But first Friday’s idiocyfest. Derren Brown was going to beat a roulette wheel. Well, let’s just point out a few things before we get started:

- Any casino in the world would be delighted to be identified and filmed because the publicity and advertising would be superb.

- You can’t make a man give you money and then make him forget he did.

- You can’t guess the speed for a roulette ball and predict where it will fall more accurately than a computer.

- You can’t predict where a ball will land after bouncing off many walls in the first seconds of its being thrown.

- You can’t use triangulation of three fixed objects to calculate the speed of a car.

- You can’t guarantee that a man will not notice that he’s £5,000 short in the bank, and therefore you couldn’t set the trick up the way he claimed to.

So Derren claims that he stole £5,000 from an unwitting stranger, on a programme that begins saying there’s no actors or stooges used. (Which rather raises the question: what is a stooge? As Brown said when he met dear Ben last week on film, he volunteered to be on the show. Are volunteers stooges?) He did this by somehow hypnotising him in about three seconds and then instructing him to visit his bank, withdraw the money, then hand it over. Then erases this from the man’s brain. Because apparently Derren Brown is an evil wizard from space, and we’re supposed to just accept this – surely the most extraordinary feat in the whole episode – as something that just happens every day. He’ll now gamble that money “live” (for some reason he can’t talk directly to Ben when he’s in the casino – which seems strange since it would go some way to proving it wasn’t pre-recorded footage and somewhat undermining the purpose of a live event), and potentially win Ben £180,000.

Once again the episode was a mixture of various nice-enough tricks that had nothing whatsoever to do with the final effect, and Brown bullshitting his face off. Oh, apart from one trick – the ball in the squash court. Where he achieved something equally as impressive as the roulette trick – somehow predicting the path of a spherical object being thrown by someone else by making impossible calculations in split seconds and knowing where on the floor it will come to rest – and threw this away midway through the show as a minor step on the way to his final plan. Which was an odd choice.

But of course he doesn’t manage the final trick! What a way to end the series, eh? The man doesn’t win £180,000, and Brown ends his series on a fail. Except of course nothing of the sort happens.

Brown’s ludicrous claim is to be able to predict where a roulette ball will land while it’s still spinning. This is clearly impossible, not just because, as someone in the episode points out, a human brain can’t make the calculations fast enough, but also because it’s a sphere bouncing on a spinning platform covered in curved ridges. (He must be incredible at Peggle!) So we get the preceding nonsense: he successfully achieves essentially the same trick on a squash court, and he is able to tell the speeds of passing cars. As usual Brown can’t resist overplaying his hand in this latter trick. Standing on a bridge he stares at a car chosen for him, for some inexplicable reason by Tim Westwood, and accurately announces its speed as proven by a policeman’s speed gun. 50mph! (They could at least have chosen a more interesting speed than the speed limit of the road with a super-obvious speed trap – it does slightly spoil the potentially impressive nature of the trick to have a car going at the speed you’d expect it to be, but presumably showing a clip of a car exceeding the speed limit would have required the police to take action, etc.) Then, because he has no ability to display moderation, he repeats the trick with his back turned and his eyes shut, needing to know the manufacturer of the car to announce its speed, 49mph. This somewhat undoes his hilariously animated and idiotic explanation of using triangulation to calculate speed. And then because that wasn’t stupid enough he declares the year the car was made, just in case anyone was left in any doubt that someone was telling him the details.

But back to the casino. Brown laboriously explains to us that he can’t identify the casino, nor even the country he’s in. He keeps telling us this, over and over, ensuring we’re aware that it would be just awful if anyone were able to work out which casino he was in. Of course, he never gives a sensible reason why, because there is no possible explanation. He does make the extremely spurious suggestion that someone could ruin the trick if they were to know where he is. This fictional audience member being someone outside of the country in which it’s being shown somehow reaching the casino ahead of him to… do what? Perhaps he’s hoping we’ll think that were the casino to know he was there they could accuse him of cheating and prevent his winning the money. But any casino that had someone win £180,000 (in Euro, clearly) on 8 Black at a roulette table that evening would simply check their security footage. So that makes no sense either. So for what possible reason would he want to neither reveal where he was nor show any footage of anything other than a terribly filmed roulette table (apparently Channel 4 could only provide Brown with hidden cameras made in 1976 for this broadcast)? Pick your obvious answer.

And to his ‘failure’. Brown promises showmanship, and here it is at its peak. He claimed that he could accurately calculate where the ball would land on the wheel – not that he could psychically predict the correct answer (that was last week, or three weeks ago). Because this was a feat of superhuman maths and physics, not paranormal soothsaying, his being wrong made him seem far more capable than being right. The ball did not land on his predicted number, but in fact the one immediately next to it. He was so close! Had he landed on the 8 the trick would have looked like exactly that: a trick. ‘Sure, whatever’, we might cry, ‘you predicted the lottery at 1 in 14 million – so what if you can predict a 1 in 37 chance?’ But if he can have somehow so very nearly almost known where the ball would stop, just missing by one tiny segment, how much more realistic does it seem? Getting it wrong was by far the more powerful and effective way to end the show.

Oh, and let’s not forget another incredibly good reason why he needed to lose. Since there wasn’t really a casino, and since he wasn’t really gambling £5,000, he’d have had to fork out £180,000 to pay off our friend Ben. Perhaps a little pricey.

It did, however, add to the rather gruesome callousness that permeated the episode. Ben, his, um, unwitting volunteer?, not only had his brain mystically meddled with, but also the promise of vast riches unpleasantly teased and taken away. This added to the astonishingly uncomfortable and spitefully unpleasant matchbox trick, where he appeared to be verbally abusing a sad and timid lady for cruel laughs (let’s hope that she really was a stooge), made for a programme in which Brown seemed to underline his new reputation earned in the first two episodes with also being a colossal prick.

A lot of people were hoping that Brown would use this final episode to undo some of the damage he’s done over the last few weeks. It’s important that people not forget quite how awful this series has been, despite the last couple of episodes being slightly more tame. The first two, and to a smaller degree the second two, have used the vocabulary and techniques employed by psychics and mediums to con the grieving and vulnerable. Anyone tolerant of this must be either sociopathic, sympathetic to the con-artists, or cannot have thought it through.

In defending Brown many have cited both what he wrote in his book, and what he said in the interviews with Dawkins. Both demonstrate a man who is passionate about exposing frauds and snake oil salesmen, and watching those videos is a treat. These now seem to be prophetic of what was to come – in the interviews with Dawkins he explains how eventually the pull of money can divert people into embracing the seediness they previously wished to debunk. He wrote in his book, “I am careful not to cross any moral line that would take me into manipulating people’s real-life decisions or belief systems.” I cannot see that he could make the same claim today.

Many have argued that this entire position is ludicrous because he’s just a magician, and magicians aren’t going to tell you how they do their tricks. But I come back to my sociopath/sympathiser/ignorant position. Brown has, in my view, taken his position as a respected debunker and sceptic and manipulated it. Others have pointed out that he begins each episode stating that he uses misdirection and showmanship, and this opening disclaimer should cover anything that follows. I think this is a preposterous position to take. It’s no more acceptable that an advert for a drug making wild claims but excusing itself with some tiny small print at the bottom saying that maybe something above might not be entirely 100% true perhaps. A magician tells you he will pull a bunny from an empty hat, and when he does this impossible feat he attributes the effect to “magic”. This is hugely different from a man who has spent years engendering a reputation for scepticism and debunking then creating TV shows in which he promotes unscientific gibberish and encourages others to not only believe in these fallacies and lies, but even try them for themselves. This has the potential to create a worldview in which such beliefs are held. To ignore this difference is ridiculous. Because it’s the difference between a stage magician and a con-artist.

In the very first episode of Brown’s Channel 4 series Trick Of The Mind in 2004 Brown narrates, “Performing the magic for me is not about convincing anyone I have amazing abilities.” This doesn’t sound like the man in the last four weeks of programmes. Of course, he was always walking both sides of the line. His series have always made ridiculous claims of parapsychology. In fact, the inestimable Simon Singh was calling Brown out on this over six years ago – an article I’ve only just stumbled upon. I was taking issue with Brown back then (although falling for much of the show I couldn’t immediately recognise as regular card tricks, etc), but had since been won over by his apparent scepticism in the years that followed. Specials like Seance and Messiah, while still muddying his position, showed great potential for exposing the shysters. But it’s all gone now.

The awesome Chris French said to Singh in that piece all those years ago:

“If Derren Brown really has successfully developed techniques to discern the contents of people’s minds in the way that he claims, he has single-handedly achieved more than the collective attempts of psychologists over many decades. It may be of some relevance that Brown already had a successful career as a conjurer before he started claiming that he was producing his effects in a different way.”

