There's nothing greater than the wonder and illusion of magic.
When it goes right, it can be one of the greatest spectacles
from the world of entertainment...
..but when it goes horribly wrong, it can be even better.
Started to pull harder and harder and harder and harder,
but it just wouldn't come out.
It was absolutely as painful as it looks.
From the biggest names in the business...
"It's not why I came to Vegas. I'm going to eat Roy."
..to new talent trying to make their mark...
Did I get anything wrong? No, the duck got it wrong.
..we've got them all - the moments the magicians hoped would vanish.
I think even Paul McCartney turned up to call him a wanker.
From the excruciating...
It was just one cockup after another, really.
..to the downright painful.
There's no two ways around that. A spike has just gone into his hand.
There's water...
I'm not doing this because I have a death wish.
..fire...
Basically, it's an economy back, crack and sack.
..and a drawstring bag.
It's like shoelaces.
Once you get a knot in your shoelaces,
they're difficult, aren't they?
Magicians pushing boundaries to the extreme...
Whoosh! Everything went black.
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
Near-death moments that will take your breath away.
To see a gun being pointed at your husband, my heart started to thump.
GUN FIRES
This is what can happen when magic goes horribly wrong.
Here we go! It's the Wicker Man!
ANNOUNCER: ..two, one...
It's absolutely lethal.
Agh!
One of Britain's top names in magic is Shahid Malik,
holder of three world records in escapology and a regular on TV.
But, as a young magician, in the scorching summer of 1975,
his career nearly ended before it started.
I'm Shahid Malik. I'm an escapologist and illusionist.
I was about 19,
and I thought I would attempt an escape from a bonfire.
A human bonfire.
I can very vividly remember watching that bonfire stunt.
And I remember it because I remember thinking he was completely bonkers.
Little did I know I was going to end up marrying this...bonkers person.
Shahid Malik was really
a big star in the magic world.
I decided to attempt the bonfire escape
when everything was bone dry.
Hadn't rained for weeks and months.
In the middle of the showground,
we had a stake driven into the ground.
I was then chained, strapped, handcuffed to the post,
Red Indian fashion.
So, hands behind the back.
Ankles were roped, chained, padlocked.
Looked harshly dry, and there's a man who's tied to a pole,
getting his hay bales put around him.
Straw bales were huge, stacked in brick fashion.
So, they basically locked themselves together.
Built to a height of about six feet, about three feet away from me.
I went in there in jeans and a white shirt, and that was it.
That's all I had.
I have to say, stupidly, there were no precautions. There can't be.
If you went in a flameproof suit and a helmet...
well, that's not much of a stunt, is it?
There he was with 40,000 people, you know,
"Hey, I'm the big magician being given this spot."
He wasn't going to stop it.
We never thought in our wildest dreams that this could go wrong.
Impetuous youth, I suppose, isn't it?
I thought I was Superman.
This is my one chance to do something that's spectacular
and really, really death-defying.
Ego, a young man's ego.
Of course, the repercussions were enormous.
The hay was then soaked in petrol and lit.
When it happened, it was chaos.
The hay bales just set alight with a bit of a flourish.
Here we go! It's the Wicker man!
It takes really quickly. What a conflagration.
Boof!
It's alight.
You could literally hear it explode.
It was like being inside an oven.
He's gone up like an oil refinery.
It was absolutely...intense heat.
It's impossible to describe.
And I was inside there and I was scared.
I got out very fast. I think I escaped in...
I think they worked it out as 32 seconds.
And I jumped through the flames and through the straw.
And then rolled over and over and over, you know,
to put out the flames, cos I was on fire.
And only once I got outside the flames did I realise
that something wasn't quite right.
And the stewards and marshals came running towards me.
They immediately tried to pull off my shirt.
I could feel the cold air hitting me and knew I had been badly burnt.
There's nothing worse than burns, because it's a delayed reaction.
My back was badly injured.
My entire arm and the back of my hand was just completely burnt away.
He was badly, badly marked.
Quite badly disfigured from that.
Stupidly enough, we didn't have anything on standby
like extinguishers and buckets of water and fire cloths,
because never in my wildest dreams did I think anything would go wrong.
I was rushed to hospital by an ambulance and a police escort.
40,000 people watching this, wondering,
"What on earth has gone wrong?"
People were fainting because I had been hurt.
I suffered second and third degree burns
and I was in hospital for over six weeks.
Thankfully, he was all right. But, wow... Wow, horrible.
I'm grateful that they did what they did and I got out of it alive.
You would think it's going to be difficult
to get back from something like that.
But I was young and fearless,
and I was ready to come straight back.
And as soon as I was fit and well, I was doing stunts again.
But, I have to say, I've never done...
I've never done the bonfire stunt again!
Over the pond now to Calhoun, Georgia, to a 45-year-old
magician and escapologist who named himself after one of the greats.
My name is Michael Anthony Mooney.
That's my real name, but everybody calls me The Great Moodini.
Must have taken him hours to come up with that name.
I can't say it without laughing.
Terrible name. Terrible.
But the fact he's called himself The Great Moodini, for me,
he has already won me over.
I met Joe Burrus, he was a magician in the jail.
When we was in the cell together, he showed me this magic trick
and it was just like,
"I know what I want to do when I get out of here.
"I want to be a magician. I want to entertain."
Magic actually saved my life, to tell you the truth.
A local magician is recovering after a disastrous stunt,
captured on his own cellphone.
I was at the Atlanta Motor Speedway and there was 5,000 people there.
I was the half-time highlight.
I was scheduled to do a race car stunt.
I was going to be tied to a 100-foot chain that was tied to the pace car,
which is a race car.
I think it went from 0-60 in a couple of seconds.
It was a very fast car.
Faster than me.
And Michael's job is to get out of these restraints,
these chains and locks,
before all that slack in that chain is gone.
The object of the stunt is to get the shackles off your wrist
and let the car just pull the chain down the track.
What a brilliant idea, you know,
to make the handcuff escape really exciting.
But he just hasn't thought about it.
He doesn't look like an escapologist.
He doesn't behave like an escapologist.
He is just a heavyweight guy
who probably struggles to get up in the morning,
and he wanted to do an escape stunt.
It just doesn't work, does it? The two don't go together, do they?
When I told the track officials how to do it, I didn't specify,
"Let's do a countdown."
I should have been more specific, saying,
"Hey, we'll go on three, two, one...go,
"then I start getting myself out." But I didn't do that.
In front of about 5,000 people last night at the Atlanta Motor Speedway,
Michael Anthony Mooney locks his wrist in for a stunt
he has done at least twice before.
He's to escape out of the locks before a car
pulls the 100-foot chain and anything attached to it away.
This time, though, it goes horribly wrong.
Escapologists get carried away by being Mr Macho.
So, that particular day, I thought I'd get a bit brave
and bolder and I blindfolded myself.
And that's where things start to go wrong.
And as they wrapped the chain around the shackle and everything,
really didn't pay attention to safety.
Your safety, at the end of the day, is more important
than whatever it is you're going to be presenting for an audience.
The chain...to the cuffs, the shackles, created a knot.
I just was too complacent,
got careless and it almost cost me my life.
Mooney tells me he's done this stunt twice before in front of crowds,
always successfully.
And they forget that, "Hang on, this is dangerous.
"I need to keep my wits about me and make sure this happens."
This stunt usually takes about less than five seconds.
Couldn't actually see the car leave.
If I had not been blindfolded,
I could watch the car and come out just in time,
but, unfortunately, I took those aspects away.
And then I remember the countdown.
ANNOUNCER: Three, two, one...
I'm standing there and then I felt a vibration in the chain.
I knew I was in trouble.
I got this side off and went to get this other side off
and got tangled up in the knot that was on the bar.
And I just couldn't get out.
And then the car took off.
SHOCKED GASPS
Oh, my God.
Just the pain... You can only imagine the pain.
He forgot that it's got to leave without him.
Three, two, one...
SHOCKED GASPS
That car helped me do the best cartwheel I've ever done in my life.
My only cartwheel I've ever done.
Just think about it.
Buy a chain that's got a little fake bit in the middle!
You just break the little thing, rather than breaking your arms.
I mean, it's just an idea.
Just a little tip I thought I'd throw out there.
It was total darkness after that.
Cos when it flipped me,
my head hit the concrete and I was in la-la land.
You know, I was gone.
He could have been dead. Or limbless.
I was laying on the pavement, bleeding everywhere.
People bring children to race meetings.
I remember the track officials talking to me.
You know, in and out of consciousness.
I just woke up in ICU.
The surgeon that operated on my wrist and my leg,
he said if I hadn't have gotten this one side off,
then what would have happened?
I would have got pulled and it would have jerked my head back,
broke my neck and killed me.
So, I was grateful to get the one side off.
Had bandages everywhere.
I couldn't bathe or do anything.
Had nurses that took care of me.
My hands today...
I can eat. Of course, you can tell!
I can eat and do basic functions, but I think, with what's happened,
I think I'll just stick to the basic magic tricks.
As far as the stunts, I had to retire from doing stunts.
If I had a couple more seconds, this side would have been clear,
I'd have been celebrating with the crowd and everything,
but there was no celebration that day.
Coming up, a water cell escape that goes horribly wrong.
I was having major issues.
My fingers and hands were going numb.
The next thing I knew, I was on the ground.
And David Blaine finds himself hung high and dry.
I think even Paul McCartney turned up to call him a wanker.
I mean, that says everything you need to know about David Blaine.
One branch of magic that never ceases to amaze and astound
is escapology -
death-defying stunts which involve getting into tight spaces,
often being buried underground or padlocked in a vat of water.
And whenever we think about the art of escapology,
one name always comes to mind.
Houdini said, "People will pay to watch you die."
Houdini was one of the biggest superstars, I think, of the world.
Many magicians are hung upside down nowadays in straitjackets
and they've got burning ropes.
It doesn't get more exciting than that.
There's no bigger conflict
than, can you get out of a box or you're dead?
But, as an escapologist, when your act goes wrong,
it's your life on the line.
As American escape artist Spencer Horsman found out in 2015.
My name is Spencer Horsman.
I am a sleight-of-hand comedy magician
as well as an escape artist. Those are my specialties.
A former contestant on America's Got Talent,
he later joined a magic show called The Illusionists,
where he wanted to set himself his biggest challenge yet.
I really, really, really wanted to create
some sort of accessible water escape that I could do anywhere.
And, thus, I created my first one,
which was a tiny, tiny, tiny, small box.
A lot of people think, "Oh, you're a thrill-seeker
"and you love pushing the edge and risking your life."
No, I'm not. I don't do extreme sports. I'm an entertainer.
Spencer Horsman has a water escape.
A little bit unique in that instead of a lid or hatch of some sort,
he has got bars that are going across the top of it.
That is suspended.
Your hands come through it.
Your head can't, so you still can't get a breath of air.
But your hands can come through and start working on the locks.
So the show is called The Supernaturalists.
The night before opening night, we have our second-to-last rehearsal.
For me, it was just ego. Instead of me signalling,
"Let me down now, I only have a few seconds left," I just went.
