I’ve just been watching a programme on Channel 4 called Derren Brown: Messiah. Derren Brown is a professional charlatan, an extremely clever one of the TV magician, hypnotist, showman and general all round trickster type. He sets out to confront other professional charlatans of the psychic, evangelist, UFO researcher and new-age types.

He’s got a very serious point to make:

Whether we believe in psychic ability, crystal energy, alien abduction, talking to the dead or Christianity, we are rightly or wrongly buying into a very powerful belief system. I’m not interested in attacking anyone’s beliefs but I think as intelligent human beings we should be prepared to question our beliefs — and the people who encourage us to make life decisions based on the information they give us.

And that’s what grabbed my attention and greatly elevated my impression of Derren Brown. Skepticism and critical thinking can’t be promoted enough, and I think it’s fantastic that he is using his considerable talents to promote these ideas. His aim is to test the skepticism of the people he confronts. Each time he carefully explains that as soon as one of them asks him if he’s tricking them he will own up.

The first people he meets are some psychics who teach psychics (to be psychic?) at the Sedona Creative Life Centre in Arizona. He asks one how she deals with the responsibility of giving people advice on important decisions. She answers that if someone is “guided” to her to ask for advice then she must be qualified to give it, which is certainly an interesting outlook.

Brown does the usual image projection test in which a viewer in one room projects an image to a receiver in another room. Scientific tests of this have always come up with no better results than you’d get from guessing, but Brown gets it right every time. How he does this I don’t know. It’s one of his best tricks. At one stage he says, “just let differemt images sail through your mind, don’t go overboard on detail”, and the woman draws a boat. Can saying the words “sail” and “overboard” really induce someone to draw a boat? If so it’s astonishing. But there is obviously more going on, it’s just hard to find out what because Brown’s shows are very cleverly edited, so we don’t get a chance to analyse completely what he’s doing.

Of course, all the psychics are thoroughly convinced. One of them goes so far as to say, “as a person who trains psychics, I would have [my students] watch that film and say ‘this is how you do it.’”

Next up, Brown goes after the Christians. He doesn’t hold back.

I used to be a full on, happy clappy Christian until my mid 20s, and then I started to realise that my belief was just as prone to circular logic and self fulfillment as all the new-age nonsense which bugged me. And then reading the New Testament as a historical document finally rid me of any religeous belief.

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But the real point he is making is this:

But if I can convert people through non-spiritual methods, how many people are out their doing the same thing in their own way?

He goes to Rhode Island to visit Curt Nordhielm of Restoration House Ministries, whose speciality is evangelising to immigrant communities. Nordheim writes in some ministry blurb, “The huge influx of foreign people groups into this nation can be viewed in two ways. They can be seen as a threat to our way of life — both spiritually or culturally. Or they can be viewed as an opportunity for evangelism.”

What Brown appears to do is quite unbelievable. He invites a bunch of atheists, agnostics and other doubters to come to a meeting, and then apperently converts them instantly. After he gets one girl to switch from talking about how religion was forced on her by her family and she never accepted it, to talking about how she had felt a spirtual inner hug when Brown put his hand near her face, half of the meeting, including Nordhielm, walk out.

But Brown continues on. One guy voices my exact problem with religion:

How could you believe in or worship a higher being […] that’s supposed to be loving, that’s supposed to be merciful and kind, but [people] talk about free will […] well it wasn’t a three-year-old’s free will to die of leukemia. And things of that nature. That’s what makes me just not buy it.

Next thing, the same guy is standing up, facing away from Derren Brown, who holds up his hand and pulls at the air. This apparently induces the guy to fall over and then, when asked, start saying how his previous beliefs and opinions were incorrect. It’s all very odd.

It looks like Brown has hypnotised these people, but I don’t believe in hypnotism. I’d say actors were used but a caption at the start of the program claims that no stooges or actors were used in its making. This scene has me wondering on how many levels is Derren Brown a fraud, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because it seems even more unbelievable that the whole sequence was faked. It’s more likely that there’s a very clever trick I don’t understand.

But Brown picked the wrong target in Curt Nordhielm, who is visibly shocked and skeptical about Browns antics. I think if this had been tried with a faith healer like Benny Hinn then the result would have been more convincing.

Things pick up when Brown visits Lorraine DiFelice, a publisher of a new-age magazine and organiser of a Vegas convention. He convinces her that a metal box with a switch, battery and bulb, is reading her dreams. She uses it for a week and he then attaches electrodes from it to his head and tells her what she dreamt about. Afterwards you can almost see the dollar signs spinning in her eyes when she talks about letting Brown come on her radio show and publish whatever he wants in her magazine.

As for how he did it, it seems likely Brown used cold reading techniques. He pulls a similar trick on UFO researcher and author Ann Druffel whose medical history he somehow reconstructs, a talent he tells her he had since he was abducted by aliens. Dollar signs spin in her eyes too — she wants his story published in “the most respected publications”. The best part of this section, though, is when Brown is interviewing Druffel. She tells him that abductions usually start when the victim is in a “dream state”. When he suggests that “some people” might say that the whole abduction was a dream, Druffel just looks confused and lets her friend Vince Uhlenkott answer (he mumbles about “grey areas”).

Finally, Derren Brown meets spiritualist medium and teacher Rev Janet Hohavec. He does the standard cold reading talking-to-the-dead trick, and makes a big show of how uncomfortable he is about doing it.

I personally believe, given my knowledge of the psychic industry, that I’m using techniques here used by pretty much any successful medium. But you’re going to watch this knowing that I’m fake. And if that makes you feel uncomfortable, then that is kind of my point.

And it’s a good point, because Brown’s victims get quite upset hearing about their dead loved-ones. At the end a caption states that everyone involved was told the true nature of what happened and agreed to appear in the programme. “Real” mediums (media?) would never admit what they were doing, of course. Our medium thinks Derren Brown has a gift, but (dollar signs), “to move it to another level would be incredible.”

The programme was a facsinating display of Derren Brown’s edge-of-your-seat, how-did-he-do-it? trickery, mixed in with a very serious and important message.

At the start of this post I wrote that the people Derren Brown confronted were Charlatans, but there may be more to it. That they were apparently so willing to believe him means that to a greater or lesser extent they really do believe in what they’re doing.

I can’t think of anything more depressing and pointless than dedicating your life to a falsehood, which is why I think it’s so important to maintain a healthy, active skepticism.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Imaginary Friends, Reviews at 1:48 AM EST

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