Singh adds,

“Brown annoys me because he so often presents false explanations for his magic tricks, thereby misleading the public and making a joke of serious psychology. And the television executives annoy me because they willingly provide a forum for his stunts, not seeming to care that factual television is a precious commodity.”

I believe Brown has gone far beyond this now. He has taken his pseudo-psychology into a far more dark place. His effects rely on ignorance and gullibility, promoting unscientific thinking on a mass scale, and most of all, (unwittingly or otherwise) endorsing the actions and techniques used by those who wish to con the grieving and vulnerable. And for those who believe he’s not attempting to simultaneously cultivate an image as a debunking sceptic, but simply be a figure of pure entertainment, you might want to take a look at this from five days ago. The hypocrisy is genuinely unpleasant.

When asked by Dawkins for examples of why someone might pretend to be psychic by using conjuring tricks, but pretend that they’re not, he says.

“[There's] the magician who crosses over to the dark side. Who knows what he’s doing but realises there’s more money to be made in psychic readings than there is in doing tricks.”

“We all know examples of that,” replies Dawkins.

Community – NBC

I didn’t know what to expect from this. I love Joel McHale on The Soup, but he does seem to struggle with the autocue. It didn’t bode well for proper acting. The pilot was the funniest sitcom I’ve seen in years.

The premise: McHale is a lawyer who has been caught practising without a license. (“I thought you had a degree from Columbia?” “I do, and now I need one from America. And not as an email attachment.”) He’s forced to go to community college. Er, just go with it. Once there he employs his skills at lying and bullshitting people to attempt to breeze through the course, along the way accidentally creating a study group of mismatched students.

It works by a combination of a superb mix of people (including Chevy Chase, oddly), a potential romance, lots of fast-talking cleverness, and an awesome relationship with one of the members of staff played by John Oliver. This last part provides the very best jokes in the pilot episode, which makes it something of a shame he’s then gone from the show by episode two, and absent from the titles. The following episodes have still been funnier than anything else on TV at the moment – it’s testament to quite how stunning the pilot was that it can drop in quality and still be so damned strong. But the pilot – the moment it finished I started it again and laughed as hard the second time. Oh, and it gets even more kudos for having scored its first two episodes with Matt & Kim songs.

Cougar Town – ABC

When Bill Lawrence began season 8 of Scrubs on ABC last year he recruited Courtney Cox for the first few episodes. The two clicked, and he created a sitcom for her, presumably believing he wouldn’t be making any more Scrubs. Now Scrubs is renewed, but no one’s entirely sure in what form (Neil Flynn is now in The Middle, Christa Miller’s in Cougar Town, and others are popping up elsewhere), his attention is split across both shows, credited with writing and directing the first episode of each. And from Cougar Town it does appear he’s spreading himself thin. Courtney Cox is a single mother, recently divorced, raising a teenage son. She was pregnant at 20, and now feels that she missed out on having her wild times. Inspired by a new friend she attempts to hook up with a younger guy, and it’s from here that the show gets its title. Although Lawrence promises this won’t be a premise beyond the first few episodes, the title really justified by the local high school’s football team being called the Cougars. It’s a bright, breezy single camera sitcom where Lawrence has attempted his usual schtick of creating a collection of friendly and conflicting characters. Except they don’t have anywhere to be. The result is a lot of awkwardness as people are pushed into each other in the cul-de-sac in which Cox lives, then disjointed scenes at the school, night club, etc. It feels like the scenes that should surround the core of the programme. But it’s coreless, neither a workplace nor family home sitcom. It’s amusing enough – Lawrence is a reliably funny writer, and Cox is a very talented performer – but it feels hollow like someone cut out its reason to exist.

Modern Family – ABC

My primary response to Modern Family is: good grief, Al Bundy got old. This is a peculiar combination of an NBC-style mockumentary sitcom and more traditionally ABC cuddliness. The result is something that wants to be a lot more dark than it is. It’s shot in documentary style, but over-acted in a very unnaturalistic way. Yet it’s still funny. It’s creaking under the weight of its stereotypes. Older man with significantly younger immigrant wife. Gay couple adopting a baby. Terse and unhappily married parents. But they’re good stereotypes and they deliver. Often in clunky old jokes, but still entertaining. Because it wants to echo The Office, Parks & Recreation, etc, the characters all do interviews with the documentary crew, and the camera work is all hand-held and wobbly. Which is all fine, except there’s no clear reason why anyone is making a documentary about them. Muddled, often ludicrously over-acted, it still manages to be worth watching.

Hank – ABC

Not worth watching half a minute of is Hank, Kelsey Grammer’s latest attempt to prove there’s a reason for him to be on TV after Frasier. Unfortunately what last year’s horrendous Back To You and now Hank have shown is, Frasier is all Kelsey Grammer is capable of. So for 2008 there was Frasier on TV news. And for 2009 there’s Frasier trying to learn how to be a family man. Hank’s premise is so amazingly hackneyed that you pause for a moment to wonder if it’s some sort of meta-joke, an arch critique of tired sitcom tropes. Apparently a law was passed that every single TV show must find a way to work the economic downturn into its plot this season, but this takes it one step further and makes it the source of the story. Hank Pryor was once the boss of an enormous company he started from scratch, but has just been voted out of his job by the board of directors. Their fancy city house is lost, and guess what, the whole family (adoring but cynical wife, surly teenage daughter, sweet 10 year old son – could they have been anything else?) has to move back to the small town where Hank grew up! Can you imagine the antics! That anyone could even pitch a fish-out-of-water premise without immediately stabbing themselves on a pair of kitchen scissors is mysterious enough, let alone it get commissioned. So in the first episode we see Grammer struggling to sleep in a small bed, Grammer struggling to communicate with his kids, Grammer struggling to not speak to his family like his employees, Grammer being annoyed by his urban brother-in-law. Rather tragically this character is played by the excellent David Koechner who is horribly wasted in this mess. It’s stunningly awful, Grammer clearly incapable of anything other than playing ill-received pompous, blustery blowhards. James Burrows is attached to this, which only makes it more surprising how poor it is – his other current project, Gary Unmarried, still somehow managing to rise above its cliches to be dumb fun. This manages the dumb.

The Middle – ABC

ABC really have gone for sitcoms this season. It seems to be working for them. Hank and The Middle managed to score the highest ratings of the night, beating shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Gary Unmarried. I’m not convinced this will be a trend that lasts. While The Middle isn’t close to being as dreadful as Hank, if anything it’s far too damned strange to pick up a loyal following. Starring the other half of Back To You, Patricia Heaton, as the mother of a dysfunctional family, watching it is a bipolar experience.

On one side it’s as if the writers had never seen another family sitcom in their lives. It mysteriously wallows in the most trite cliches as if it’s the first programme to have thought to feature a lazy teenage boy. It’s like a stand up comedian declaring, “Ever noticed the difference between cats and dogs?!” and expecting the audience to fall over in surprise at his insightful wit. There’s the over-worked mother (Heaton), the overly relaxed but ultimately stable father, (Scrubs’ Janitor, Neil Flynn), the mentioned lazy teenage boy, the gormless middle teenage girl, and the nerdy to the point of retarded younger boy. It’s a cast the “cookie cutter” insult was made for.

But on the other side it’s a creepy, disturbed fantasy. The nerdy kid, for instance, his best friend is his school backpack, and he repeats the last word of every sentence in an unsettling drawn-out whisper. The mother works at a used car dealership that is cartoonish beyond belief, and features Chris Kattan as a Cheshire Cat-like lunatic almost without lines, grinning insanely, creepily, in the background. When the family visits the high school to see their daughter apparently perform in a dance event the sign outside reads, “COMPE TIT ION”. The word “TIT” (a word you’re not allowed to say on US TV) in giant capital letters for no reason, beyond adding to the unsettling air that permeates throughout.

It’s a mystery. The dialogue is abysmal. Just beyond belief lazy crap. The only laughs come from Neil Flynn’s complete nonchalance in his honesty. When his wife asks him if he’s upset she’s getting old he replies straight faced that yes, it bothers him. When his daughter asks if he’s disappointed in her for failing at everything he tells her that he is. It’s surprising, and funny. But again, against the tone of anything else in the episode. The situations are more entertaining. A sequence where their daughter’s inanity leads to a disaster on-stage is well timed and well delivered. Another extremely odd moment sees the mother dressed in a superhero costume, crawling on all fours in the middle of nowhere, eating a cake she finds on the road.