Tunnel vision came in.
Get him down!
SCREAMING
Criss Angel is the one that saved me in this case.
Again, our crew was very quick.
He was able to hop up there, ladder and everything,
and help me out and start pulling me out
before I even got down to the floor, which was great.
I just took 24 hours off before going at it again.
You'd think Spencer would have learnt his lesson,
coming so close to death, but he just had to try it again.
A few months after that incident,
we were kicking off another four weeks' worth of touring
up and down the north-east,
so we decided to do old-school Houdini promoting
and do the escape outside the theatre
that we were gonna be performing at.
It's a certain type of person who does this for a living,
and I think that it's important that you get back on the horse.
That day just started off on a bad foot.
There were props that were not packed,
lock picks that were not packed, the heater that we use on tour
to circulate and keep it at a certain temperature
up until showtime... wasn't working either.
The reason why it's so scary is...
even if he owns the prop,
even if you think the prop has gimmicks in it,
he's still in water.
And we all know that it can go wrong.
So they filled the tank directly from a spout in the theatre
with hot water.
No cold - straight hot water.
So, the first time I was able to touch the water
was when I was getting lowered inside it.
Typically, I keep my water at about 90, 95 degrees.
And it was upwards of 105, 110 degrees.
That sort of temperature, they warn you, you know,
you're never supposed to put your head under it.
CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK
He's going in.
Start counting.
There's camera crews there,
newspapers there, my father was there...
He compresses himself into this box and
he has a number of different chains on that he has to get out of.
Ultimately, he has to pick the locks on the rods
that are on the external part of the tank.
He's got a lot going on.
People want to see the danger.
They want to see what you're doing.
If you cover something up now,
they're going to think it's trickery, even though it's not.
Around the 3.30 mark, maybe before that, I was having major issues.
My fingers and hands were going numb. My toes...
couldn't really feel those.
And getting severely light-headed.
Not because of the lack of oxygen holding my breath,
but because of the heat.
And that was causing me to get dizzy.
But it was taking me an impossible amount of time
to simply get the padlock off of the final pole.
And it just kept spinning, kept spinning, kept spinning,
and that's because I couldn't control it, I couldn't feel it.
Doing it on the ground, you would just get to them very quickly
and get the lid or the bars off.
When it's in the air, now we have to lower him down
and still get the bars off.
So there's added time in the rescue.
I remember, at that point, hands were on my hands and then,
the next thing I knew, I was on the ground. So I don't remember
getting pulled out of it, but it was that quick.
When they pulled me out, I was physically in pain.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
My body was horribly cramping.
Doing stuff for real, you're going to get hurt eventually.
People don't like to really watch other people get hurt or killed.
For them to witness that it went wrong AGAIN,
that wasn't something they were really prepared for.
It just makes my heart hurt
because I know that he's frustrated with himself
for not getting out on his own.
I'm not doing this because I have a death wish,
I do it because the audience enjoys it
and I'm willing to take those little bits of extra risk
for their entertainment pleasure.
One of Britain's most revered escapologists was Alan Alan.
Born between the wars,
he's credited with inventing the burning rope trick...
You're too late, you should've been here...
..but he shot to fame by staging stunts especially for the media
and his most infamous was being buried alive in 1949.
Alan Alan is probably the most famous escapologist
we've had in the UK.
Fabulous name, straightaway, you just think, "Love that".
He was a real kind of pioneer.
Alan Alan is a bit of a legend.
He was a very successful escapologist.
He did a frightening chain escape
whilst hanging upside down
from a piece of rope
that's on fire,
and, fortunately, that went well,
most of the time.
He seems to have freed himself all right,
but the chains must come right off
before he comes down.
Those are the rules and he stuck with them.
Alan Alan, huge Houdini fan,
wanted to recreate one of the most famous things Houdini ever did -
buried alive.
Houdini was so fit,
he was so strong, he trained a lot.
I don't know how much training Alan Alan did -
obviously, this clip, not enough.
He wasn't a tall man, Alan Alan,
but crumbs, in that clip,
I thought they were burying a child - it's Alan Alan!
So Alan is there, in his Speedos...
Looking a little bit like Mowgli from the Jungle Book...
I wonder if they were those itchy woollen ones?!
I expect it was quite racy for the day.
Mr Alan is to be buried alive.
"Oh, I'm not going to sit in a box or anything,
"just shove a bit of cardboard on top of me."
So his mates dig a great big hole, Alan jumps in, they've got this
piece of cardboard that they've sort of thrown over the top of him...
I don't know what purpose that served.
'The time is 11:30,
'the grave is filled in.
'6 feet and half a ton of earth,
'its weight increased by the dampness,
'are between escape man Alan and the cool November air.'
Looks like him and his mates
have been down the pub and they've thought, "You know what?
"I've got a great idea,
"I've always wanted to do the old 'buried alive' thing.
"Come on, Al - I've got a spade, let's go down the park."
I'm wondering what actually happened that day.
Did he really annoy his assistants beforehand
and the assistants are like,
"Let's get our own back, let's really pack this FLAT".
I'll bury my feet in the sand,
but that's about as low as I'll...
'A signal rope, which is attached around his body
'is his only contact with his helpers.'
The safety device is a bit of string that they've tied round
Alan's wrist and the string goes to the surface,
and every now and then,
one of his mates tugs on the string and if Alan tugs back,
it means he's doing all right.
I expected it's one tug for "OK" and 1,000 for "get me out of here"!
'Minutes tick by. Something has gone wrong - no signal has come.'
It was so British, the way they covered it.
They basically said, "Oh,
"and he doesn't appear to be getting out of there any time soon.
"So, we're just going to dig him up before he dies."
'And the shovels begin to fly again.
'They've got to work fast to avert disaster.
'Two feet down, bare hands have to take over,
'for the shovels may hurt the man whose escape bid went wrong.'
They've got to be careful,
because it's spades and they don't want to cut him.
'38 minutes after setting out, Alan Alan is free,
'alive and sound. But only just.'
Again, what's very British is right at the end,
cos he comes out in his swimming trunks, they go,
"Can we just get a jacket on him?", some decorum, boy, come on.
That's brilliant.
Alan Alan, a bit like his name, hadn't really thought it through.
'Some people think he should give up gambling with death. But he can't.
'It's his living!'
Always know where the exits are.
Despite Alan Alan's failure and Houdini's claim
that the "buried alive" escape was impossible,
it didn't deter Huddersfield-based escapologist Antony Britton.
He had to have a go at it in 2015
in a pub car park.
The sorts of things that I've done in the past is exploding crates,
getting out of straitjackets,
straitjacket escapes inverted.
I don't think I've got a death wish!
I just love everything to do with escapology.
This particular one was the 100-year-old buried alive challenge,
which the great Houdini attempted...
He couldn't achieve it.
Then the wonderful Alan Alan attempted it and he failed.
I felt that I could achieve it.
Why not?
Antony Britton, bless him,
a sort of have-a-go escapologist...
This man has escaped from burning ropes locked in a straitjacket
and this is the man we hope will escape
from 6 tonnes of soil.
Being buried alive,
that's a stunt that is very dangerous.
I try and push myself to the maximum and hopefully it will work out.
Sometimes it hasn't, sometimes it has!
He did an escape for charity.
The first shot we saw was
a 6-foot-deep hole.
And a digger next to it.
And then suddenly, they started to throw soil over him.
I felt the first bucket of dirt hitting my back...
..which came down with a thud.
Crikey, that hurt!
You've got what looks like
an afterthought of a bloke
who's gone, "Yeah, anyway,
"I've got a digger in the garden,
"I'm having me garden done".
"You know what - yeah, let's bury me alive. Bring it on! Fantastic."
Everybody was all prepped -
if the worst comes to the worst,
they knew what to do.
We genuinely have no idea if this is going to work.
Judging from history... it won't.
Everything was going perfectly well.
Every time the scoop goes in the hole,
the soil crushes more and more of his body,
forcing more and more air out of his lungs...
It might look easy, but these things can go wrong.
You can hear the crowd chanting and screaming and everything else...
..and then all of a sudden, it just goes silent.
Soil has basically buried you at this point.
Escapologists seem to have this thing about "buried alive",
there's dozens and dozens of them that will have a go at this.
It's not the safest escape in the world.
He's been down 6 minutes...
and we've still got more soil to go, this is...
I don't quite know what I'm watching! This is mad.
When you breathe out, your rib cage collapses.
As I did that,
the soil decided that it was going to fall
into where once my rib cage was,
so when I went for a breath back,
I couldn't expand my lungs.
At that point, I started feeling myself going unconscious.
Before I went into the grave,
we decided that we were going to go with a throat mic,
so the head groundsman could hear
what was happening down below.
It was about 8 minutes into it
that it completely went dead.
That's when he called it a day.
Got the spades on and the digger came round and did exactly what
he was supposed to do.
Hang on, they're digging him out!
They're digging...
I could feel myself going under
and at that point, that's it,
I just can't remember after that.
I was out cold.
PEOPLE SHOUT ANXIOUSLY
It's too dangerous.
I wouldn't recommend anybody do it.
BOY: Oh, my God, he's dead!
He's dead!
Oh, my God! He is dead! Can we take this off the screen?
Take this off the screen!
It's lethal.
Kids, if you're next to the ambulance,
you need to move away from the ambulance!
Most people do say once you've been buried alive,
that is the end, really!
I've learned by it.
So, I wouldn't say it was a fail.
Now, sometimes a feat of magic or illusion defies belief.
One such performer who falls into this category
is Dutchman Mirin Dajo.
And what you're about to see is not for the squeamish.
You are going to see a man have a 28-inch sword thrust through
his body without hurting him. This is no fake, neither is it a miracle.
I can absolutely tell you as a magician,
I don't think there's any gimmicks there,
he just shoved a sword through himself.
The only thing he does do, and he's very wise,
he uses the same guy to do it over and over and over again.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
He does it front to back, he does it side to side...
Years ago, Indian mystics showed Dajo how swords could be passed
through their bodies without causing injury. It's pretty extraordinary.
I think it's the clip that made me the most...
Eurgh, couldn't watch it, and it's pretty horrible.
I mean, it takes very little to scrape an organ,
which happens in surgeries all the time.
It's literally a scratch of a scalpel,
that will...kill someone.
I mean, Mirin does not have the showmanship.
I mean, bless him, he's a good-looking fellow,
he's got the beard, he's got the goatee beard,
so he's halfway there with the old magician look,
but he's not really doing any chat.
He just takes off his shirt,
gives a fellow a sword and goes all the way through. Kebab time.
A sword thrust carefully along this path
would cause little pain or bleeding
because there are no nerves or blood vessels in scar tissue.
Now, when I perform magic, if I get a paper cut, that's it,
game over, I'm going home.
Eventually, a permanently open channel
could be formed right through.
Bwuh! Why?
Come on! Oh! I couldn't... I...
It's one of those clips where you're watching it
and you're looking away, and you say,
"Oh, he's doing it again! He's doing it again!"
It's phenomenal to watch, but it's horrifying as well.
Meantime, Mirin Dajo eats and lives as an ordinary individual.
