Aibu to think that anyone who believes is derren brown is daft?

[TENDTOprocrastinate]

I have no belief in derren browns psychic ability. his usual hypnosis shows are blatantly all set up with actors/actresses. I have had many an argument about this in the past with dh. His current 'apocalypse' show- if it were real- would be a Jeremy beadle gone (far) too far. However, this apocalypse show is mildly entertaining. At least he is admiting that there are actors involved- though clearly guy who is supposed to be hypnotised is an actor too. (Dh thinks otherwise)

The good witch who shows the way to the yellow brick rd? Is it Glenda?

Grotbags?

Ooooh, I am confused now.

There are a number of possible ways of looking at it, I think:

If we take it at face value, then Steve is a genuine participant who is not 'in on it'. He is also an aspiring actor. Derren would surely have known this from his early investigations. In which case, he decided this guy's acting career was not significant enough to make people suspicious. This seems a bit unlikely to me.

Second possibility is that he is a genuine participant, not actually an actor, and the acting and marathon pages were fabricated to make us suspicious.

Scenario 3: Steve is in on the whole thing and is an aspiring actor. In this scenario, Derren has failed to do the adequate preparation and underestimated the likelihood that the audience would do their own detective work.

I really dislike scenarios 1 and 3 and desperately hope it will be #2 because that will spell a big twist for the audience. :)

I'm confused about the Wizard of Oz. I understand the references, but what will this mean? I don't know the film well enough to draw any conclusions from this.

Scenario 1 sounds confusing. What I mean is that surely Derren would be unlikely to choose a participant who was an actor because it would look bad. (Even if the experiment is genuine).

Derren Brown is very good at what he does.

I sometimes wonder if Jesus was a bit of a Derren Brown.

I saw one of his live shows once (Derren Brown, not Jesus) and he did admit to some of it being set up. but he also asked the audience very nicely not to tell anyone what went on in the show, as he only wanted people who came to the show to know.

DH and I would normally tell friends and colleagues what we'd seen on a night out, yet we both felt we didn't want to tell anyone. Do we have a massive respect for Derren, or does he have some hypnotic hold over us?

'I saw one of his live shows once (Derren Brown, not Jesus)'

.... . exactly my sense of humour

Glinda is the good witch in Oz.

Elphaba is the green witch.

Is Elphaba good or bad? Cannot remember!

From memory threre were two bad and two good.

Oooh! The Wizard of Oz is said to be one of the films used for Monarch Programming, aka a brainwashing technique created by the CIA. Does this mean something? Anything? Do I win a prize?

He's brainwashing all of us! Only watch part 2 through a piece of smoked glass

She's bad, she's the one with the monkeys I think.

Elphaba is meant to be bad according to the traditional WoOz, but in fact she is an animal rights protester, ostracised because of her green-ness who loved a boy who was obstentiably more suited to glinda-the- 'good' (pesky prom queen) because he was the football captain who should never love her

I was kind of joking about him being Glinda.

Pop-u-lar, you're gonna be pop-u-lar.

Defying gravity...

Derren has posted a message on fb saying thanks for all the messages "especially all the hilarious it's fake ones".

Clinical Hypnotherapist here checking in for this thread I saw him live and even though I am NLP trained I still thought wtf! He is bloody good at what he does. The power of suggestion. Have a look at transactional hypnosis on you tube for the inductions that put people under in seconds. ive seen these techniques demonstrated on courses and as a practitioner you need to be incredibly confident to pull them off (tho they do work- have seen 'tough' colleagues totally in a trance state as a result). Very entertaining stuff

He's hardly likely to post on fb saying "yep your right, totally got my number, it's all fake" is he?

Well no, but I'd have thought maybe if it was fake and he'd been rumbled he'd be keeping a low profile.

But that wouldn't be good showmanship. He's got a twist coming and it will be big!

Nah, he's a showman!

He's a brilliant showman, and an evil genius too. Quite often in his live shows he will make it look like he has ballsed up his trick and you're cringing because of how awful it is, then he will unexpectedly pull it back at the last minute in triumph and what looked like an error is actually the set up for an even more spectacular finale.

Have only just watched the first part of Apocalypse, it wasn't even remotely convincing!

Aside from the discovery of the main guy being an actor, there were a huge amount of things that didn't add up.

• The "hidden" cameras. They had this funny ability to move just like a handheld camera, which means either they were handheld cameras or the walls were wobbling back and forth and up and down

• The lighting for indoors was very high quality for "hidden" filming

• The program used to "hack" the phone, we're pretty certain it is the same program used for testing apps in development. So they weren't intercepting the phone's data at all.

• No earpieces but the actors could apparently hear Derren's instructions

• We could hear them clearly, bearing in mind even movies have to overdub some audio in a studio in order for it all to be audible and the microphones are huge powerful things.

• In the ambulance there are water bottles next to Steve's feet, and then suddenly they aren't. Continuity anyone?

• The "hacked" TV was very definitely edited in rather than filmed

• Them being outdoors and there not being any intrusive sounds (planes etc)

There was more, but I thought I'd stop there.

Entertaining nonetheless.

If there is a twist it better be bloody huge!

The people outside the coach definitely looked like they'd been edited in too. They looked like they weren't there, like they'd been superimposed on to a blue background. It just didn't look real.