Of course the obvious comparison would be Malcolm In The Middle. They’ve not exactly been subtle, simply chopping the name in half and then attempting to repeat 90% of its ideas. But where MITM carved itself its own bizarre and unique space on television, The Middle feels like a floating jumble of oddness that doesn’t fit in anywhere. As such I found it absolutely fascinating. Not funny. The horrible dialogue made me squirm. But there’s something so damned wrong with it. It feel like it might suddenly break out into Lynchian nightmarish unreality at any point. Which is at the very least a novel approach to the hoariest sitcom setup.

A number of people suggested to me after the disgraceful embarrassment of Derren Brown’s lottery Event that this may be part of his building up to something. That he may have gone in this direction for a reason, with the intention of a big reveal at the end of the series.

I wasn’t convinced. His act has always consisted of performing regular magic tricks with the current vogue of mentalism patter over the top. His act has always been about the grand misdirection of stating his effects are achieved through suggestion, hypnotism, and other baloney, while quietly palming the card. He has always implied that there’s something scientifically verifiable about all manner of woo-woo bullshit, while proclaiming his wishes to denounce woo-woo bullshit. This hypocrisy just seemed to reach a new, grotesque depth with the lottery episode, promoting utter rubbish like automatic writing, and talking complete and utter nonsense about statistics.

But then this week’s episode, so stark-ravingly stupefying, has gone some way toward convincing me that these optimistic people might be right. Because at one point this evening Brown uttered the words, “the energy”.

His absolute adoption of the vocabulary of the snake oil salesmen and conmen seems a step farther than I can believe he would ever go. This evening’s episode was a slow build up to a farcical attempt to cripple the nation with a magic film. To fill in the 45 minutes before this, Brown rehashed a bunch of tricks we’ve seen him do again and again, each with his flare and showmanship. The Hamleys giraffe trick was utterly ridiculous and great fun. From the moment he did his idiotic mime at the start it was numbingly obvious he was setting up a giraffe-based pay-off. But of course it doesn’t matter how much you decorate a toy shop with giraffe patterns, it won’t have a greater influence over someone’s choice for a present for a child they know, than their own knowledge of what that child would like. The giant giraffe with the correct name on it is a great punchline, and it’s a beautifully performed trick. But it’s a trick. Why? Because if Brown’s stated methods worked, he’d be working for universities teaching these extraordinary breakthroughs to academics.

This is underlined by the trick with the man selected from the audience by a magic tune. (A tune that won’t affect viewers at home, magically!) Everyone knows that’s a trick. A brilliant one with so many reveals: the choice of chair, pen, order of cubes, and the ticket stub. All superb. But here we’re not being asked to believe that he caused those choices in someone, because he at no point did he attempt any of his “perception without awareness”, and the notion that the tune could be involved is too laughable. It was, rather, an undisguised fantastic piece of magic. And the same principle is applied elsewhere.

More peculiar was the homeless bit. Decorating a mall in “suggestions” he extorted members of the public for huge amounts of money. He claims. But he obviously didn’t, because if it were possible to achieve this effect by a few signs in some shop windows, PEOPLE WOULD ALWAYS BE DOING IT. (Insert your own smug remark about how shops trick you into spending blah blah – but that’s based on the shopper’s greed, not their sudden involuntary altruism.) The idea that a man would give his shoes away because he walked past a shop window with a shoe-based pun on it is berserk. And of course for any of those people to have appeared on the programme they would have to have signed off on permission for their faces to be shown, and thus know what happened. So forget the idea that they were innocent passers-by who unwittingly emptied their wallets. (Oh, and what was with Brown’s joke at the end about buying a new pair of shoes? We’d just been shown a guy giving him new shoes. Brown wasn’t the one who lost any. Um, huh?) The premise beneath it is that yes, of course, we’re all influenced all the time. I find my choice of sandwich filling can completely change by the choice of the person in front of me in the queue. So we believe in that bit, and are asked to extend this to an absurd degree. For some reason.

So we are being primed for this big finish, where he will cause people watching to become stuck in their chairs. Throughout there’s childish faux-subliminal flashes of Victorian-style drawings of people fixed to their chairs. This is emphasised by Brown’s explanations that subliminal flashes aren’t being used, and his mentioning of how such things are feared and outlawed. These flashes aren’t subliminal, of course, because otherwise we wouldn’t have seen them. They were displayed for long enough not to constitute a violation of the rules, but quickly enough for people to believe they had spotted something they weren’t meant to – more misdirection.

Then we get that hilarious VT of the testing process for the creation of the broadcast video. Six subjects shown videos, with extreme results! One man in a trance! Another man with his arms stuck in the air! What is this potent force he’s discovered?! It’s obviously too stupid to even bother discussing how pointless such a trial would be. However, what’s more important is to once again observe that Brown is teaching the direct opposite of scientific scrutiny and intelligent method – reinforcing stupid, unscientific thinking, and endorsing the lunacy of alternative therapists and their brethren.

The video itself must have made Brown and his production team roll around on the floor laughing. “So, some rotating lines on the screen then?” “Oh, with some plinky plonky music over the top!” “YES!” Gales of laughter. And finished.

My housemate Graham suggested to me earlier in the week that Brown may follow the video by asking people to call in to report if they got stuck. I felt horrified, and said, “No. No way. He wouldn’t sink that low? There would then be literally no way to differentiate his act from Uri Geller’s.”

There isn’t. Unless, as the optimists suggest, he’s building up to something.

Uri Geller used to go on live television, draw a picture on a piece of paper concealed from the camera, and then BEAM IT INTO OUR MINDS. He would stare at the camera with those ghastly beady eyes and shriek that we were picking up the picture, and we should draw it ourselves. He would then reveal a picture of a house or a sailboat or a tree, and the viewing public would be asked to call in to say if they had drawn the same thing. He’d do the same with his claims that he would start watches and clocks and bend cutlery by shouting, “START!” or “BEND!” at the camera and into our houses. And the result would be the same each time. The switchboards would be “melting under the number of calls” or whichever hyperbole. They’d take three calls on air all of which confirmed, “YES! I drew a house!” Or, “YES! My watch started! It hasn’t worked for forty years!” And this would be proof of his powers, and the programme would end/move on.

The two different tricks used different methods. People tend to draw houses, boats or trees. And those that don’t, well, guess what! They don’t call in. The starting watches is slightly different, but old watches will sometimes start working again if warmed up and jolted, which is always part of the process (“Grip it tightly in your hand!”). But the same principle applies. The vast, vast majority of watches won’t start, the tiny minority that do call in. And if you’ve got, say, twelve phone lines at your TV station, you can “melt” them with thirteen calls. Of course, neither of these requires causing a physical manifestation to have occurred for a viewer. However, it demonstrates that you can create the implication of national success by taking very few calls. Geller relied on it.

The point being, you need three or four calls out of your audience of millions to appear successful. Brown took, what, four calls? Last week’s episode got around 5 million viewers. Without the “how to win the lottery” pull I imagine this week will have dropped. Let’s be pessimistic and say he got 4 million viewers. To seem effective, let’s say he takes five calls. That’s 0.000125% of your audience. I’m not a qualified statistician but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that’s not a representative proportion. Let’s be more fair. Let’s say that the station received, say, 10,000 calls in those few minutes. That’s a big number – the sort of number that would look great in the news. “Ten thousand try to call Channel 4 to report Brown’s paralysing success” the credulous press might say. That big number, that would remain a minuscule quarter of one percent of the people watching. 0.25%

The point is, asking the public to phone in to demonstrate success is a whopping waste of time, and an extremely effective means of creating the illusion of success.

But, still you cry, what about that quarter of one percent? They got stuck, right? I truly believe he could have announced he had a video that would make the viewers fly, and received this many calls reporting success. Idiots are in enormous supply. One thing Brown is correct about is that people are open to suggestion – it’s all there is to hypnosis. Simply telling someone they’re hypnotised is all you need to achieve a stage hypnotist’s pratting around. Tell people they’re stuck in their chair, and stuck some will get.

Why do I not believe that his video could cripple someone? Firstly, he’d never be allowed to broadcast it. As he said himself, he can’t control our minds. What he can do is take advantage of stupid people. As he introduced the video he said lots of things that people associate with hypnosis. Telling us that we feel heavy, telling us to slow our breathing, and so on. His voice pattern changed, the camera zoomed in on his face, he stared directly into our eyes and told us to relax. Lots of “ooh, I’m being hypnotised” cues. Then he showed a spinning pattern. Then some people in a studio pretended they couldn’t stand up.