As an act, it's one of those things that you kind of go...
First of all, how did you learn you can do that,
because that's not like a card trick, is it?
And also, why do you do that every day?
Was he just really bored in fencing class?
Not only have you got to be worried about, you know,
spiking a major organ,
they didn't look like they were sterilising the blade
or anything like that.
Just like some guy with his sleeves rolled up just has a go, you know?
Unfortunately, Mirin Dajo died really, really young.
I'm not surprised, considering his body was...
full of holes.
It was so important for Mirin Dajo
to prove this was no act or illusion
that he finally agreed to demonstrate it in front of experts.
'Here, at the Burgerspital,
'a famous sanatorium in Switzerland, the surgeons, physiologists
'and students assemble to investigate the strange case
of Mirin Dajo.'
This is an old Pathe newsreel
and in it, a sort of East European guy's trick
is that he gets people to put a sword right through him
and he genuinely does, you can see it goes right through him.
Mirin Dajo, sword through his body -
what...the fuck?
The clip of Mirin Dajo is absolutely phenomenal.
I'm pretty sure a lot of scientists
still don't really know what was going on there.
But his obsession with being a human pincushion finally caught up
with him. In 1948, at the age of 35,
he swallowed a steel needle.
It ruptured a major artery and killed him.
It's sort of like an old health warning -
"Danger, if you have swords regularly inserted through you,
"you will die of internal injuries soon."
And he did.
Coming up, David Blaine fails to wow.
In America, people are, "Oh, David, he's amazing, look, wow!"
In England, you just go, "What?"
And a "buried alive" stunt that couldn't go more horribly wrong.
It was like, whoosh!
Everything went black.
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
We're journeying through magic's more horrible moments.
And when tricks do go wrong,
it usually means the secret is well and truly out of the bag.
Which is why you'll find most magicians
try to keep their cards close to their chests.
You used to be thrown out of the Magic Circle, didn't you,
if anyone spilt the beans on how the magic tricks were done.
There's this almost Hippocratic oath amongst magicians.
It's like a code of honour, life and death.
They'd rather we don't find out that, you see,
when they're using a fake hand
or, you know, a second person in the box.
This man has been bestowed with supernatural powers
and that's how it's accomplished.
They'd rather we don't realise we're being conned.
Magicians don't want anyone to know
how the tricks are done,
because it's magician's code.
And if you knew how it was done, it wouldn't be a secret.
It's sort of fooling science, it's kind of keeping life exciting,
means you don't know everything. I like it.
The whole purpose of everything is to confuse people.
It's just a nice, drug-free way of doing it.
Once you've revealed the secret,
the magic doesn't exist any more,
and that's the only reason
magicians don't tell people how we do our tricks.
It's not because we're anal, we want to keep our secrets to ourselves.
( Yeah, it is.)
But to really impress your audience, the best thing to do is shock them.
Escapologists take the lead here and what they're really good at
is scaring the living daylights out of you.
There's this escape artist here in China, he's an American dude.
My name is Dean Gunnarson, I'm an escape artist,
a daredevil, a stuntman.
I try to take my escapes to the extreme limits.
I enjoy magic and most of my friends are magicians,
but for me, I like the realism of the escape.
I like when a police officer locks you up in his handcuffs
and his leg irons and threw you in a jail cell,
and said, "There's no way you're going to get out".
Like a lot of people,
I got interested in Houdini when I was about ten years old.
Dean Gunnarson is very important in this day and age.
Dean Gunnarson is a very experienced escapologist,
I've known of him for a long, long time.
Dean has really been one who pushed the boundaries a lot.
The jacket is off, ladies and gentleman!
The art of escape is better as a result of Dean Gunnarson.
And he made it, how about that!
Accidents will always happen with water escapes,
because it's just such a finicky thing,
your body reacts to it differently, it's...
..always, always a risk.
Like any big escape, I didn't just decide one day and do it the next -
I spent many, many months to prepare and to practise holding my breath.
Being in a confined space is scary.
It's frightening.
I do these things not because I have no fear,
it's because I've had to overcome my fears,
and one of the fears is claustrophobia.
Here I am, 19, going to university,
boom, it's my big stage,
the biggest stage I'd ever faced in my young career as an escape artist.
Dean Gunnarson arrives, he's got a white tuxedo, real showman,
he's got the mullet hairstyle.
I had everything ready, I had the coffin with the chains,
we had the police, the ambulance,
and 10,000 people showed up.
He's handcuffed, chained, padlocked, in all sorts of shackles,
that kind of thing.
Then he's placed inside a wooden coffin, believe it or not.
In a wooden coffin? Would you really want that? No.
The coffin lid is then nailed on.
It's NAILED into place.
And when they close that lid...
..you're dark, you're isolated, you're totally alone.
At that time, I imagine Dean starts to extricate himself
in order to make his escape from the coffin,
which is the big thing at the end.
He's got to escape and leave the coffin
and swim out and float on the water.
Can you duck down? Yeah.
They hooked it to the crane and then they raised it over to the river.
The idea was to get it to sink as quickly as it can.
As scary as that sounds, when you're in there,
you want to go down quickly.
People know you can't breathe in water.
So if they hold their breath,
they know how long it's taken.
That's a nice little way of building up the tension,
because the audience then can sort of...
TAKES IN HIS BREATH
When you go underwater, you want your lungs full,
so the first thing you have to do is push all your air out,
get rid of all the CO2 in your lungs, so that's what I did,
I used my stomach, my diaphragm, I pushed everything out of
my lungs and I took a nice, big lungful of air.
And then when the coffin got about two thirds of the way down,
for some reason, it stopped sinking.
It was kind of counterbalancing with the weight in the water
and I was stuck in an air pocket about two thirds full of water,
so I could feel the water level on my neck
and I'm holding my breath,
I wasn't sure exactly what was going on above...
So I decided I would steal another breath of air.
So, again, I pushed all my air out...
And when I went to breathe in, to fill my lungs with that nice,
fresh air, the coffin sank.
Once you hit the water and the water gets into the coffin, that's it.
No more air. That's when you start to panic.
It sank like a rock, just, "bloop"!
So now I not only got stuck under water with very little air,
I got stuck under water with NO air.
Now I'm in trouble.
You need to work very, very quickly.
Realistically, about 1½ to 2 minutes.
What you have to do is not panic.
You have to conserve your energy.
Once you're underwater, if you use your energy struggling,
then you've lost it. It's not going to happen.
Your adrenaline is going,
you're using more energy, so you have less time to escape.
So I was able to get out of the chains,
I remember putting my hands to my goggles
and just forcing myself to relax.
I couldn't scream, I couldn't yell,
I'm 10 feet underwater, no-one could hear my cries for help.
Bring it up, Donny.
And then I started to see little flashes of light
and then it was like, whoosh - everything went black.
I got sucked down a tunnel.
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel,
I don't know what it was,
I didn't know if it was a freight train coming at me
or if it was the big man or, you know,
the Grim Reaper shining his flashlight, but I saw it.
Nearly four minutes underwater,
it's around the time when brain damage begins to occur.
I wasn't afraid, I wasn't in pain and I saw this light.
It went from one extreme, from being something totally great
and successful, to going totally wrong and dying.
He was pronounced officially dead.
I mean, I don't think you can push it much closer than that.
Can you ask them to get back?
Everybody was quite upset.
That was scary from their perspective - I mean, I was DEAD.
You've just got to roll the dice and see how they come up.
That day, I got lucky.
Hats off to him, that was a spectacular stunt.
That's not a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
Grown-up magicians know only too well it can all go horribly wrong.
But what about the kids?
There's something beautiful about when kids want to try magic.
You know it's not going to be executed with the finesse
of the professional.
The trick has quite a sinister looking young man,
who looks like he's wandered off an amateur stage version
of Phantom of the Opera.
It's a very confusing facemask he's wearing.
He's like a lad from the local estate,
he's got the mask and a hoodie -
I thought he was going to rob the Post Office.
A volunteer, willing or otherwise,
is brought on and sort of slid in one end...
The bit of cardboard's about eight-foot long.
She looked taller, lying down, didn't she?
What they've done, is,
they've obviously seen a trick on the telly and thought...
"How can we do this? Clearly,
"you have to have two women in a large tube of cardboard.
"That seems easy enough." Well, this is...
So, when you start sawing through it,
you start seeing the fact that the box is collapsing.
To be fair, the box has to take the weight of a human being...
or two...
Sawed through the old cardboard... Whoop!
Table flips over and one pops out one end, fabulous!
It's a beautiful dismount.
The best thing is the fact that they don't try to style it out.
I think so much more magic would be better if they'd just looked,
laughed and ran away.
I enjoyed this one more than I would watching someone do it properly.
Not properly as in properly saw someone in half,
but a proper magic trick.
And then the other woman in the other box realises the game is up.
She comes up and then she's thinking,
"How do I get off stage when my friend has already...?"
She thinks, "I know how to do it -
"I'll does fall off this table as if I can't walk properly as well".
This is what all magic shows should be like -
you can see Tommy Cooper turn in his grave,
going, "Why didn't I think of this?"
There's no other way to end that trick, really -
once it's gone wrong one end, you may as well just go whole hog.
He should probably sell that to the Magic Circle.
That is exactly how that trick should be done.
Letting the kids have a go is one thing,
but at the other end of the magic spectrum are...the superstars.
David Blaine!
SHE SIGHS
Well... I don't like the guy.
I'd rather sit and look at a chilblain than David Blaine.
I'll say it plain and I'll say it proud.
Yeah, he's very good...
As a con merchant, yeah.
David Blaine is an enigma.
He's wrapped in a puzzle, covered in a quiz.
I really do think he thinks he's the baby Jesus.
I personally like David Blaine.
I've not met him, don't know the man at all,
but I like watching him cos I find him intriguing.
I know the Americans love him, they do,
cos they love all of that razzmatazz, don't they?
"My God, it's amazing! He hung upside down for three days,
"just wearing a pair of pants and survived on nothing,
"except his own tears!" We don't care in this country.
Where the hell is your showbiz, man?
I mean, where is your poise, your posture, your pizzazz?
One of the feats that David tried to do
was holding his breath underwater for 9 minutes.
I regularly have holding-my-breath competitions under the water
with my kids on holiday.
In the old days, I could go up to 40, 50 seconds sometimes,
so I know what I'm talking about,
I'm quite an expert in this.
And David Blaine was trying to break the World Record, I think,
which is around 9 minutes,
and he decided to do it not in a swimming pool
with his children, as I would have done, but in a large goldfish bowl.
It was just gagging for someone to come up and give it a kick
and for it to roll away...
down Central Park or wherever he was.
Remember filling the bath with water and going, "Right,
"who can hold their breath the longest?"
You'd stick your head in, holding your breath,
and I remember one of our mates actually beat David Blaine,
they were there 11 minutes, but we did have their head held down,
so it was probably cheating.
And he's no longer with us. But the thing is... I think that's murder.
It was hilarious,
because he managed to do it for 7 minutes and I remember watching...
Suddenly, it was amazing because he was getting rescued by two mermaids.
