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.

I realise I’m wasting energy dissecting the third episode of Derren Brown’s The Events to any great depth.

They show a close up of this woman’s eyes and ask people to draw a shape, and then the letter “O” draw itself on the screen as a slowly appearing circle, etc etc. And then, astonishingly, Brown even instructs people who drew concentric circles to text in, as if after doing this people texting this is some sort of useful evidence.

Once again Brown muddles half truths and glimmers of things we’ve experienced with ludicrous over-played nonsense. So we’re expected to believe he can make a man fall asleep and then steal a TV by drinking his tea at the same time, while insultingly claiming the remarkable, verified ability of some blind people to use echolocation to be in any way related. Of course, most of it, were it not in a programme in which the presenter psychotically flipflopped back and forth between declaring his disbelief in psychic powers and announcing things are happening because of psychic powers, would have been fantastic magic tricks. Here it all feels like part of the propaganda that contributes to his crazed misinformation campaign.

So much is so much rubbish. But what’s most peculiar about this third episode in what we can only desperately hope is a four-part set-up is how ridiculously he overreached on the final reveal. The most idiotic claim Brown makes is that somehow the tricks in the show in any way relate to his claims of “remote viewing”, something he debunks and confirms with every other breath. This ranges from simply confusing – how does the light bulb trick possibly relate to anything? – to disgustingly insulting – the aforementioned echolocation. None of it relates in any meaningful way, other than his mealy-mouthed semi-debunking of the ridiculous fraud. (It made me so sad he stopped so far short of denouncing him.) Instead, it explodes into a trick too huge to make any sense.

The problem we have is Brown’s claim to not know what was drawn. Now, he’s of course done a thousand other tricks where he claims to be able to influence what someone draws – this time we’re asked to forget that. His mark is asked to draw anything she likes, but it must be a simple pattern or shape. There’s fairly limited options at this point (all the people who merrily agreed to draw a train seemed to forget that bit), but still too many for Brown to guess. But while he claims to not know what’s drawn, and denies the ability to remote view, he also has her placed in Stone Henge which we’re told she sort of saw her image representing (this was strange too – she added it on to the end of her description in a way that didn’t relate, and made no sense). Then we also get shown the persistent close-up of her eyes representing the pattern she drew – again requiring knowledge of what was on the canvas to be successful. So obviously it’s impossible without either knowing what’s on the canvas or causing what’s on the canvas. Too many things, too much going on, all of it relying on absolute prior knowledge of the drawing, and none of it having anything to do with the gibberish of choosing to display some texts from people who drew a circle.

Again, had he not bothered with the anti-scientific bedlam of this bipolar presentation of “remote viewing” and simply done a magic show, it would have been a splendid trick with a superb punchline. Instead it’s an embarrassing mess of bullshit. This evening became reduced to “Here’s some concentric circles. Draw a shape.”

So sure, I hope next week he confesses to all this. Because this is not the man from the Dawkins interviews, nor the guy who wrote a book debunking the sort of idiocy he’s been advocating for three weeks. But it’s too late, isn’t it? Millions have already seen him take his position as a respected debunker and use to it promote unscientific gibberish, and saying, “Ha ha, I was just kidding!” at the end of it won’t undo that.

Oh, and a PS of something brilliant my sister said last week. “Someone who thinks Brown’s explanations for how he does his tricks are at all true is like someone believing Paul Daniels was really sawing Debbie McGee in half.”

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.