But the key moment was when Brown declared that those sitting nearer the screen would likely be more affected. He states earlier that if others in a room can stand, someone else is more likely to be stuck because of “the energy”. “…which we’ve found concentrates the energy on you.” At this point it all snaps. At this point, when this man starts using terms like that, surely, SURELY, he has to be building up to some grand reveal in the final episode? “Energy”. What “energy”? The light from the screen? The heat the screen generates? The gravitational force exerted by the Earth and Moon? I cannot believe that Brown, a man who wrote a book debunking such bullshit, is really willingly embracing these terms without a larger motive.

I’m willing to sadly accept that he may have sold out on all his principles for the sake of upping his act and thus gaining more screen time. Last week’s lottery show was evidence of that. But I cannot accept that he has suddenly become a man who says “The energies work better if you’re nearer to the screen.”

EDIT: And how could I forget?! The beautiful explanation that the video won’t work at a lower resolution, so if it’s posted on the internet it won’t work. Um, Derren. It’s not 1997. The web can stream videos in HD, likely at a higher quality than the average television. Really, come along.

I’ve gone on before (but a long time ago) about the difference between a magician tricking you, and lying to you. But to quickly reiterate: Magicians aren’t telling the truth, clearly. If I tell you I’ve written a prediction in an envelope, or that I’m producing a ball from your ear, I’m tricking you. It’s not true. But you know that. You know that I’m not psychic, hopefully you don’t believe that anyone is psychic. In fact, the very worst outcome imaginable would be for my trick to legitimise the conmen and charlatans who will steal your money. So instead we enter into this contract. You know I’m not going to tell you the truth, and you’re going to be okay with that. However, this opens an interesting door. How big a lie can I tell?

Say my trick is to know the word someone in the audience is thinking of. If I tell you that I’m not using a stooge in the audience, and I’m using a stooge in the audience, is that okay? The effect is very impressive if I can appear to somehow know the word an unwitting audience member is thinking of. It’s rather extraordinarily less impressive if I can know the word my friend and I agreed on before the show. So we seem to have a rule in this contract that says that while I’ll deceive you, trick you, I won’t openly lie to you about the conditions of the trick.

Now, clearly magicians do. Lazy, tedious magicians do this all the time. But I think most people agree that if they learn this is how a magician achieves his effects – says he doesn’t use camera tricks but does use camera tricks – they lose all interest in them. So we have this muddled set of rules. They’re impossible to pin down, but crudely it’s, 1) the audience agrees to be deceived, and 2) the magician agrees to not tell specific sorts of lies.

Derren Brown has made his career out of exploiting the ambiguity of this. He spins these patters about influencing people’s minds, conditioning, and suggestion. It’s all patter to disguise doing what I think is a perfectly ordinary magic trick. Which is fine, whatever, who cares? It’s a neat way of achieving a great effect.

But is it? I think he’s doing something worse. By using explanations (and he sells these as explanations, the purported method by which he achieves his effects) it seems to me he reinforces uncritical and dangerous thinking. By saying he can make someone choose a card with silliness like “the power of suggestion” or whatever else, and then going on to “show you how I did this” with montages of these claimed suggestions, he gives people enormous reasons to believe in the paranormal, or the grossly and demonstrably unscientific. Derren Brown, through his act, in my opinion reinforces the very people he keeps claiming to wish to expose, the mediums and the psychics who rob from the grieving and the frightened.

So the last time I went through all this I concluded with my despair that after spending most of a programme demonstrating how easily people can be tricked by simple statistics, he couldn’t resist pretending to have genuine powers at the very end, undoing all his work.

The lottery predicting “explanation” show made this look like nothing. He appears to have fully entered this position of neo-medium. It’s devastating.

On Wednesday Derren Brown achieved the remarkable by saying the lottery numbers after the lottery numbers had been announced. He had his prediction made on some ping pong balls, he assures us, but after a meeting with Camelot he was told he could not reveal them before the draw because the BBC has the rights to be the first place to show the winning numbers. If that doesn’t make you laugh out loud, you need to read it again. He asks that we believe it would be against the rules to show any six numbers he chooses, in case they’re the winning numbers on that night’s draw. Er, no. In fact, the closest you could get to breaking the rule of the BBC’s right to broadcast the results first would be to stream that live feed on another channel, which is exactly what he did. He has, of course, every right to show whichever numbers on ping pong balls he desires at any time he chooses. So there’s your first rather enormous problem.

But fine, whatever, if you’re doing a sealed envelope trick you tell the audience that you’ve placed your prediction in a sealed envelope. The reason you do this is obvious – you don’t already know what word/picture/number is going to be picked. Because you aren’t psychic. Brown, and any number of other mentalists, of course attempt to get around this by swapping “psychic” for “able to influence”. It’s the same thing, neither is possible, and by swapping a word you’re of course still doing the same trick. If you weren’t you’d have no reason to hide the prediction in the envelope. And Brown, of course, had no reason to hide the winning numbers before they fell from the lottery machine. He didn’t know them. Because it’s impossible to know the random numbers that emerge from a machine, and your chance of guessing them is 1 in 13,983,816. To put this in perspective, that means if you were able to play the lottery once an hour every hour, all day every day, you’d have to do this for over 1,596 years before you’d match these odds. He didn’t guess the lottery results.

Which means what he did on Wednesday was a very clever trick that gave the impression he did.

What he did on Friday was a horrible exercise in preying on people’s ignorance and poor understanding of maths and science to trick them into believing in things that aren’t true.

It begins with his pooh-poohing the LUDICROUS suggestions people have put forward, scoffing at the madness that he might have the technology to imprint ping pong balls remotely, or use LED projection, or many other methods that would clearly work very easily. You think THAT! You idiot! No no, it’s none of those boring ordinary and practical ways that I, a mere television magician, couldn’t possibly know how to do! (It’s a small wonder he didn’t reinforce this scoffing by explaining that he can’t even set the VCR.) It’s by this far more believable method he’s going to tell us over the next hour.

This begins with a claim that by causing people to be in a state of fear he can increase their suggestibility. Which might be true if you’re frightening someone into agreeing with you, but it doesn’t in any way allow someone to cause you to choose box 4 instead of 3. Again, I’m not interested in spoiling tricks. But there’s a very simple way of having the mouse card be in front of the last empty box which doesn’t involve controlling her decisions in a meaningless way.

This is then repeated with a pre-taped sequence in which he does a familiar trick on a larger scale. He has a man stamp on cups, one of which is supposed to conceal a knife. It’s an old trick done in a new way. It doesn’t rely on inducing fear or any other nonsense. Brown does it very well, blends it with another prediction trick, and then has a nice reveal at the end with a mouse. It’s great stuff.

Then we come back to the studio and we’re told that this works on humans, but can it work on a machine? Well, no. It can’t. Because, firstly, it doesn’t work on humans. And even if it did, machines don’t have emotional responses. So why did we go through all that? For no reason at all. He moves on.

It becomes about coin tossing. He tricks a room of gullible people into believing that a crowd supporting a coin toss can change the result. But aha! He was tricking them and us, it’s not really true! It is, instead, “deep maths”. (Google this term and you’ll get a lot of results about Derren Brown, and not a lot else.) But he can’t explain it now, there’s no time, far better to simply scare the audience with a technical term after muddling them about coins who enjoying cheering. So of course this must have something to do with how he, and we, can predict the lottery? Except, um, no. The lottery isn’t decided by two people’s independent choices, one mathematically supposed to outdo the other. It’s a machine randomly spitting out ping pong balls. We’re moving on again.

And finally, over half way through, we’re onto the explanation he’s going to stick with. He keeps implying the earlier tricks are relevant, but never saying how. But it’s now about “the wisdom of crowds”. This, states Brown, is the genuine real proven definitely true thing where the shared opinion of a crowd is more likely to be correct than that of a single expert. (Oh no, please no, please don’t be attempting to reinforce the death of the expert!) So ignoring anything that appears to be in James Surowiecki’s book (I’ve not read it, but this extract appears to entirely contradict what followed), he gathered together 24 people and had them guess at the lottery results.

This process is then drawn out multiple times, with the group taking part in exercises like “automatic writing”. Brown again plays his clever card here. Rather than using this in the traditional way mediums and psychics do – claiming it’s a spirit controlling what you write – he tells a half-truth about the way it ‘works’, and then claims that it has access to some special magical part of people’s subconscious, or whatever rubbish it was, that leads them to make better… what? Guesses of numbers they clearly can’t know? This angle on automatic writing is nothing novel – despite there being not a shred of evidence that it has therapeutic value or gains access to people’s inner thoughts, many use it in this faux-legitimate way for supposedly reputable reasons. Read about that here. By using this method his group manages to guess four of the six numbers, which is proof! Proof that a pre-recorded videotape of footage can show people appear to do this. Maybe they even did! They had roughly 1 in a 1000 chance. It’s not improbable. It’s unlikely, of course. So armed with this, and this crowd whose averaged predictions can’t possibly fail, he repeats it and rushes to his live studio to show their predictions match the lottery results.