These two people just dived in - I think that was the highlight,
seeing these two people overdressed
in these silk mermaid outfits just trying to save David.
It was beautiful when he came out, he came out like Bambi,
he was like that.
"Mum, where's Mum?" Just shaking, like this. Bless him.
Probably not one of his best stunts.
Another of David Blaine's endurance attempts,
he was hung suspended upside down like a bat.
I'm no expert on endurance,
but I thought the idea of endurance was that you endured...
You started, you endured and then you finished.
He was standing up!
He was having a full-blown meal.
Not started, endured for a tiny little bit, went for a cup of tea
and a sandwich and a lie down, came back, endured a bit more.
That's not endurance, that's a regular day's work, with tea breaks.
That's what that is.
His excuse is that he's not going to wee himself -
why go upside down for so long?
If you're going to dangle yourself upside down for three days
over Times Square, you deserve to wet yourself.
That is not a useful skill.
He should have had some sort of bungee facility, I think,
so people could have come, got hold of him,
pulled him down, and then released.
I think, if you're going to do an upside-down trick,
you've got to do it upside-down.
Like, I can do an upside-down trick the right way up.
And I'm not claiming to be David Blaine.
In 2003, David Blaine brought his latest stunt to London.
He was suspended for 44 days over the River Thames in a Perspex box.
But it's fair to say the British press and the public
were distinctly unimpressed.
Can you call that a trick?
Sitting in a box?
This huge American superstar, superstar magician,
all over the world, people hiring him for millions
to turn up at parties and stuff like that.
In America, people are like, "Oh, David, he's amazing, look, wow!"
In England, you just go, "What?"
A far cry from the adulation
he receives in his native America,
the British crowd saw the stunt as an opportunity
for a bit of good old-fashioned heckling and abuse.
He comes to England, they put him in a plastic box,
and we throw eggs at him.
It's 11 o'clock and you think, "Shall we go home,
"or shall we go and throw some stuff at David Blaine in his box?"
Go and throw some stuff at David Blaine in his box.
Why didn't he do this trick in America?
Hurl abuse at him and chuck, what was it, golf balls?
Golf balls at him! He's lucky no-one cut the rope on the box.
The British are not fans of this sort of thing.
We do not like show-offs,
we do not like egomaniacs.
I think even Paul McCartney turned up to call him a wanker.
I mean, that says everything you need to know about David Blaine.
We will bring them down.
Another major American magician
who can claim his place in cockup corner is Chris Korn.
He gained global fame through his hit TV show Mondo Magic,
seen by over 70 million viewers.
One particular moment sticks out.
The trick with the metal spike
is like Russian roulette
being brought up to date.
1,001, 1,002...
1,003.
The idea of the spike effect
is a little bit like what we see on the street
with the three-shell game.
1,005... Have you finished? Yes.
'In this case,'
it's reverse psychology for the magician.
It plays a spin on your brain.
In the shell game,
I'm trying to control the object and keep it away from you.
In this case, I have to figure out where it is
and make sure I AVOID it.
So many magicians, you know, it goes through their hand.
If you get a little bit confused while performing this trick,
you should probably just stop.
If you don't know where that spike is,
you're going to have an accident.
I love dangerous magic,
but I just know that one can go wrong.
I would never do it.
It comes down to that human nature
of us wanting to look at a car crash.
It's been banned from the Magic Castle now.
It is dangerous, it truly is one of the most dangerous effects in magic.
What body part do you need as a magician? Your hands.
Oh.
It's Darwinism in action.
It's natural selection for magicians.
So, I did the show,
it's called Mondo Magic,
and that was for A&E at the time
and I really liked to seek out effects and tricks
that no-one else does.
I was in Europe and saw this guy doing the spike trick.
It gained my interest because it was something most people
weren't willing to risk doing.
It's just...
There's no two ways around that,
a spike has just gone into his hand.
Oh, my God. I hit it. BLEEP!
I've known people that have gone wrong on this -
they go into the next room, they just...conk out.
Oh, BLEEP.
The shock, the blood.
Game over. Show's off. Audience out. Money back, please.
A lot of magicians thought that was fake.
"Oh, good television!" But you actually see the colour.
I swear, you can see the colour go out of my face.
I thought my career was over at that moment.
Your nerve centre is right here.
The miracle, or the luck, I ran into, so when I hit this,
the block tilted.
So it ended up going slightly through the side
because this is your nerve centre. Right here.
All to do a magic effect.
I've seen it go wrong so many times. It's such a risky thing to be doing.
One of the most disturbing ones, for me, was Menny Lindenfeld.
Menny Lindenfeld is an Israeli magician
who was on stage
doing this Russian Roulette style trick with a knife under paper bags.
Blindfolded, I believe. Doesn't know exactly where the knife is.
OK.
Clearly!
You've got to have a good insurance company that day, haven't you? Jeez.
Forget sleight of hand, it's slice of hand!
Coming up, magic goes horribly wrong for Siegfried and Roy...
They actually grabbed him by the back of the neck
in the way it would protect a cub.
..and magic shows its cut-throat side.
At this stage, he's supposed to go - bing! -
and pull this washer out of his neck.
It was absolutely as painful as it looks. There was blood.
Magic is all about razzmatazz, glitz and glamour
and there's one thing every act should have.
A big finish is everything.
Da-dah!
The whole point of a trick is that it builds to a pinnacle.
Birds, cards, saws, fire.
"To finish, I'm going to saw this woman in half.
"Tell you what, I'll take three members of the audience
"and only two of them will survive."
You sort of start slowly
and get the audience onside, win them over.
Create different pictures,
so that there's ups and downs.
It has a beginning, a middle, and - very much - an end.
If you can incorporate some pyrotechnics in that
and a wind machine, more the better.
Aren't I amazing?
Right at the last minute, you pull the rug from under them
and they go, "Whoa!"
Creating a grand moment that people know, oh, this is the end.
You want to leave them with a lasting impression of you.
And a rising star who's making an impression online
is Texas magician Bryce Harney.
My name's Bryce.
I got involved in magic when I was 10.
Started doing YouTube when I was in high school.
That's when I started getting into the street magic.
It was important to get the setting right,
because I wanted to create a different mood
for this Halloween video.
I wanted it to stand out.
It's Halloween, Bryce is on the streets.
He is about to take a washer, instead of a Polo,
which is what people normally use for this trick.
I wanted to make it a little darker,
but that wasn't exactly the best option.
He placed it in his mouth. Swallows it.
Gets some string and then starts to saw.
And it gets to the stage where his neck is contorted,
it's all mushed up.
And, at this stage,
it's where he supposed to go - bing! -
and pull this washer out of his neck,
so it's onto the string
but, unfortunately, he's still there, he's still struggling.
He's feeling a bit of pain.
He got the dental string,
put it in his throat to try and pull it out,
and as he was pulling it out,
it actually got stuck at the last minute.
He didn't mean for that to happen.
I'd rehearsed it a couple of times without the washer.
And this was the first time, actually, doing the full trick.
So when I went to take the string out it wasn't coming out
and I started to pull harder, and harder,
and harder, and harder, and harder, but it just wouldn't come out.
So I was, eventually, just yanking at it.
It was absolutely as painful as it looks.
I had to go to the bathroom after that. There was blood.
I didn't include that in the video
because I didn't want it to be gruesome
but, in the bathroom, yeah, there was blood,
and there was definitely scarring for a couple of weeks after that.
It wasn't nice to watch.
You can, kind of, imagine where the washer came out afterwards.
TOILET FLUSHES
But, whether you're tattoos and hoodies, or top hat and tails,
sometimes an epic fail is just inevitable.
Especially when you're outdoors
and it's half-time at a major American football match.
Any magician knows Harry Blackstone. Any magician who's any magician.
Harry Blackstone belongs to the old school.
One of the last great illusion shows on a grand scale.
You know you've made it if you're performing at the half-time show.
Nowadays, we have Beyonce perform it, Coldplay.
That was Harry Blackstone Jr.
They've really gone to town with the budget.
They've got a lot of people involved in this production.
Little tip, if you're going to do magic,
try not to do it outdoors, try not to do it on live TV.
He's in the middle of a pitch, in, quite clearly, a strong wind.
That's really a hard arena in which to perform a trick.
It was a disaster. It was brilliant to watch.
Obviously, you need to pull a rabbit out of a hat,
if you're a magician in the '80s.
Unfortunately, he drops the rabbit which, nowadays,
would probably get you arrested.
I don't know if it was me,
but that rabbit seems to be oversized to me.
I don't know how long he'd been in there but he obviously had the hump.
And then he starts producing beauty queens in these cabinets.
There are four girls that can't get out of the wooden
card sculptures that they're in.
If those flaps aren't just going flap, flap, flap.
Then, someone's got to be doing that.
Someone's got to manually come on, in a Spinal Tap-esque way,
with a chisel and a mallet and prise it open.
You're watching it going, "Oh, no!"
Something clearly goes wrong and Harry, quite rightly,
takes it upon himself to stand in front
of the transparent cabinet to obscure the magic.
It was just one cockup after another, really.
Poor girl,
she's got her dress caught in a trap door.
She looks really angry when she comes out of that thing.
Probably not as angry as Harry looked under the circumstances.
The only thing you'd hope would disappear is yourself
up your own backside, in the situation like that.
Another big star
who took his close-up magic show to the next level is Dynamo.
Here he is in a video recording of his 2016 show
that was filmed live at the O2.
He's looking cool in his jeans and hoodie with two audience members
he's pulled up onto the stage -
but how long will that cool look last?
A record-breaking crowd watching Dynamo at the O2.
What a phenomenal gig.
Tom's phone, the bottle that Tom chose.
Watch.
That's Tom's phone inside the bottle.
Dynamo, showing off what he does best
with his breathtaking sleight of hand.
Making a mobile phone appear in a bottle
sort of became his signature trick.
It's mind-blowing.
It became a YouTube sensation.
So, he really wanted to be able to do it in his live show.
Can you call Tom's number, please?
It's calling.
Bless him. He's got it in the bottle and that's not quite enough.
People want to hear it ring.
Things clearly not going so well now, as the 20,000 audience
wait for the phone to ring.
Remember, Dynamo, this is live on TV.
There's no editing this bit out.
It's, like, uuurggh!
Is it calling? It's calling. Yeah.
In no way was this Dynamo's mistake.
Technology definitely can always fail.
I hope you got a signal in there, mate.
Which service is he with?
Has he ran out of data?
Is the EU roaming killing him?
All right. You know what?
If you're with Tom in the audience here,
can you call his phone, please?
What can you do? Not your fault.
Call it as quickly as you can. It's a live magic show, people.
Anything could happen.
Is it ringing?
What do you do?
You're in a really bad reception zone.
They should be with another service provider.
Are you calling it, yeah?
Well, believe me. That is Tom's phone in this bottle.
It might be broken, but...
He'll have to tell us all the story there. Thank you very much, Amy.
Thank you very much, Tom.
Head back to your seat. Thanks very much, mate.
Your show could bomb.
Come on, mate.
Your big build-up you're doing ends up face down on the floor.
Like, "Ah, OK, thanks everybody. It's awesome."
