I haven’t posted for a while, so don’t expect this story to go far as my readership has dwindled to around 3 people who come here by accident, however thought I’d share my disappointment in tonights Derren Brown; The Events Lottery reveal. Not because it turned out shit (I can’t argue with that) but because the British public were robbed of the chance to be shown one of the most incredible, daring and quite frankly outrageous feats of any performer who’s ever graced this planet. He rigged the lottery and he has the footage to prove it.
I attended the filming of tonights show on Thursday night with two of my best friends, my flatmate Dave and my (awesome) girlfriend, Fran. As anyone who’s attended the filming of a TV studio show will tell you, the experience can be drawn out and boring, retake after retake, laughing like it’s the first time you’ve heard the joke, everytime. The heat of the studio lights doesn’t help matters either (at one point some poor bloke fainted and hit the deck). The whole time the 140 of us were there however we were treated very well, the warm up act was a good laugh and kept things rolling along nicely and we were well watered (a couple of sandwiches wouldn’t of gone amiss though). Derren also came across as a really good, humble bloke, borderline shy at times.
Anyway, after about 2 hours of filming during the Wisdom of Crowds bit (2nd possibility) I was pretty much lapping it up as I’d just read a whole chapter about it in Crowd Surfing on a recent holiday and (ironically) thought it would make good subject matter for a blog post. Then they played the backroom footage of the 24 volunteers seeing the numbers match up on Wednesday nights draw. It didn’t sit right with me at the time and I didn’t think the crowd were very impressed either, it appears the 24 taking part weren’t didn’t buy it either (first comment from DaniBoi).
Then Derren goes into the explanation for Fixing the Machine (3rd possibility). The part where he runs up on stage to pick up the six racked counterfeit lottery balls had to be re-shot about 4 times, then the bit where he explains it by picking them up had to be shot a further 3. At this point we were getting a bit frustrated with the slowness of proceedings to get to what we all really wanted to see – evidence of how he did it.
This is it; here it comes
[Derren speaking]
“If I had picked the lottery (which I did not) then I would’ve known ages ago which numbers would’ve come up and then the guesses of the 24 people would’ve been meaningless as I would’ve switched their set of balls for the numbers I knew were going to come up…
[shot of a switch happening on stage background screen]
…i.e. the numbers on the heavier balls that I put into the machine,
[believe it or not, this now cuts to a profile shot of my previously mentioned girlfriend, Fran. This is weird enough in itself but I'll choose to ignore this and move on]
Now this next bit is fucking crucial, because it’s at this moment that live in the studio Derren introduced a short film by saying that what we were about to see was shot in November of 2008 on Oxford St. On the stage’s framed background screen they played a sequence of him on the top deck of an open top bus at night with last years Oxford St. Christmas lights going over his head. He walks down the centre aisle of the bus and has six kids (around 4-5 years old) sitting either side of him in banks of 2. He raises each pair of hands to show the balls they are holding, and points the numbers towards the camera. All 6 numbers that came up on Wednesday’s draw. He told us we were seeing an edited version and the full sequence would be shown when it was aired the next day.
In addition, here’s an entry from his blog dated the 27th of November 2008 (had to use Google cache as his blog is currently down) that supports the fact that he was
“Currently in the middle of filming on an open top bus around Oxford st under the Christmas lights (not pictured). Tried something I hope will pay off in a year or so. Could be quite exciting”
It’s also supported by an article on Broadcast Now from the 17th of August this year where they say
“The specials have been in production since last year and included some filming on an open-top bus in Oxford Street in the run-up to Christmas”
In addition, in the teaser trailer before the show he was holding a snowflake (can’t find the vid as again, the site is down) which is an obvious reference to the Christmas lights.
[UPDATE: Thanks to some of the Will and JoeTresh's sleuthing in the comments below I've added a few more links here]
A picture of the 6 kids I refer to can be seen on Derren’s blog post dated the 12th of August 2009
In the original The Events trailer there is a bus around 30-31 seconds in with a fake lottery logo saying ‘it will be you!’
[End of Update]
After providing hard evidence (which he told us at the time hadn’t been shown in full) to us, the live studio audience , why is he reduced to leaving this video on the cutting room floor and go straight to the words
“…but I would never admit to it, and if I was ever asked I will say ‘It was just a trick’”
It sucks the fucking big one. After the culmination of all of about three hours of my life on this project I can only conclude there are 3 possibilities for this;
- Camelot got wind of the existence of this footage and despite the fact that Derren at no point admits to rigging it if the footage gets broadcast Camelot are in a position where they can use the footage to prove Derren committed a crime in order to beat odds of 1 in 14 million. The footage is now probably 6 ft. deep underground somewhere in Hampton Wick
- He is going to hold on to the footage until the end of the Events to fuck with anyone who says he’s not the biggest, most badass performer the world has ever seen. I don’t think this is a possibility however as it completely removed the drama of the moment and we were only asked to not say anything about how it was done to anyone until tonights show was broadcast
- I’m an idiot
I’m not ruling 3 by any means, but I did speak to both Dave and Fran and my story checks out. We are ruling out mass hypnotism until Derren Browns special next week.
Looking at the aforementioned Brand Now piece from August:
Brown has described the first of the four specials as a stunt that “could be a career breaker.”
He said cryptically: “In the modern world of mass communication and big business, simple tricks can be developed to make even the most secure of systems vulnerable when you know where to push.”
One of these predictions has come to pass, seeing some of the haters on Twitter it looks like the other might too, I hope the open-top bus footage evetually sees the light of day. After so much hard work he deserves some credit, even though he could’ve committed mass fraud on a national scale it’s an incredibly beautiful thing.
Fuck ‘em. Nice one Browner, it was mint.