Although for some mysterious reason Brown was unable to tell them what their predictions were! He had to write them in secret and conceal them immediately. And since he’d got a group of 24 people to guess six random numbers each and then taken an average of their results, they could have no way of knowing what they were themselves.

So we’re back to where we started. He hid the balls from the viewer, and indeed he hid them from those he claims predicted them. Why? Because it’s impossible to predict the lottery, and “the wisdom of crowds” doesn’t apply when there’s no wisdom involved in their selection. The wisdom of crowds, should it be true at all, depends on people being able to make informed guesses. Not pick random numbers out the air. Because you cannot be informed on which balls will win the lottery, because it’s random. We already know this, but we had to sit through an hour of a man lying about ways in which it might be possible. A man using the half-truths, the slivers of science we think we know, and those gut feelings we wish were true (we all believed it together, so it happened!), to reinforce people in their non-rational, non-scientific thinking. He endorsed the things he has purported he wishes to expose. He has previously made claims about wanting to reveal the evils of those who prey on the grieving and vulnerable, and then made an hour of TV that reinforces the lies they use to achieve this. He seems to be becoming one of them. In fact, it’s worse than becoming one of them. He’s one of them pretending to be one of us.

He then delivers his routine about how he could have fixed the national lottery, which begins well enough but then descends into mad absurdity as he says so matter-of-factly that he’d have to “hypnotise the security guards” as if that’s the thing that of course one can do. But it’s funny, and he’s a scamp. And then he says the first true thing of the whole hour. “Or maybe it’s just a trick.” And the programme ends.

And of course it’s just a trick. BECAUSE YOU CAN’T PREDICT THE LOTTERY. You can’t predict it by inducing fear, or cheering it on, or taking the average of guesses from people closing their eyes when they write numbers down. And why not? Because it’s random. It’s random. It’s random.

Derren Brown went to grotesque lengths to make people more stupid tonight. He celebrated the vulnerability of his audience, revelling in the ambiguous zone in which his work exists. He reinforced beliefs in things that are demonstrably untrue.

Obviously there’s not much to say about University Challenge that hasn’t been said ten thousand times before. Perhaps the most interesting aspect for me has been the change from a programme where I stare in amazement at how much the contestants know, to worrying for the future of our planet by how little they know. I should stress I still know far less than they do, but my expectations for what a university’s four chosen representative students should know has gone up. I also have some quite strict rules I would bring in to prevent 60 year old contestants currently studying for their ninth PhD from appearing. It’s flat-out cheating. Having forty extra years, 200% more life, than most contenders is completely imbalanced. Logic would suggest you just have a team of aged professors currently studying for extra qualifications. So to prevent this, when I’m in charge I’ll either institute an age cap of 30 (thus discriminating against myself as much as anyone else), or a maximum combined age for a team that would force them to have children on the team if they picked an old fogey.

Only Connect is more intriguing. It’s astonishingly difficult, with teams whose brains make me stare open-mouthed in amazement. It’s presented by Victoria Coren and her 1970s hair dryer advert hair – someone I find equally likeable and irritating, such that I get very confused. She has a tough job, presenting an intensely hard quiz show with a light-hearted attitude to an empty studio. Lacking an appreciative audience certainly gives it a BBC 4 atmosphere, but also makes for some extremely awkward gaps after she delivers a crappy joke with an over-confident air. However, what makes it quite so engrossing is that not only are the questions mind-bogglingly tough, but the teams mostly get the answers correct. These are people with vast chasms filled with knowledge in their heads, and the ability to apply it laterally. A typical question. What do the following have in common?

Epistle To The Ephesians, De Profundis

Need a third clue? You’ll lose a point.

Don Quixote

A fourth? You’re down to one point now.

Pilgrim’s Progress

As you may have worked out, they were all written while the author was in prison.

Or how about this one?

This team of mathematicians got it at this point. I did not. Alt text for the answer!

Oh, go on, one more. What’s the fourth in this sequence?

In this week’s episode I not only managed to get a round 2 question correct with just the first two clues (not the above one, I should stress, which is from last week), but also one neither team got. I immediately promoted myself to World’s Most Handsome Genius. Then regained perspective as I sat staring in confusion for the rest of the episode, drool hanging from my lower lip. Well, not the whole episode: the final round in which names or phrases have their vowels removed, and then the remaining consonants awkwardly spaced – I can do that bit. Someone should have me on their team for that bit.

And Only Connect brings us to Eggheads. It is the perfect yang to Only Connect’s yin. It’s the most peculiarly broken quiz show of all time.

The contrast with Only Connect (only made possible by the wonders of watching TV via the iPlayer) is startling. This is a programme in which five of the stupidest people in the universe attempt to out-general knowledge five of the most competent quiz show contestants of all time, being asked questions that oscillate wildly between being so embarrassingly easy as to be contemptuous, and requiring specific precision knowledge about a specialist subject. Although it leans by a stretch toward the former.

It works like this: A team of five take it in turns to answer questions in a given category, competing against one of the “Eggheads” – people who spent the ’90s hoovering up money from every televised quiz show until they were contracted to this. So say the subject is “Politics”, the five will choose which of them is best suited (read: least unsuited) for the topic, and then pick which Egghead they believe to be poorest in that area. They then take it in turns to answer three multiple choice questions, with the person who gets most right qualifying for the final round. Should both get all three right, it’s sudden death questions without multiple choices. There’s four rounds like this, in order to ensure there’s at least one member of the contenders in the final, where the process is repeated, this time as a team game, in the subject of “general knowledge”.

I’ve watched maybe ten episodes. In most of them the team had just one contestant left to compete against the five knowledge-engorged quiz experts. It’s laughable.

It’s beyond laughable. It’s almost cruel. Of course, television quizzes have abandoned cruelty as a theme in the last few years (with the exception of their Queen, Weakest Link, somehow still going). Perhaps watching people be mocked and bullied isn’t as appealing during a financial downturn. (See Dragons’ Den for the most startling change here – season 1 was a gallery of shit-stained peasants being brought in front of the cruel Kings and Queens to beg for their money, season 7 is reasonably smart people presenting almost-decent ideas to a kindly crowd of avuncular investors.) But Eggheads has no intention of being mean. It’s so cup-of-tea-and-a-jumper that it could be Whitely-era Countdown.

Bumbling idiot presenter Dermot Murnaghan desperately struggles to suggest that the players stand a chance in hell. “Ooh, so close there Samantha! If only you’d known how to speak without hitting yourself in the face you could have squeezed out a victory there.” He then attempts to make a joke, which comes out wrong, and then Alan Partridges himself deeper into a hole until he tails off mumbling incoherently. The Eggheads go on to win.

I never saw it in its early years, the BBC having been repeating 2007 episodes until this week, but I wonder if the wretched smugness from the Eggheads when answering questions is a vestige of the programme being conceived in 2003, at the height of quiz cruelty. But smug they are as they not only give the answer to their question, but the surrounding events and other related facts. Clearly contestants are asked to do the same, or at least to show their working as they throw an imaginary dart into one of the three answers, or the programme would be about seven minutes long. “Well Dermot, I know it’s not ‘maths’ because I’ve never heard of that. It could be ‘onion’ – I know I’ve seen those on television. No, no. I’m going to say ‘Westminster Abbey’. Westminster Abbey is a root vegetable commonly eaten with cheese in sandwiches.”

Here you can see Ali struggling with the Literature question: What was the name of the dog in the Famous Five books. This, like so many of the questions, seems as if it belongs on a CBBC quiz, where the audience of 9 and 10 year olds would scream out the answer. However, Ali doesn’t know. Nothing can do this more justice than a transcript:

Dermot: What is the name of George’s dog in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five adventures? Is it Timmy, Billy or Freddy?
Ali: Well, I’m not really sure. But something’s drawing me to Freddy. I think it does sound like quite a doggy sort of name, so I’m going to go with Freddy.
Dermot: Did you ever read them?
Ali: Um, no I didn’t. I think my mum tried to get me to read them but I never did.
Dermot: It’s Timmy. It’s Timmy, and I bet you would have got that Pride & Prejudice one.
Ali: I know I woulda! Cos I’ve seen the film.