Back in the glittering '80s,
Las Vegas was the undisputed capital of big magic and big hair.
It was also the home of two of the biggest names in the business.
Basically, if you went to Las Vegas, one of the things you'd do,
you'd either go and see Elvis, when he was still alive,
or you'd go and see Frank Sinatra,
or, the ones that just seem to have constantly survived,
were Siegfried and Roy.
Siegfried and Roy were the pioneers of the mega-magic show in Las Vegas.
They started it all.
It was kind of half old-school circus act with wild animals,
half curious camp Vegas extravaganza. And it was brilliant.
It was exactly what Vegas is about.
They were two guys who learned how to raise and tame white tigers,
and they would use them as part of the show.
So, you would go to their show to watch amazing magic
and to see beautiful animals on stage.
They're wild animals.
And, however much you train them, since they're cubs, or whatever,
one day, they're going to go, "Why the hell am I doing this?"
"I'm going to take a bite out of your neck."
One of those animals was just, one day, going to go,
"You know what? This isn't for me, really."
"It's not why I came to Vegas. I'm going to eat Roy." And he did.
During a performance in 2003,
one of the tigers they'd worked with for decades hit out at Roy
and it marked the end of their amazing act.
The tiger was spooked.
Something wasn't quite right and it got panicked
and it actually grabbed him by the back of the neck,
in the way it would protect a cub.
So he was protecting him and pulling him away
from what he thought was danger but, in that process,
completely damaged all his spine at the back there.
I've actually, you know, been with them and seen Roy since
and, you know, it was just so sad.
And the fact, I think, that you know, it was a partnership,
so Siegfried didn't continue working after Roy was injured.
That, oh, I don't know...
That's something that's very deep.
Coming up, Vietnam's Got Talent magician in an acid attack.
Clearly, his entire mouth is being napalmed.
And live knife throwing on TV
gets a little too close for comfort.
Oh, my God! There's blood!
Whether a trick goes right, or horribly wrong,
a magician's always got something up their sleeve.
I am a big lover of the wizard's sleeve.
Like, the things they keep in there is amazing.
A magician's props are everything.
The basic wand.
Their hat.
Boxes and tubes.
It's all up their sleeves and in their pockets.
All the shiny things and knives.
You need things built
in specific dimensions.
If you put all your trust into, like, a bit of rope,
it only has to go wrong once.
Most of the dogs are now working on weddings and things like that.
Being released, aren't they?
Into the wild.
Endless, endless, endless, endless scarves.
Abracadabra.
Doesn't work. Without the props.
If you're a big illusionist,
you need the proper cage to put the tiger in. And you need a tiger.
It must be hard work being a magician.
"I'm just going out to work, love. I'll see you tomorrow."
"Hang on. Ooh...
"Have you got any doves, love? I forgot my doves."
"Oh, I need a goldfish, as well."
Without the props, sometimes there is no magic.
And never more so than on talent shows
where young up and coming talent really have their chance to shine.
I don't know if you, like me, are a keen fan of Vietnam's Got Talent.
It's one of the best Pacific Rim talent shows going.
The most exciting thing about Vietnam's Got Talent
is the fact that there is a show called Vietnam's Got Talent.
HE SPEAKS IN VIETNAMESE
There's a gentleman called Tan Phat.
Let me tell you this, there's a lot of Got Talents
around the world and Vietnam's is the hardest one.
Tan Phat is an extraordinary young man. He is so sweet.
Not quite sure what the trick was, really.
But, essentially, it involved five egg cups.
Vietnam's Got Talent, for him,
involved drinking an eggcup full of acid.
The best thing about this magic trick gone wrong,
by quite some distance is it is clearly gone wrong.
He demonstrated that it's bad for you
but we all know acid's bad for you.
Apart from in moderation, on a little salad, delicious.
He mixes them up and he has to use his psychic powers,
or his intuition,
to tell which one has got the water and which one has got the acid.
Of course, it all goes horribly wrong and he drinks the acid.
He does the same face that I do when I have had a Sambuca.
And he spat it out so delicately.
I have a friend who can vomit like that.
When we were children, teenagers,
and people would have too much to drink
and sometimes feel unwell, she vomited in the way
that men wanted to hold her hair back
and make love to her afterwards.
Can I just say, for a man who drank half a shot glass of acid,
he did hold it together fairly well.
And, clearly, his entire mouth is being napalmed but he carries on.
He's professional.
Listen, I did three flaming Sambucas for £2 the other night.
Did anyone applaud me? No, they fucking didn't.
That's why the Americans couldn't beat them. They're a tough race.
This side of the pond on Britain's Got Talent,
we do our jeopardy in a slightly less dramatic fashion.
I decided to go on Britain's Got Talent.
My name is Dave Allen.
Really because I didn't know what it was all about.
Someone told me about it and to have a little look
because no-one knew what it was.
It was the very first season of Britain's Got Talent
Hey! Domino the duck, thank you.
I had Amanda Holden, Piers Morgan, and Simon Cowell,
three of the most straight-faced people, really, ever.
And the premise of it was that, after making a duck appear
out of a notepad,
I would then prove that it can actually talk,
as I was doing a little bit of ventriloquism.
Very badly, but I was still doing it.
Then I was going to put it in a cannon and fire it across the stage
into an empty cage on the other side.
I'm going to place you in the duck transporter.
No! Don't put him in there! "It's all right. I'll be right!"
There we go.
Five,
four,
three, two,...
I performed that act hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.
It's never gone wrong.
Go-oh!
DUCKS QUACKS AND AUDIENCE LAUGHS
Did I get anything wrong?
No. The duck got it wrong.
The duck should have stayed in the cannon. So, it is his fault, really.
So, he should be right here explaining himself.
Unfortunately, he's not here. He's...
BUZZERS
When magic goes really horribly wrong,
it's plain for everyone to see.
But not all tricks that go wrong are so obvious -
and trying to work your magic in the 21st century
makes it even harder for magicians
to keep their secrets from prying eyes.
I think this is one of those classic clips
that the 21st century does just kill magic.
Oh, and if you hadn't spotted it,
you will, because it's been put on social media.
Once you've got a twitter audience, or a you Tube comment audience,
like, there's no hiding. It has to be perfect.
Alesha, could I ask for your autograph?
So, Jamie Raven's lemongate,
the thing in the semifinal of Britain's Got Talent
where he gets Alesha Dixon to sign a banknote and then, miraculously,
the banknote appears in a lemon.
You've got to be kidding me!
Does that have your name on it?
Alesha Dixon has her boobs out and I didn't notice about the lemon.
I had to Google it and find out online
and it was some middle-aged woman who'd spotted it
because she was obviously not interested in Alesha Dixon's boobs.
Alesha Dixon has not noticed
Amanda's face has changed since series one.
so I don't know why we're all het up about her not noticing this.
The stupid thing about people getting so irate about this
and, sort of, going, "I've worked out how he's done it."
It's a trick, mate, you know.
When was the last time you got a bag of lemons home from Tesco
and started opening them, going, "my God, there's 20 quid in here"?
Of course, he's shoved it in their somehow.
It was just, either a bad shot,
or he should have concealed the hole more.
I don't really get the scandal.
It just means he was a bit rubbish at hiding holes in lemons.
Is it wrong that I find Simon Cowell quite attractive? It is, isn't it?
Even next to Alesha Dixon, I think,
Simon Cowell's definitely got something. He does!
But, sometimes, relying too heavily on your audience to help you out
doesn't always guarantee success,
as The Amazing Kreskin found out to his cost in 1976.
He was a huge, huge star in Canada, America,
and made some appearances on television in England, too.
Did lots of predictions, mentalist tricks.
Very nerdy looking - big glasses and a safari suit.
He was, basically, a cross between Derren Brown and Austin Powers.
He had a live show
and he invited James Coco, the actor, onto the show
to perform this really amazing live mentalism act with him.
Kreskin was a great showman
and what he did was take very basic magic tricks
and make them look like mind-reading miracles.
I have a card. You can see only the back of it, correct? Right.
It's a glorified card trick.
I believe I know where that card is, Jim, in the upper deck.
But he's got a guest on there who's deciding whether the audience
are clapping louder for one value of card than another.
Jim will say, applaud more strongly, either for one to 26, or 27 to 52.
I'm going to try to predict a thought
to all of you here in the studio audience.
He did take a lot of risks and, on this occasion, that didn't pay off.
Let's applaud from one to 26.
APPLAUSE
There's only one outcome with this particular trick that won't work.
52.
APPLAUSE
And, sure enough, by total chance that's the outcome that happens.
I have to say this, now, the test has totally failed.
Inside, you know, his whole body must have really sunk to the ground
but he was a pro.
You know I would not pick the bottom card of the deck.
This is the first time I've had a total failure in a test.
It's totally failed. I'm levelling.
We're going to go to a commercial break and, I think,
when we come back on we're going to try it again, Jim.
They returned from the commercial break
and he turns around and goes, "I'd never have chosen that card."
"So let's do the trick again."
Concentrate, folks.
If anything, people were more impressed
because it went wrong the first time.
Because it made the trick look as if it was difficult to do.
You're not doing brain surgery.
The audience is not going to die because your trick's gone wrong.
Is that it? It certainly is. The same card. The six of diamonds.
It works the second time.
It's a bit like a juggler deliberately dropping a ball,
so that when he finally does it right,
he gets a bigger round of applause.
For our next trick, we're winding back the clock over 100 years.
Franz Reichelt made this amazing body suit to enable him to fly.
This was just after the Houdini era
when people really loved these kind of stunts.
This was before telly was invented. Boredom was rife.
Clearly, Franz has sat at home and gone...
FRENCH ACCENT: "I am bored. I need an 'obby."
So he's knitted himself
what looks like the most inappropriate parachute
you've ever seen your entire life.
Leonardo da Vinci drew pictures of parachutes
in the 14th century which looked more like a modern day parachute
than anything that this man had come up with.
He was really trying to push himself to the limit.
That's what we've got so much nowadays,
because of people like him who were really pushing boundaries
to learn new things and advance science.
To be fair, he's not at the top.
He's on the first level, which sounds a bit rubbish,
but if you've been up the Eiffel Tower, the first level is high.
I mean, we're talking probably 15th floor.
And he's standing on a table on the edge...
and he's got what looks like a very large duffel coat.
It doesn't look like that much of an invention.
And he flaps it a couple of times...
He'd sort of done the equivalent of when you flip your coat over
and trap the wind in your coat.
"Look at my sail!" That's basically what he'd done.
I remember as a kid, my mum caught me sat on our window ledge
and I had all these plastic bags...
I figured all these plastic bags attached on strings to me
would act like a parachute.
But I was a child
with no understanding of the basic laws of physics.
The design just looked ridiculous.
It looked like the sort of parachute equivalent of a Dyson Hoover
but with no actual science behind it.
Have you used a dummy first,
thrown the dummy off the Eiffel Tower with your parachute design?
Before you go up there,
you just test it somewhere a bit lower down first, wouldn't you?
I mean, how bored must you be
to stand on top of the Eiffel Tower and go...
