welcome to the News desk.
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| Derren Brown bets his career on winning the lottery |
07/09/2009 |
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He has
controversially played Russian roulette on camera, held a seance and
manipulated audience members into robbing a security van. Now Derren Brown is
promising to predict the results of the National Lottery this Wednesday, and
explain how to take down a casino. Presumably Channel 4's funding problems will
soon be a distant memory – although Brown has apparently been banned by
the broadcaster from buying a ticket.
You can hear more of Brown's plans
via this videocast distributed this morning. (So that you're
not disappointed: it's more of a recorded press release than insight into
Brown's mind.) It sounds like heady stuff: ambitious, exciting and possibly
unpredictable television – although the fact Brown says there will be a
"special twist" to the casino event suggests it will not, in fact, be a how-to
guide to break into a vault and run off with all the cash. Television, eh? All
hype.
And yet I'm finding it tough to get really excited about Brown's
lottery predictions. Perhaps it feels too close to last year's special on
betting. Or maybe we're getting to the point where we've seen Brown pull off
one stunt too many: each time the stakes are raised, and each time it becomes
more difficult to grab an audience with the idea. Derren Brown brings down a
casino? Well, that's what you'd expect, isn't it. He almost seems undone by his
own ability.
I will nevertheless
be watching on Wednesday to see if Brown does manage to get all six national
lottery numbers correct. If he does, I imagine several million people will tune
in to the programme on Friday that will explain how he did it. If he gets the
numbers wrong, however, things presumably won't look so good for the rest of
the series. What will Friday's show then be called: "How not to guess the
lottery numbers correctly"? Loads of people do that every week without any help
whatsoever.
The Events is high-risk stuff all right: Brown is
effectively betting an entire television series on winning the lottery. That's
not quite as potentially fatal as pointing a gun at your head and shooting, of
course. But in terms of his career, should Wednesday's stunt go wrong, it's
probably not far off.
First show 22:35 Wednesday 9th September.
Don't miss it!
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