The most mystifying thing about the programme is the belief that there’s any tactic in going first or second to start receiving the alternating questions in each round. Here it seems to stray into the dream-like insanity of Deal Or No Deal, with the presenter reinforcing the idea that there’s in some way a risk to be taken by going second.

Each contestant has three questions. Getting more than the other means you win. Going first or second simply decides which three questions you’ll be asked. And yet that previous exchange continues:

Dermot: It’s a bit of a gamble. I mean, it can pay real dividends if the Egghead slips up. Don’t let me put any of you off going second coming up later, but this time if you get your first one wrong the Egghead has the advantage, and CJ’s really taken full advantage there.

NO THEY DON’T! Argh! This idiocy arises because if the Egghead goes first, he can eliminate the player before they get to their third question. Should the Egghead get his first two correct, and the player get one of the first two correct, then when the Egghead answers his third question correctly the round is over. If the player goes first, gets one right and one wrong, they then get their third question to attempt to draw level, before the Egghead goes on to beat them anyway. Going first, the player has an opportunity to draw level, with the possibility that the Egghead gets it wrong. Going second, there’s the possibility that the Egghead gets it wrong, creating the opportunity for the player to draw level. No advantage is gained or lost. The lack of necessity to ask the player the third question is simply an unknown when the player goes first.

Okay, right, I know – no one else cares.

But Eggheads remains this giant peculiarity. Deliberately pitting the stupid against the smart, and then acting surprised when the stupid lose. The £1000 prize rolls over every time a team loses, and to emphasise quite how daft the whole thing is, in the series 7 episodes being shown, the Eggheads had won the previous 58 episodes in a row. Which makes the decision to then suddenly leap to showing episode 45 of series 10 a little odd. Did they lose the remaining series 7 episodes in a fire? Did no one ever win, and the programme curl up into a weird twisted ball and become unbroadcastable? For some stupid reason I need to know!

In conclusion, watch Only Connect. It’s great.

The programme, in which some of the world’s biggest creatures (elephant, giraffe, whale, etc) are dissected, is absolutely fascinating. But watching it feels like a fight to ignore Evans and his about-to-cry face saying things like, “Once upon a time…” when trying to explain evolutionary theory. But this is as nothing when compared to his constant apologising for the programme’s existence.

This is never worse than in the elephant’s episode, where he implores with the audience to forgive the existence of every moment of it. Phrases like, “Of course it’s a complete tragedy that the elephant has died…” NO IT ISN’T! It is in no way a “tragedy” that this animal has died. It would be very sad if it were your pet elephant, or if it were the last elephant in the world, but it was not. It was a zoo elephant that was too ill to stay alive, and so was put down. And now, brilliantly, it’s here on this programme for the public to witness something that’s usually carried on in private, a dissection of such an incredible animal.

Evans demonstrates how out of place he is in this programme when he’s asked by a couple of kids, around 10, about something hanging off the side of the whale they’re dissecting in N. Ireland. Is it skin or plastic they want to know. And suddenly he comes alive! Enthusiastically he runs over, grabs a piece of it, and explains why the whale’s skin is flaking off, illustrating it for them with examples of how their own skin can flake off. He’s spirited and clear, and involves the children. He’s a children’s presenter, and he’s great at it. Really great. But this is on late at night on Channel 4, for adults.

Sorry, sorry! Sorry it died! Sorry we’re dissecting it! Sorry I’m here! Sorry! Sorry!

I wish this programme, so brazenly called “Inside Nature’s Giants”, was proud of itself. Rather than appalled.

Thank goodness it also features Richard Dawkins explaining the biology, as he seems to have the confidence in his viewer that he or she might not be a moron. He’s used all too briefly, but makes a big difference when he appears. And it’s ultimately a great show. There’s a tinge of that frustrating Channel 4 tendancy to imply this is about grossing people out, rather than educating – something they did horrendously during the human autopsy programmes a few years ago. As intestines spill out, there are the shots of audience members looking horrified. But despite these weird flaws, ignoring the nonsense, it’s still well worth watching.

You can watch all the episodes here.

Networks and studios’ frantic actions to keep clips of their TV shows from appearing on sites like YouTube and DailyMotion are well documented, most famously with Viacom suing Google for the astonishing amounts of free advertising YouTube was offering The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, helping both programmes to become international phenomenons. Understandable Viacom were furious at millions of people worldwide seeing short clips of their programmes and developing an enthusiasm to see more. It was a disaster for them, with other countries around the world recognising the online popularity and purchasing broadcast rights. Surely no amount of money from Google could ever make up for such abhorrent results of piracy. But that’s an aside.

Better Off Ted is a single camera sitcom about a big pharma company, Veridian Dynamics, specifically focusing on a small group of characters in an R&D department. Jay Harrington’s Ted is the straight man to a mix of eccentric scientists, evil bosses and kleptomaniac colleagues, keeping a cool head as his team attempts to develop living balls of meat, jetpacks, and long-term cryogenic chambers. What makes a programme that could so easily descend into the wacky keep safely in the witty is Ted’s calming influence both over the characters, and in turn the writing of the show itself. His steady platform counters the ludicrous water around him.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect, only six episodes in, is the warmth of the relationships. Malcolm Barrett and Jonathan Slavin play two scientists who so very clearly love each other deeply, evoking the fond, comfortable affection of a loving elderly married couple. Andrea Anders’ Linda manages to portray an adoration for Ted as both overtly sexual and enormously meaningful at the same time, with Ted’s inability to reciprocate (he’s “used up” his office affair) somehow completely charming. Even Portia de Rossi’s evil boss manages to exude far more depth than your typical one-dimensional baddy boss character. Rather than being a mean lady with a heart of gold, or a decent person trapped in a difficult job, or whatever other excuse TV normally uses for having their negative character be acceptable, Veronica is far more complex. She is evil. Most of the time. Other times she buries an act of kindness under seven other acts of evil. Not because she’s really a good person, but because she’s a complicated person with both good and evil aspects.

This is possible because BOT (snigger) doesn’t worry about the rules of reality. It’s fascinating that by freeing itself of the laws of the universe, creating a world where people can be frozen solid and survive, or a security system refuses to recognise black people, or blobs of meat can live if fed and cared for, it manages to be far more human as a result. That security system is a fantastic example. I can’t think of a comedy that has handled issues of racial discrimination more brilliantly, and more brazenly. The separate water fountains moment had me gasp out loud in shock – it was astonishing.

Each episode also contains one spoof commercial. Shot in the style of a big pharma ad promoting all-round loveliness and care for the environment, people, employees, etc, they perfectly spoof the bullshit. The one that appeared in episode two (the first episode’s advert was oddly poor compared to the rest) makes me cry with laughter. As spoof adverts, they would of course be the most superb way of promoting the show online. Which leads me to an interesting tale.

They’re not online. Instead there’s some half-arsed equivalents that don’t appear to get the joke the televised versions are using on a perfunctory website. In fact, each seems to repeat chunks of the other, and none are funny. It’s a horrible representation of a simply fantastic programme. So I thought I would illustrate my point by uploading a couple of them to YouTube. I realise this would be in violation of the copyright terms, but since my motivation was to promote the show, I somehow got over that. Having searched for any legitimate version, I donned my criminal mask and hat and sent them uploading. Incredibly, before they had even been posted on the site, they were flagged as violating Fox’s copyright. (The show is made by Fox and aired on ABC.) I have no idea what the technology is behind this, but somehow the one minute long clips were being correctly identified and banned from appearing. Since YouTube has countless tens of thousands of videos being added at any one time, this can’t have been an eagle-eyed human vetting the content, but rather some sort of terrifying computer program. However it was done, it was made sure that no one was going to bloody well promote that show – no sirree bob.

What a silly place they’ve all got themselves into. So desperate to stick their greedy claws into everything they forget that the purpose of a television programme is for people to watch it, thus selling lots of advertising. Fighting against all forms of promotion (and let’s be clear here – even if someone were posting entire episodes online, these would still serve to raise awareness of the show, thus increasing the potential audience for the next legitimately broadcast episode) is pretty awesomely stupid.

Fortunately, the creators of Better Off Ted aren’t awesomely stupid. In fact, they’re just plain awesome, as is proven by this fantastic Veridian Dynamics commercial they released online after it was learned that the show’s finale episode had been bumped off air to make room for Obama’s speech:

Utterly brilliant.