FRENCH ACCENT: "I think this will work, let us give it a go."
And he does that thing that I've done when I'm trying to bungee jump.
I sort of try and then, "Oh, no," and then...
But, unfortunately, unlike me, he didn't just step back.
He jumps.
Can't describe the feeling of how disappointing it was
to see how it ended.
It's really sort of tragic that someone had that much conviction
in a design that just has no scientific backing.
That made headlines everywhere around the world, as it should.
It was probably one of the world's first filmed idiots.
Just thinking, "Look, I have a large duffel coat."
I don't know what he was thinking. But he's French.
FRENCH ACCENT: He was a truly great man.
Not very aerodynamic, though.
Coming up, extreme street magic goes horribly wrong.
I got the scissors and I cut his throat.
You're going to feel a slight scratch, OK? Oh!
And why Mexican soap stars shouldn't do escapology.
Welcome back.
Before magic can go horribly wrong,
magicians have to learn to get it right.
And, like all professions, there's a lot you have to learn.
Got my hair on that one.
Sometimes you think the trick's gone wrong when it actually hasn't.
I love it when a magician does a double bluff,
so he'll do this trick where, "Oh, my goodness,"
the audience have gone, "Oh, he's mucked up the trick,"
and in the audience's mind, they love that,
cos they're sitting there going,
"Yes, we've got one over on the magician."
I think that making mistakes is a distraction technique
to make us not notice that the card is still stuck to the elbow.
There's just nothing an audience likes better
than thinking that the magician screwed up.
As a magician, there is nowhere you're more exposed
than right out on the streets.
And the problem with that is, when it goes horribly wrong,
there's nowhere to hide.
Just a quick magic trick.
It looked like he'd just learned that trick, just from a book,
and literally, no practice,
just went outside and thought he'd perform it on someone.
But the thing is, he had such a big crowd there...
Is this your card?
OK.
The trick he was doing, it's a very well-known trick,
and what was meant to happen is the four cards that he was showing
was going to plan,
because her card wasn't meant to be there.
You make the spectator think you're going wrong and then at the end,
you top it off with, "Ha-ha, I'm right."
Look at that card.
Basically, when he slaps them like that,
one card in her hand was meant to be her card.
But it wasn't. So, yeah, he was wrong all the way through.
Before you go out and perform to anyone, you practice in a mirror
and he just thought, "Oh, I've just read it, let's go out and do it."
So it's his own fault, really.
Even if he didn't upload that video after it going wrong
and he was filming it,
someone else could've been on their mobile phone filming it,
so now that's his whole reputation gone,
because they're going to remember him
as the guy who just mucked up the trick.
Now, the thing about street magic
is you never quite know when or where you might stumble across it -
and, for some shoppers, it can push them over the edge.
The trusting of the public to react how you want is foolish,
but it does create some comedy gems.
It's a bit like a candid camera type thing,
and the general public don't know what's going on.
And one of my favourite exponents of this is Ben Hanlin.
I go undercover, I set up hidden cameras
so people don't know I'm a magician,
and they don't know they're being filmed.
The trick was supposed to go, someone buys an item of clothing,
I cut off the security tag with actual scissors,
thus ruining that piece of clothing,
they have an argument and then I magically
put that piece of clothing back together, so they are like, "Whoa!"
That's how it was supposed to go.
Didn't quite get that far, though.
You said you wanted the tag off, though, right?
Yeah, so that I can leave the shop with the tie.
Without the tag on.
Um...
Is there someone else I can speak to here or something like that?
I'm on the door today. Is there a manager about? No, he's gone home.
Excuse me!
Well, here you go, mate, here you go, there's your...
All he's trying to do is get him to watch
this fairly mediocre magic trick!
So he went through a lot of abuse.
Come over, come over, come over.
He goes, "I hate you, mate, I'm not doing it, I'm doing one,
"I'm out of here, I'm not coming down here again,
"What are you doing? Wah-wah-wah."
I can't wear this, yeah? Show me how I can wear this.
I'll show you, I'll show you. Show me how I can wear this.
I'll get rid of this. Do you want another...
You're getting a bit annoyed, aren't you?
Look, it's no problem, mate. This is fine...
You said you wanted the tag off.
I do like it when people get the hump and he's in a shop
cutting up a tie that the bloke wants to buy
and the bloke has the last laugh.
I don't care, you're fucking robbing off me. Stand there!
I'll give you this... Fuck off!
That...That's stealing, that is, mate! Suck my dick.
"Suck my dick!"
"Suck my dick, Ben!"
It's only a tie!
Suck my dick!
One of the big dangers of street magic
is that sometimes your carefully prepared act can backfire,
as Israeli illusionist Hezi Dean discovered
when a news crew came to film him in Tel Aviv.
Everyone would love to levitate,
it's one of the superpowers that you would have.
Levitating is when you're floating
with no part of your body in contact with anything.
Technically, he's just leaning on something high up.
He appears to be levitating simply by connecting with the wall.
And you would perhaps fall for that if you were...
..two years old.
If you do a trick in Israel,
knowing Israelis, you've got to be absolutely sure,
because they don't mince words and they're very direct as an audience.
It's not his real hand, it's glued to the wall.
"You're just an idiot, glued to a building."
"You're clearly attached to the wall through a pole!"
"Go away... Go away!"
There is a part of his body that is attached to it
and this is how we see him hanging.
"It's got a harness on or something, is it?"
"Just go away. Go away!"
There's nothing worse than a punter heckling you
while you're still doing a trick.
Not just someone on Twitter going, "That was a bit rubbish."
"Oh, something must be going on under that tarpaulin.
"I don't know what, but something is happening under there."
When you see that the only way he can get down is through
a big hydraulic lift with a curtain around it,
it doesn't exactly scream out "real magic", you know?
Looks like the removal men have come, it just looks rubbish.
It was the most unimpressive thing
I think I've ever seen a magician attempt to do.
You can see that happening at any street corner in Covent Garden now,
except they're dressed as Yoda,
so it is just slightly more entertaining.
But has Hezi got off relatively lightly with his audience
compared to our next act?
Hi, I'm Ryan Tricks, I'm a street magician, I'm a YouTuber,
my videos have been seen by over 10 million people.
So, Trollstation, they're actually like an extreme prank channel
and they approached me to do, like, something with them,
to team up with them in Covent Garden.
And they had the idea of, like,
a street magician kills member of the public.
I want to try a stunt, like a big, big trick.
When I got a big crowd around, I made sure there was no kids,
because it was going to be a bit extreme,
because they are an extreme prank channel.
Has everyone seen, you know, like, famous magicians,
they saw a lady in half?
I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to do something a bit better.
I'm going to cut someone and heal them.
Everyone was like, "No way are you doing it to me."
Right? Does anyone want me to do it to them?
So I cut and I heal.
You? What do you mean?
Like, I cut you, like, a cut, and then I'll be able to heal you.
OK. With some scissors.
I had one of the guys from the channel actually in the audience,
cos he was going to be the guy I was going to do the big trick to.
If you come here for me... Come here.
OK, we'll stand...
Just come here, come here, you'll be fine, you'll be fine.
What's your name? Gomez. Gomez? Nice to meet you, I'm Ryan.
He's an actor, so it was really good, he played it really well.
And then I used him and then we went on to do it.
He sounds like he comes from Tilbury in Essex. Gomez!
Yeah, of course he is(!) Really?
You can feel them, they are sharp, right?
They're sharp, right? Yeah?
So, word to the wise, if you're visiting a big city
maybe with a group of friends and some bloke with badly spelt tattoos
comes up and starts, "I'm going to cut you, I'm going to cut you,"
right, rather than gather around, run away.
You'll be fine, it won't hurt, all right? Can I feel the scissors?
Yeah, you can feel it, it'll cut you. It is sharp, OK?
It'll only feel like a little prick.
Are you sure you want me to do this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, watch.
I'm going to take this,
I want you to take your hands out of your pockets,
put them behind your back.
Just like that. I need you to relax for me, OK?
Close your eyes, close your eyes.
I wanted to make it look as real as possible,
so I made it look like, to get him into, like, a hypnotic trance,
I was making him breathe in, breathe in, breathe out.
So I wanted it to be so real,
I didn't want anyone to think anything of it.
You're going to feel a slight scratch, OK?
You're going to start to feel it now.
Fuck!
'Then blood started coming out and he dropped to the floor.
'I run off and literally everyone was just staring at him,'
which was quite crazy, because nobody even went to help.
Don't just stand there! Some people are still filming it! Jesus.
That's not really a classic magic plot,
that's more like amateur surgery in the street.
And no-one even went after me either, so...
It was quite, it was sort of like a good experiment, I think.
I think you've kind of crossed the line there.
April Fools! April Fools!
I mean, if you want to end your career as a magician,
I mean, that's how you do it, right?
Looking back on it now, it's a bit...
Yeah, it was a bit too much, I think.
I think it was a bit too far.
What are you doing? You're running around with scissors
and you've just pretended to get stabbed in the street, are you mad?
I think it just left people with a really bad taste in their mouth,
especially the guy who had his throat cut.
Ryan has just lost himself a summer of kids parties.
You just can't do that, you just can't do it.
You can really traumatise someone with that.
It was an April Fools.
It doesn't matter what it was. I don't care what it is.
You upset a lot of people. Were you involved in this?
No, I witnessed it.
We all got in trouble, actually.
The police come, we wasn't expecting it, and he actually got a fine.
Really, it's horrible, horrible.
Cos he's a really good stooge, he's brilliant,
I think he's really good.
Awful, though.
Coming up, a near-death experience during a daring water escape.
Head goes back, turns stiff, turned blue and blacked out.
And a word of warning for those trying tricks with fire.
Don't play with fire if you're a fat bloke.
When it comes to leaving an audience open-mouthed,
for the modern magician, it's all about size.
Over the years, magic has kind of escalated in grandeur.
They want more, they want bigger.
If no-one's going to die, they're not really interested in it.
You build something in your house, like a mad scientist.
Like, OK, how do you test it?
"My illusion is bigger than your illusion,
"therefore I must be a better magician than you are."
These magicians are now throwing themselves through class,
cutting themselves with blades.
Add water, fire, height.
And then the next thing, jumping down to the bottom of the ocean
and then they'll vanish for three days and then come back.
My dad is like, "Is this Jesus?"
I said, "Yes, I think they're doing what was in the Bible."
What you're getting here is almost the DVD extra without having
to pay for it, or ask for it, or want it!
Where is it going to end?
When are magicians going to go,
"Right, I'm going to make the world vanish now."
How far have we got to go to impress an audience?
We've got to get more and more daring
and be more and more dangerous.
It's Murphy's law, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong.
And the daddy of dangerous stunts was the one and only Harry Houdini.
The water torture cell escape was invented by Harry Houdini,
and I think it was a way to try and transfer these river escapes
into the theatre.
American escape artist Kristen Johnson, nicknamed Lady Houdini,
has performed the water cell escape hundreds of times.
On 16th January, 2009, at a half-time basketball game
with an audience of 17,000 people, things didn't go quite as planned.
