Last night we watched Derren Brown, sois-disant Mentalist (mental might be the word) or illusionist, who had trailed his Channel 4 show, The System, as a foolproof way of beating the bookmakers.
He purported to show a single mother, whom he had e-mailed anonymously with five horse racing winners in a row, then was to invite her to Sandown where she was to back a certain horse, the “sixth winner”, with all the money she could muster. She had about £1,000 left from her earlier winnings, borrowed £1,000 from her father and, if maths are right, must have borrowed £2,000 (which she could ill afford) from a loan company.
Brown had her hand him this £4,000 for him to stake for her on Moon Over Miami. Which lost.
The untold hurt she must have felt must have been appalling. I have never in my life seen a show with such a rank, vile, bullying element – not even the dreaded Big Brother.
The denouement was that, of course, the ticket he had handed her had the winner’s name on it, and she collected.
But what he did was unforgiveable, utterly.
The System actually involved contacting some 7,500 or more ordinary people, sending one-sixth of them the name of one horse each in a six-runner race. All losers were then deleted and the “winning” group then divided again into six groups, again given one name each of a further six: so of course, eventually, there were a handful of six people with Five Winners In a Row.
All the “winners” were filmed betting in their fifth race, without yet meeting Brown. Only the winning ticket, the lady featured in the show, was asked back to the appalling torture-fest which was the final game.
The credits said that “all losers were offered their stakes back”, but does not make it clear whether they accepted or not.
This was television at its lowest point. For shame, Derren Brown; for shame, Channel 4.
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I totally agree this programme managed to build up to something interesting and then totally let us all down.
Lets compare to some of Derren’s other shows. In the Heist he managed to convince several “normal” people to choose to rob a security guard, now that’s fairly amazing. In this disappointing show he merely managed to convince one person to place a large bet on the horses and to do so he had to arrange to send out 7000 emails and pay the losses of up to 7000 people who lost out on these bets.
That is not interesting in any way. The only part that was even moderately interesting was the explanation of how it worked with respect to the coin tosses but once that small piece of fairly mediocre mathematical trickery had sunk in the rest was very poor and well below the standard to which Derren’s fans have become accustomed.
I totally agree this programme managed to build up to something interesting and then totally let us all down.
Lets compare to some of Derren’s other shows. In the Heist he managed to convince several “normal” people to choose to rob a security guard, now that’s fairly amazing. In this disappointing show he merely managed to convince one person to place a large bet on the horses and to do so he had to arrange to send out 7000 emails and pay the losses of up to 7000 people who lost out on these bets.
That is not interesting in any way. The only part that was even moderately interesting was the explanation of how it worked with respect to the coin tosses but once that small piece of fairly mediocre mathematical trickery had sunk in the rest was very poor and well below the standard to which Derren’s fans have become accustomed.
The coin toss un-masked was inevitable. If you have a 50-50 chance on each throw, eventually if you continue going long enough you will have ten in a row. That is why people who bet black or red on roulette eventually come out a little bit ahead.
I don’t mind the illusions, or the “magic”, or the flimflam: I just hated the manipulation of the single mother who believed she could be genuinely out of her difficulties. That is the unfeeling con, the bullying, to which I referred.
As to betting horses, the only system is to study form. Only the bookmaker wins – the rest of us lose from time to time. And the golden rule is never bet what you can’t afford to lose – that is the rule which Derren Brown forced, and I don’t think that is too strong a word, the heroine of the show to do. To bet more than she could afford, including loan money.
That he made it “right” by giving her a winning ticket did not make it right, morally. It should never have been done.
Now if he had managed to con a professional punter, a rich person with plenty of spare money, someone in the know, I would not be complaining. It was the cruel manipulation which offended me.
Well in today’s era of reality (exploitation) TV, I am sadly not that sensitive to the moral issue at hand, though I acknowledge it. For me, as an enthusiastic viewer of Derren Brown’s usual antics, I was just let down by the lack of any interesting, intelligent or stimulating content.
Seldom have I seen so little material spread over so long a time. It was my first viewing of Brown. I don’t think I wish to repeat the experience, somehow.
In his defense I wouldn’t write him off so quickly his material has been in the past intelligent and interesting. “The heist” was particularly good and contained a solid warning message about what people have done if they are goaded and hypnotised into it. In contrast to “the system” it was considerably more moral.
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