I’m not arguing that Red Dwarf was ever amazing. It was always cheesy and aiming for primitive laughs. However, it was invariably charming. Performing science fiction in three-camera sets in front of a studio audience was a mammoth task, and the restrictions this imposed forced both creativity within a tight budget and confined space, and a focus on the relationships between the main cast. While there were duffers, there were also episodes like Polymorph, Backwards, Quarantine, and the touching Back To Reality that managed to cram in huge amounts of plot into 28 minutes. The four year gap between series six and seven saw much change, Naylor not able to capture the tone that had made the late 80s/early 90s’ episodes so fun. So the ten year chasm between series eight and this brief reprise, Back To Earth, didn’t bode well.

The first and possible most confusing mistake was to lose the audience laughter. There are two extremely large reasons why this wasn’t a good idea. First, giving the show freedom from the constraints of the theatrical sets lets the writing loosen, and the imagination behind it get more lazy. Second, and perhaps more significantly, the entire thing was written and performed as if expecting to have audience laughter. Through all three episodes there were awkward silences after the punchlines, the script designed to appeal to a cheery studio crowd, and delivered by a cast who must have been expecting it. Since there wasn’t a single funny line in all three episodes, the onus put on the viewer to fill these gaps was extremely uncomfortable viewing.

Naylor’s script was a horrible mess. Given ten years to come up with a story, and perhaps even a few jokes, that the best he could manage was a reference to how there’s always coins down the back of a sofa, or how people forget to put DVDs back in their boxes, is a little sad. The cast spent the first episode delivering lines that were designed to evoke memories of their twenty-one year old characters, and ended up feeling like Red Dwarf karaoke. So Cat said the sort of thing Cat used to say, you know, about how he cared about his hair. And Rimmer was a bit fastidious about something, and annoyed by Lister’s being gross. Oh, and that Kryten, eh? Remember him? I’ve no idea if they killed off Holly in series eight, but he/she was absent in either form, and entirely unmentioned. There’s a story about a big squid thing in the ship’s last water tank, which they attempt to investigate but instead it attacks them.

However, the big plot was to be their discovery of their fictional nature when a dimension-jumping portal goes wrong and sends them to our own present-day Earth. They appear in an electronics store, after falling out of television screens showing highlights from the forthcoming new Red Dwarf three-parter, Back To Earth. Do you see?

As if the League of Gentlemen’s film had never been made, the characters learn that they are part of a TV show called Red Dwarf, which may well be about to show its last ever episodes. Realising that their mortality relies on the continuation of the programme, they set about trying to find the show’s creator to beg him for more life.

Reading the back of the extraordinarily comprehensive promotional box for the forthcoming DVD (there’s a joke about how VHS replaces DVD in the future which makes little sense, but instead feels like the words of a sad, confused man who wishes it was still the 80s) they learn that they first visit a comic shop, on a journey that will eventually end in their deaths. It’s as they walk into the comics store that the most distressingly sad element of the episodes becomes clear: Naylor’s created a fictional universe where people still care about his show.

The shop is packed with Red Dwarf merchandise, like no comic shop anywhere in the world is. People are just stoked about the show’s return on the Dave channel. And when the four characters from the programme walk into his shop, the manager is completely nonplussed by their appearance. They explain that they’re from the TV show, and he says something about dimensions and is fine with that. Huh? Blather, blather. They then make their way to the set of Coronation Street, where they’ve heard Craig Charles now works, and meet up with the confused actor. From there they find the creator of the show, who isn’t Doug Naylor (which would have at least made some modicum of sense), but is instead yet another part of the utterly nonsensical Blade Runner referencing.

Throughout all three episodes there are nods toward the film. Not spoofs, or pastiches, but simply stuff that’s in Blade Runner. Sets are replicated, characters are dressed to look like Scott’s characters, and Cat makes origami objects that he leaves everywhere. When confronting their creator, who I guess was meant to be like Dr. Eldon Tyrell, he explains that he was inspired by the movie when he first made Red Dwarf, and was again inspired by it in these final episodes. He tells them how it ends for them, and we see a dramatic Blade Runner-referencing chase sequence where they’re all shot falling through a shop window, surrounded by mannequins. They then kill him, and discover that by typing on his typewriter they can write their own future. But then they can’t, and then they realise that they’re probably not really there, and then go back to Red Dwarf. Er.

This is not before Lister meets Kochanski (played by Chloë Annett again, and not Clare Grogan, damn their eyes) dressed as Rachael from Blade Runner, despite the creator guy being dead, and what? Seriously, what? Why is it still referring to the damned film? Absolutely bugger all made a moment of sense. Oh, talking of which, when they meet Charles on the Coronation St set, he tells them that the script for the third episode is about to arrive. A show that’s still unfilmed, waiting for the actors to receive scripts, that already has point of sale displays in electronics shops and the DVD cases printed? What?

So it turns out the squid that attacked them was another despair squid. You know, from Back To Reality – Red Dwarf’s truly great episode. The one where they find themselves back on Earth, learning that all of Red Dwarf was a computer simulation they’d been taking part in, and forcing them to return to empty and unwanted lives. It was bleak, smart, and convincing. When they finally returned to the ship it was an enormous relief. Joss Whedon later repeated the idea in Buffy, when the slayer wakes up to find that she’s in a psychiatric hospital, her superhero existence simply a fantasy. It’s a clever device that plays with your having suspended your disbelief to accept a programme’s more ludicrous elements.

Except this time it was a female despair squid, and “therefore” the ink had caused them to not experience despair, but elation. It was their dreams coming true! But… but this had been about them fighting for their lives, knowing they were about to be written out of existence, and failing to escape. Only Lister had any hope, realising he could find the actor who’d played Kochanski. But it was a sad, miserable hope of making do. No one showed happiness at any point. Bearing in mind their previous desperation to return to Earth, this was even more bizarre – finding themselves home again should surely have caused at least a smile? But their time in the fantasy was spent in fear. If this is Naylor’s understanding of elation, then no wonder the whole thing was so astonishingly unfunny.

Instead it was a sad, lonely fantasy for one man, Doug Naylor creating a world where people still remembered his last TV show. In his fictional Earth there had been ten series of Red Dwarf, and it was a show everyone cared about. Stores promoted his DVD with exuberance, every screen showing the programme; comic shops were packed with memorabilia; and ten year old children on the bus knew who Dave Lister was.

The tragedy is, if he’d only told the truth he could have had a decent story. Imagine the three-parter where the four characters fall out of a television set showing Red Dwarf to a world that’s almost forgotten it. Twenty-one years old, fourteen years since its last decent episode, they’re mostly forgotten characters, sometimes remembered by a subsection of a generation of thirty-sometimes who watched it in their teenage years. Its last chance to come back is a measly three part run on crappy cable channel Dave. They’re fighting for their existence in a world that’s moved on. Then there would be empathy, tragedy, and most of all, honesty. Or, you know, he could have just set it in space with a funny monster, weird happenings on the ship, and a bunch of silly lines for a studio audience to guffaw at. Just… just not what he actually did.

Trying to do Back To Reality again, but this time with a much worse idea (and an obsessive and meaningless desire to replicate Blade Runner) just cannot have been the result of ten years’ thinking. It did nothing to honour the memory of a cute, silly programme that delighted a fourteen year-old me when he stayed up past his bedtime to watch Polymorph, and couldn’t believe he’d found a show that was about science fiction and also comedy. That first episode was such a wonderful moment, a programme I found hilarious (as an adult I find it rather loses that, but remains fun) with monsters and holograms and slobby idiots in spaceships. That’s Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s legacy for me, and I treasure it. They were fine writers, and they made a fine show. Perhaps it’s time to stop trying to make it now.

Here’s the simple reason: the recently reborn Ian McShane as a conflicted King, ruling over a modern nation, Gilboa, a place bearing many similarities with modern North America. Gilboa is in a long and bloody war with the neighbouring Gath. A soldier, formerly a farm worker, called David rescues the king’s son who has been taken hostage by Hath troops, and is welcomed into the king’s courts – in the capital city of Shiloh. Here he becomes involved in the politics of a new city under a new king. There’s war, there’s brilliant dialogue, there’s battling family members, and there’s a backstab every commercial break. It’s beautifully made, McShane is magnificent – bemusing you as to whether he’s Machiavellian, naive, selfish, selfless, murderous or peaceful – and most of all, it’s really damned smart. It’s a remarkable programme, and it should be watched.

That’s the short version. Long version:

When you first study Biblical history, you’re taught the groupings of the various types of books in the Old Testament. It goes: Pentateuch, Historical, Poetry, Major Prophets and Minor Prophets. The best bit of Historical is the “United Kingdom Period”, in both Samuel chapters, 1 Kings 1-11 and Chronicles. It’s when Israel is unified, and the people have clamoured for a king. God’s always warned them away from kings, but by this time there’s no avoiding it, and the cycle of kings and prophets begins. And it all begins in Gilboa, with the prophet Samuel being told by God to anoint Saul. It’s when the soap opera gets interesting, the politics and the relationships equally brutal.