We created a full-view water torture cell,
which enables a person to see the entire time I'm underwater.
The real danger comes in with how long are you holding your breath
and can you pick the locks and the handcuffs
in a shorter period of time than you can hold your breath?
Now, when you relax,
you can hold your breath much longer than if you're exerting energy.
When Kristen is in the tank, she's exerting energy,
so the biggest thing is,
can you pick the locks quicker than the breath you can hold?
At around two minutes 40 seconds,
I saw changes mostly in her skin colour
and just her motor skills in general.
So I gave her my signal to get out.
At two minutes 40, I gave her that said signal.
And that's when you see her starting to go to the top lock
and working on that lock.
And at two minutes 48 seconds, or eight seconds later,
that's when you see her body convulse, head goes back,
turns stiff, turned blue and blacked out.
It's gut-wrenching, watching the effect that you have
on a loved one watching you potentially drown.
My emergency role kicks in and that is to take the key
that's on a lanyard around my neck,
get the two locks off that's holding the lid in place...
..throw the lid to the ground,
get to the top of the tank and get her head above water.
Fortunately, I had her out in about nine seconds.
Call the medic!
When I got out of the tank, I was waving to the crowd
and I looked down at Kevin and he's like, "Come on, get down."
AUDIENCE APPLAUDS
Her, still immediately afterwards, waving, like it was OK.
People would assume that it's fake.
Cos, "Oh, she just faked being passed out, look,
"she's waving, she's fine. What do you mean? That was..."
I was like, "No, unless you've passed out,
"You don't understand that."
He was hustling me off to the locker room
and I thought he was acting so strange, and I turned to him
and I said, "You had to get me out, didn't you?"
And he said, "Yes."
Comedian Steve Furst is known for his quirky characters.
One he tried to pull off for a recent TV pilot
was a mystical street magician.
There was a pilot for a show called Rumbled, which was pranks,
really, and it was Steve Furst.
It was a pilot for the BBC.
It wasn't picked up.
Who knows why?
I've made a lot of them in my time, sometimes they're brilliant,
this was actually really good.
I wanted to do a very self-important street magician
who thought he was better than he was.
I would walk up to some punters,
Watford high street, lots of people shopping,
middle of the afternoon, and I would simply get
a little group of people, I would try and engage with them.
Quick trick for you, just stand here, sir. OK.
So, sealed pack of cards, yes?
It's the classic trick,
you've probably seen a magician have a deck of cards.
You pick a card.
That was a good parody of how magic kind of is at the moment.
You stand on the street and go,
"Pick a card, I'm not going to look."
You put the card back in the pack, please, and shuffle,
shuffle it again.
And I'm doing the whole... you know, stupid pose.
He got all the actions right, the movements.
You put it back in the deck...
You shuffle it, "I can really feel it, yeah,
"I can feel your card, I can feel your card."
And there was a Range Rover parked there...
which is our Range Rover.
Wait, I'll make it more interesting. Wait, OK...
Rather than just show it to you...
"I'm going to throw this and it's going to...
"stick to the glass, you know?
"Right, you ready? You ready?"
Eye contact, eye contact...
'And at that moment, we had somebody over the other side of the road
'with an electrical charge and this sugar glass window just goes...'
Thankfully, it worked, because we only had one pass at it,
cos we could only afford one explosion and sugar glass.
Is that your card?
No?
They did it, them!
They actually thought it was real,
I don't think they realised it was a prank.
I think they actually thought that he actually smashed
a window by accident, because he runs off.
I think that is what sells it.
I uploaded it to YouTube and I labelled it as
"Street magician trick goes badly wrong."
And then therefore they will devour that as a community of onlookers
and hence from 0 to 6.5 million in a very short space of time.
That was one of those hidden camera moments where you go,
"That was a good day's work. That was a good day's work."
The ultimate trick for a magician at the pinnacle of their career
is the deadliest of all.
In the magic world, the bullet catch is always discussed,
because it's killed more magicians
in the history of magic than any other trick.
Rifles were genuinely being fired on stage.
But a lot of people do it, probably for some good reasons.
I love my job, but I don't want to die for it.
The bullet catch was invented by William Robinson,
and his stage name was Chung Ling Soo.
And he came up with this brilliant magic trick.
People would come for miles
to watch this man get a bullet in the face and catch it.
There are lots of different ways of doing it.
And one that we restaged had killed Chung Ling Soo
at the Wood Green Empire in the early 1900s.
Our producer managed to find the man that had actually fired the gun.
Paul Daniels recreated the stunt. He had the original guy.
Would you please welcome Jack Grossman?
APPLAUSE
He was an elderly gentleman then.
Jack has agreed to take part in the playlet again
and we just hope that it doesn't go wrong like it did on that night.
Paul researched and researched and knew every method there was
for a bullet catch.
And he created his own.
You get the bullet signed
so that even at the end you can verify that it is the same bullet.
With real firearms and real bullets
tricks can go wrong and you can get shot.
The idea is someone at the other side of the stage
has a big, old-fashioned, huge rifle.
It doesn't take much for something to go wrong.
Everything counts in a magic show.
One bit goes wrong, it's game over.
It's gone wrong so many times and it's ended fatal so many times.
It's an awesome thing to see.
In the traditional version, he held a plate
and he caught the bullet on the plate.
This is the thing about magicians.
They will do anything to get a reaction.
It's got to be bigger, it's got to be more dangerous.
How can I up the ante and take it to the next level?
We are such a competitive bunch.
I wasn't worried until the guy lifted the rifle.
To see a gun being pointed at your husband...
My heart started to thump.
And it was that moment that I suddenly went, "Oh, my God."
Whenever you see it live, part of you always goes,
"This could go wrong."
As it already has done loads in the past.
GUNSHOT RATTLING
This has killed lots of people.
BULLET RATTLES
APPLAUSE
I mean, just learn a card trick.
The gentleman that had fired the gun that had killed Chung Ling Soo
believed that inside the gun there were two barrels
and that the metal had worn through.
What happened to Chung Ling Soo was a piece of shrapnel
within the rifle itself that got fired at him and killed him,
just like a bullet.
As far as I know, it's been another 27 magicians since then.
APPLAUSE
Ralf Bialla was a particularly interesting character
who did this trick.
He did quite a hard-core version of it and did it a lot.
He actually had steel teeth inserted
and used to wear dentures over them.
He also had these metal gloves
and he used to shield his face with them.
It was like his staple thing,
and he died by falling off a cliff.
It was because he suffered from dizziness that was caused
as a result of the injuries he sustained
doing this trick over the years.
GUNSHOT
It's like being a sword-swallower
and dying by choking on a peanut, or something, you know?
Coming up...
Celebrity have-a-go magician OJ Simpson
shows off his sleight of hand.
That was the second-best trick OJ has ever pulled.
Oh, controversial.
And when explosives and magic combine to go horribly wrong...
She gets out with one second to spare but she doesn't realise
she's only got one second,
cos she think she's got another 15 after that.
We're journeying through magic's horribly wrong moments
but, you know, if it's going to go wrong,
at least you should look good.
If you don't look the part, first of all, you shouldn't be doing it.
Magic for me is always about the spectacle.
The tinsel in the background from the working men's club.
It used to be glittery coats really strong bright lights.
I'm showing you this.
You've got to fill the place with dry ice.
Fireworks going off.
You want to stand in front of your wind machine for a moment.
Possibly white stallions.
There's nothing in the tube.
Great music. And a drumbeat.
To bring some tension to something that is ultimately a bit...meh.
But no matter how good you look and how well you've set the scene,
there's one gig in magic that nothing can prepare you for.
And this really is the sharp end.
I mean, obviously, a circus family...
Presumably on your days off you do circus-related stuff.
You take the elephant for a walk.
You go for a drive in the clown car.
And then if you've got nothing else to do and you've got small children,
about two or five, one in nappies, you think, "Tell you what,
"Why don't we get the local children round
"to have a look while I throw knives at them?"
ARCHIVE: In a family, the Gallaghers -
Connie Ann, five years old, and Colleena Sue, two and a half -
are a big help to mother Louella,
who is no mean hand with a handful of knives.
There was no television in those days.
They just spent every evening after supper
throwing knives at each other.
You wouldn't mess with Louella, would you?
She's got a stern look, that lady.
Connie Ann is a veteran at being a target for her mother's cutlery,
and doesn't turn a hair at Ma's cut-ups -
even though Ma is pretty sharp with the cleavers.
The kids look so angelic!
I love the way they stand against the board holding one ear, like...
Toddlers are not known for um, their focus, are they, let's say?
They are known for crying, running off
and being easily distracted.
I suppose that's not the best combination with knives.
It takes a steady eye and a stern hard to heave knives
at the apple of your eye.
But this female William Tell has no qualms and plenty of faith.
"Please, Mamma, don't...
"Don't take the ear off again.
"We were lucky last time.
"We popped it in ice straight away. But it did hurt, rather."
Basically, she didn't want those kids and she's spent
so many years working on her alibi that her alibi is too good,
so she's got to come up with a new way of killing them.
A near miss.
But this miss says it's as good as a smile.
It's just interesting to see what you drive women to
when they're not allowed to go to work. So there...
It's probably happening in houses all around North London as we speak,
that frustrated women are throwing knives at their babies.
"I just want to go back to the office!"
But it's not worth it, cos the childcare is too expensive.
But what about when the tables are turned?
Hello. My name is Edward, and I work at the circus.
I'm aged ten and I throw knives and my mum.
There is a case, a guy called Edward Pinder -
I prefer this because the balance was redressed -
where a ten-year-old kid was throwing knives at his mother.
None of this feels right, but somehow that feels more right.
Have you ever seen a ten-year-old's bedroom? Things are everywhere.
I certainly wouldn't get them throwing knives at me.
Edward Pinder, this very young ten-year-old knife thrower -
you find it quite amazing that a mother would let their son
throw knives at them.
Can you imagine her bringing her new boyfriend round
and her son's not happy? "I'm not keen with this one."
No, it's wrong. Don't like it. I think it's a terrible idea.
Stop it immediately.
Couldn't possibly let an occasion like that - Whoa! - go by.
Mix knife throwing with live TV,
and that can really push things over the edge,
as Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton found out
on This Morning back on 2003.
I think on a show like This Morning that's been going on for years,
you need to surprise the audience occasionally.
So that's why, certainly for me as an editor,
I would like to push the boundaries a bit and encourage people
to be creative and just go for something a little bit different.
Knife throwing is exactly that. There's no trick to it.
You're taking knives and you're throwing them from a set distance
at a target over and over again, and the way it works is muscle memory.
You just...
Literally, knife throwers have spent their lives just going
one after another so they can get so accurate they can pick
any point on that target and hopefully nail it.
What we're going to do in a moment is ask you to throw
as many as you possibly can in a minute.
I don't how we're going to count... How many have you got?
I've got about 90 knives there altogether. 90. All right.
We're going to count how many actually hit the board.
BEN: Then you add an assistant into the mix,
and the goal of a knife thrower is to get as close to the assistant
as possible without actually touching them.
So at the end it looks like
that kind of classic cartoon shape
that she can walk off and there's a silhouette of the knives.
