Seance Hoax

On Monday illusionist Derren Brown performed a seance live on Britain's Channel 4, successfully channeling the spirit of 'Jane,' the victim of a mass suicide. Only after the show did he admit it was all a hoax... an attempt to debunk seances by showing how easily people can be manipulated into believing that they're real. Still, the show managed to attract more complaints than almost any other show in British history, although most of the complaints were lodged before the show aired (evidently because those complaining... church groups mostly... had seen into the future and knew they wouldn't like it before they saw it). Darren Brown is the same guy who pretended to play Russian Roulette on British TV back in October 2003. But for my money, it doesn't sound like Brown's faux-seance quite rivalled the drama of 1992's Ghostwatch Halloween seance.

Entertainment Paranormal

Posted on Thu Jun 03, 2004


Comments

There is no "BBC Channel 4" - the programme was on Channel 4 (as is his series Trick Of The Mind) and his name is DErren not DArren. 😊

http://www.derrenbrown.co.uk
http://www.channel4.com
Posted by joanne  on  Thu Jun 03, 2004  at  01:41 PM
Oops. Thanks for the correction. Back when I lived in England as a kid, Channel 4 didn't yet exist. I always thought it was a BBC channel, for some reason.
Posted by The Curator  in  San Diego  on  Thu Jun 03, 2004  at  01:51 PM
He'd never get away with the stuff he does on the Beeb. 😉

Fantastic site, btw.
Posted by joanne  on  Thu Jun 03, 2004  at  01:53 PM
"Only after the show did he admit it was all a hoax..."
Not true, he said early on in the show that he didn't believe in spirtualism, and "found it quite ugly" but was interested in the tricks that Victorian spiritualists used.
Posted by Saul  on  Sat Jun 05, 2004  at  08:15 PM
He said all the way through it ws a hoax. People just seem to so strongly beleave it was real they ignored his admission. How anybody could be stupid enough to beleave any of it is beyond me. Made me laugh they picked 'art' students because they lack analytical skills and easily influenced. lol.

very funny
Posted by dey  on  Wed Feb 09, 2005  at  05:42 PM
It was repeated just the other night.

The trouble was that, at the start, he laid out all these photos of the supposedly 'dead' students in three rows and told everyone to pick one but not mention out loud which one they'd picked. Then there were instructions like 'Now think of the one which is the next colour photo in the same row as the one you chose originally, then diagonally upwards until you get to a black and white picture, then...'

And of course, being a cynic, it took me about ten seconds to work out that they all would end up thinking of the same picture.

Haha, except that one of them had obviously bolloxed up the instructions, because she was thinking of someone else. I'd forgotten about that, actually.
Posted by Boo  on  Thu Feb 10, 2005  at  03:00 AM
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