This is where Kings kicks off. King Silas, brought to power partly by financial aid from Silas’ wife’s brother, William Cross, but mostly via the Reverend Ephram Samuels (you’ll see what they did there), inaugurates their new capital city, Shiloh. He tells the crowds of his appointment by God (acknowledging the unpopularity of this subject to the crowds), twenty years earlier as a brutal war came to an end, when butterflies formed a crown on his head. Now, the destroyed cities rebuilt, it’s a new era. He promises a time of prosperity.

Two years later and the war with the Gath continues. It’s a border thing, two nations nipping at each other. A former farm boy, David, is fighting on the front lines. When some soldiers are kidnapped by the Gath, David decides to single-handedly attempt a rescue, aware it will lead to a court martial. He rescues the soldiers, until on the way back across no-mans-land a Gath tank starts firing at them. Allowing the hostages to reach safety, he draws the tank’s fire away, taking meagre cover in a ditch. A rocket launcher fails to hit, and in desperation he takes a rocket shell and throws it at the tank. A perfect hit takes it out. So, it’s a Goliath tank, and he’s David, and it’s fairly heavy-handed.

However, that’s as close as it ever gets to cheesy. A newspaper headline, “David Slays Goliath”, is an obvious pun. It’s also an incongruous one, as the programme by its nature cannot know the story of David and Goliath, since it is the story of David and Goliath. Indeed, it’s the story of 1 Samuel, the rise of King Saul, and his welcoming David into his courts. It just happens to have occurred during a time of widescreen, flat-panel televisions, high-tech warfare, and cellphones.

Silas’ son, Jack, plays the role of Jonathan. I don’t want to spoil an interesting reveal, but he offers a refreshing approach to a particularly controversial interpretation of the man. It will be very interesting to see how the relationship between Jack and David develops as the series goes on – will they become so extremely close as their biblical counterparts?

But the reason to watch Kings is for the quality of the writing, the constantly surprising drama, and just how beautifully it’s shot. It’s not a hackneyed attempt to “update” a Bible narrative. In fact, it would most likely enrage the sorts of Christians who wish all TV would be such things. It’s mature, far more mature than anything else on NBC’s roster. It’s grown up. Like its source material. And despite the story’s themes, there’s more in common with Shakespeare than the Hebrew approach.

Modern Shakespeare is as likely to be corny mush as modern Bible, but Kings doesn’t simply avoid making such mistakes, but rather exemplify how it should always be approached. The dialogue is often richly poetic, switching from contemporary banter into archaic tones. People’s language actively shifts in poignant moments, taking on gravitas, and does so effectively. There are other Shakespearian themes, including a pair of guards who offer comic relief. And peculiarly, without being awful. Their role is not simply to be clowns, but rather to unwittingly change fates.

The role of God is also enormously interesting. The Reverend Samuels is an enormously powerful mind, and a smart, dangerous prophet. At one point in the opening two-parter, he literally delivers a message from God to Silas. And not a message Silas wants to hear.

The real test was episode three, after the two-parter’s explosive start. And it stands it. Less than 42 minutes long, it contains a tremendous amount of story, and feels just as powerful as the feature-length beginnings. If there are to be cracks, they’ve yet to appear. There’s so much more to discuss. Queen Rose’s constant deception that she will not get involved in politics, while she controls so very much with such terrifying precision. Princess Michelle (as Saul’s daughter, Michal). And the commentary on the roles of business in government, and the consequences. So far I’ve not seen anything that represents the Ark of the Covenant, but it surely has to be introduced soon.

I was recently chastised by Kieron for discussing the nature of network television, and the cancellation factor, when discussing a new TV show, but I really believe it’s enormously relevant. Kings has arrived in the second half of the season, and very late into it. It’s not often a good time. And NBC hasn’t had a lot of luck with its big budget output of late. The pilot came in fourth on its opening night, which isn’t a good start at all. And this is a programme that deserves viewers. My fear is that it’s simply on the wrong channel. This belongs on HBO, it looks and feels like HBO, and kudos to NBC for achieving that. But something that HBO and Showtime do that no other channels offer, is to develop programmes that achieve middling ratings. Their programmes celebrated as all-time greats did not bolt out of the gate. I fear for Kings on NBC – they’re not a network that’s proven capable at nurturing potential, and while I think Kings will complete its initial run, if it doesn’t build the audience it deserves, it won’t come back in October. I want this one, so long as it maintains the opening quality, so everyone damn well watch it.

Whedon came up with the concept during a visit to the toilet while having lunch with star Eliza Dusku, and from the evidence it really does seem like one wee’s worth of idea. So rather than offer any content, instead the episode was a series of vague questions to be answered, presumably over as many episodes as Fox will pay for. Which I’m doubtful will ever be more than thirteen.

Episode one unfortunately went with as hoary a theme as you could imagine. A child has been kidnapped, and Echo is to be the hostage negotiator. Lordy. But what makes Whedon shows so great is taking routine situations, and putting in surprise twists (even if that surprise twist does, more often than not, tend to be killing one of the main characters without warning), and his imaginative dialogue. Dollhouse had neither. It was by the numbers CSI mediocrity, without a moment of fresh or inspired banter. It was just bizarre in its banality.

However, it’s been made abundantly clear by everyone involved that episode one was not the show at its best. Fox interference, rewrites, reshoots, and all the usual pilot faffing around. Episode two, we were promised, would show the programme in its true light.

There’s no question that the second episode is a dramatic improvement, in so much as it’s not the televisual equivalent of a coma. There’s a lot more going on, and certainly the story of The Middleman wanting to hunt down and kill a human is far more original. (Even if this, astonishingly, is yet another mysterious group doing something mysterious that we aren’t yet to know about.) But sadly the writing is frequently embarrassing. It’s like a pastiche of Whedon – like one of those Scifi shows that last half a season and try to have the witty exchanges without the wit. Last year’s horrendous reboot of Flash Gordon was obviously massively worse than Dollhouse, but the cringe-inducing chatter was woefully similar. And “cern the diff” was not the worst. Each scene in the first half seems to begin with someone walking into a room and announcing the central premise of the show. “Hello everybody, we’re in a place that rents out humans with imprinted brains! Do you have that file?”

Remarkably, it even manages to make the fantastic Mark Sheppard’s appearance objectionable. Sheppard, who I believe is contractually obliged to appear in all television programmes at least once (he’s currently appearing in Leverage, Battlestar Galactica, Burn Notice, and now Dollhouse, all on air simultaneously), is for reasons impossible to begin to guess at, speaking in an American accent. Well, that’s a strong way to put it. Here he’s speaking in possibly the most embarrassing American accent in broadcast TV history. It’s agony. Just why?

Throwing out some answers straight away was a good idea. Letting us know a bit of history to Echo’s handler, Acker’s face, and giving us something for Echo to remember, at least let there be some point to it all. But the show is still buried beneath its poor central premise. That the Actives have no personality and no relationships (the latter exaggerated further by completely ignoring the others so far), and that everyone they work with are humourless drones (with the exception of Topher Brink, the 20-something responsible for wiping and imprinting the brains, who speaks like a homeopathic dilution of any Buffy smart-ass, and responsible for “cern the diff”), means there’s nowhere for Whedon and his trusted band of writers to do what they do best – have people relate. That the central character doesn’t have a personality for us to identify with is obviously the show’s biggest hurdle, and one you’d think they’d at least try to overcome. Instead we’re getting maybe thirty seconds to a minute of suggestions per fifty minute episode (trouble selling commercials into it?) that Echo is remembering things despite the wipe. But madly, only things that have happened since the first wipe, and not her own past which is surely the one thing that will let us connect to her?

Buffy, Angel and Firefly had a gang. A group we grew to love, who loved each other greatly, and with whom we could look forward to spending time. Each let Whedon’s remarkable talents shine, as they exchanged witty, fresh words, one-upping each other for gags, being poignant right when it mattered, and having heated rows. In Dollhouse, the apparently Vulcan handler for Echo turns toward a window, sighs, and says with the gravitas of someone delivering a philosophical breakthrough,

“The only thing I really know is (deep breath) it all leads back to Echo.”

Before Kellerman off-of-Homicide explains the premise to Echo for the second time in the episode.

The theme for the show says it all. A weedy, whiny drone, with a woman singing, literally, “Nyah nyah na nyah nyah” over it. A motif that continues throughout the episode.