That's awesome.
However, when you are throwing something, every now and again,
the conditions might change or you might just twitch your arm.
It can go off target and a knife is going towards a human body.
I wanted to see if there was a trick involved,
I wanted to see if he was maybe dropping the knives
over his shoulder and spring-loaded ones
would appear from the back of the board.
And so I stood behind him for the rehearsal.
And it was actually horrific.
It just got more dramatic and more dramatic and more dramatic
to the point where we thought "We've got over the hump here,
"we are near this - 15, 10 seconds left - we've got away with this,"
when, of course, she gets hit.
In the gallery we could see instantly that she'd been hit.
FERN: Two, one. Stop throwing.
Marvellous. Very good.
Oh. Oh, my God. There's blood!
So when Fern says, "Oh, she's been hit, she's been hit,"
poor Phillip's main concern, of course -
"Well, that's all very well, but how many did he get?"
She does have a cut. But do we know how many that was?
I went off to speak to her afterwards and she was very poised.
And I said, "How do you remain so calm?"
And she said, "I can't get this over fast enough.
"He keeps hitting me."
It's no surprise at all to me that they're not together.
Who would stand facing your bloke
chucking a load of knives at you? Not me, that's for sure.
Very sorry and sad to hear that that has now collapsed.
Maybe it was just one knife too many.
So, knives are dangerous.
Anything else magicians need to be very careful with?
Oh, yes, fire.
We are at a festival, probably,
though it was never a very good festival. It's early morning,
everyone has gone home apart from a few fire-eaters.
There's some fire-eater bloke and somebody's spinning stuff round.
There's a guy who clearly likes a pie or two.
And some fat bloke in his pants comes on
and goes, "I'll have a go at that."
He's a little bit slapdash. He looks like he's wearing latex,
but then you realise it's actually his skin that is being stretched.
He gets a little big for his boots,
goes in, you know, rather firmly and gets a big splash of flame.
Well, it sets his bloody shorts on fire.
LAUGHTER
And everybody is laughing at him. They're all laughing at him.
It's on his trousers. His foot's on fire. He's like, "Oh!"
Basically, it's an economy back, crack and sack.
And it's like the man's man's way of having a wax
without feeling emasculated.
And everyone is laughing.
"Oh, fat bloke on fire. Fat bloke. He's on fire."
It's not funny. It's a fat bloke on fire, for God's sake.
You've got this large man in his undies rolling around a field.
They're giant pants, the sort of thing that my nan used to wear.
And he's trying to put them on. It looks... It's ridiculous.
He's like... No, don't put them back on.
It really looked like he'd had a heavy night down the curry house
the night before, because they were all charred with the burningness,
obviously.
Don't play with fire if you're a fat bloke.
And now time for a collection of celebrities who decided
to try their hand at magic.
Up first, the Bond and Fantasy Island star Herve Villechaize.
In many ways, American TV - quite ahead of us
with their incessant need to take stars
from certain disciplines and give them other skills
and then put them on television.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Herve Villechaize!
APPLAUSE
"Boss, boss, the plane! It comes!"
I remember him.
He's an excellent pub quiz answer. He's on Circus Of The Stars.
And his magic trick is swallowing fire.
He took time out of his busy schedule where he'd been
at Santa's grotto making toys -
just turned up with his little elf outfit.
There's a lot of posturing.
SHE HUMS
I mean, I think if I was going to fire-eat
I'd do a lot of time wasting.
It's the art of doing very little.
SHE HUMS
APPLAUSE
Burning.
Look, I've got the fire. See, it's real fire.
And I'm about to put it in my mouth.
But not yet. "Oh, God, I'm scared."
There was a lot of that.
APPLAUSE
If I had to mark him out of ten... One.
Next up, possibly the most unlikely guest star
showing off his magic skills.
Mr OJ Simpson!
APPLAUSE
This is pre-trial,
so you have to remember back then he is just known for doing
a little bit of acting
and also being a very successful American football star.
And I said, "Well, if he can do it, I certainly can learn how to do it."
So I took the time and I learned. APPLAUSE
He's actually really good! Like, he's got that showmanship.
He looks like a semi-pro magician,
which actually came in very, very handy later on in his life,
when he seemed to make quite a lot of evidence disappear.
It's weird kind of watching it now,
because you're kind of looking at his glamorous assistant
thinking, "Don't get too close to him."
Let's pretend this is William Perry, the Refrigerator.
OJ certainly had the gift of the gab. It was absolutely amazing.
I mean, later, when you saw him in court, less talky.
Less fun, I thought.
All right, I'll approach William...
When I get near him, I'll give him a little shimmy,
then I'll just come right by.
He's pretty good! He can do the patter,
he can make the handkerchief go through the wand.
Realising that OJ Simpson's actually really good at magic
just makes the whole thing even more weird.
APPLAUSE
That was the second-best trick OJ has ever pulled.
Ooh! Controversial...
Now, some well-known people are willing to tackle
slightly more dangerous magic.
Anadela is a big-name soap star in Mexico,
and when she was approached to try a high-profile escape live on TV,
it all went horribly wrong.
It starts off like a classic in magic.
"I'm going to get in the box, going to get handcuffed.
"I'm going to get out of the box within a certain amount of time."
That's pretty standard. However, someone on her team went,
"Wouldn't it be awesome if we have a bomb inside of the box? Great!"
SHE SPEAKS SPANISH
You'd think if someone said, "Locksmith turned escapologist,"
yeah, oh, yeah, that makes sense.
But, no, "former soap star turned escapologist,"
it's not sort of the best training.
You wouldn't have Pauline from EastEnders -
"Oh, I tell you what I'm going to do,
"I'm going to do a water-tank escape."
Anadela is not only a famous Mexican soap star, but she decides
she's got to get even more attention by blowing herself up in a box.
I mean, that's needy.
Normally, if you were going to do this, you would have some sort
of safety element built in so that you never actually get blown up.
That would be kind of what I would try and do.
Anadela was taking a very big risk.
Any time you're putting explosives
and you're sitting right next to them, that is absolutely crazy.
They put, what, five times the amount of explosives
in the box than they'd ever rehearsed with.
It doesn't matter how many times you rehearse it,
if you've actually got a live explosive,
at some point it will go wrong.
On the day of filming, everyone gets excited, everyone goes,
"Well, let's just put a bit more in there,
"so when it goes up it'll look a bit better."
And then the guy didn't set the timer right.
And it only has to be out by a few seconds, and that's it.
They gave her 45 seconds in the box to get out rather than 60 seconds.
Changing the parameters changes everything.
You go, "Really...? God! Shit. Who can she sue?"
She's expecting a minute's worth before it goes boom. 45 seconds?!
Kaboom!
So, let's get this right. Someone...accidentally set the timer
for 45 seconds rather than 60 seconds.
It's like the start of a classic episode of Columbo, that, isn't it?
You know, you imagine him popping in and going,
"Sir, just one more thing. You had ONE job..."
"She's trying for months to get out of this box in a minute.
"What she doesn't know is we've taken it down to 45 seconds."
What...? Who does...? Why? She's clearly not trained for that.
You're supposed to be on her side, whoever you are, TV people,
and yet you're basically sending her to a slightly early grave.
She's doing this escape outside,
and quite rightly they decide that they can't use a lit fuse,
because the weather might make it go faster or it could blow it out
or whatever, so they opt for some sort of electronic fuse...
which, to me, looked like an egg timer and a couple of AA batteries.
I mean, I'm not sure I would've laid my trust in that.
She thought she had plenty of time.
She gets out with one second to spare,
but she doesn't realise she's only got one second,
because she thinks she's got another 15 after that.
The whole thing blows up with 75 foot of flames in the air.
It looks like some sort of Hollywood action film.
And the poor girl...
SHE SCREAMS
She doesn't do that any more. If that had've happened to me,
I think I would work in a coffee shop.
And so the former soap star went on to become
a former escape artist, but at least she lived to tell the tale.
Another even one full second of her being away from that
could've made all the difference.
SIREN WAILS
Coming up, a desperate race against time to escape from a frozen lake...
A stunt I wouldn't recommend anyone else to try.
..and we introduce you to a contender
for the world's worst magician.
JIM BOWEN: You've set the magic industry back 40 years.
We're romping through magic's horribly wrong moments,
leaving no stone unturned.
But what do we think of when we think "magician"?
Don't look at the hands, look at the glitz.
For donkey's years, people, when they thought of a magician,
they thought of top hat and tails.
ARCHIVE: He's pouring beer from a milk bottle!
Black top hat, black cloak with red inside.
A bit Dracula-looking, really.
Not fashion victims, but sort of perpetrators of fashion crime.
Spangles. I'm thinking low-cut shirts on the men.
Velvet is the first thing that comes into my mind. A soft fabric.
White gloves and white rabbits.
The dark, broody Latino look.
I think a cape, I think a bit too much male, er, make-up.
Top hat, long jacket.
Just cheesy, really. Yeah.
When it comes to modern magic,
it's not so much how you look but how you wow the audience.
Here's "You're back in the room" TV mentalist Keith Barry
at a live stage show in Dublin.
Keith Barry, he calls people up from the audience,
they can tie him down and tie him to this chair.
They tape his mouth,
tape his nose and then he has to get out before he runs out of air.
It's a kind of cool stunt.
Well, Keith is able to make it interesting.
And sometimes too interesting.
The version of that escape is 100 feet of rope,
an escapologist and a chair.
And you're tied to the chair
in any way that the audience wishes to tie you.
And it can be hands behind the back, here, round the neck,
the legs tied to the chair leg...
It's been going for a while,
and then all of a sudden something stops.
The movement is the same, it's a rocking movement all the time.
Nothing really changes. You don't see a struggle.
That rocking goes on for quite a long time,
and then at the last few seconds...
..the chair tips backward and there's an "Ooh!" from the audience,
and they're like, "Ooh! He's fallen..."
Everything comes to a standstill, and there's silence.
Keith stops moving. So, we've got no idea what's happened.
One of my guesses - and I've seen this before - some escapologists
have actually faked a collapse because they couldn't escape...
..and that's an easy way to get out of it.
If you can't escape and you think you're in trouble,
just pretend to faint. Wait for the medics to come on.
They'll untie you and carry you offstage.
I'd love to know the ins and outs of that and what really happened.
MURMURS IN AUDIENCE
To me, something doesn't seem right.
You're not going to faint from just doing that.
And then for the chair to tip over and then the struggling stops...
And then that's it, curtains come down.
Phew! You had us worried there for a minute, Keith.
From one show-stopper to another.
Cast your minds back to the early days of satellite TV.
One of my favourite talent shows was called Sky Star Search,
and when Sky TV first started,
this was one of the mainstays of their programming.
And it was on every day, I think it was about five o'clock,
five till six, hosted by Keith Chegwin.
APPLAUSE
Oh! There's not a lot on this card.
It just says a magic act, a man from Harrogate.
I could give you his home phone number, if you want.
Er, this is act number three. Please welcome Robert's World of Magic!
I don't really like escapology at the best of times,
but at times you could appreciate the skill and craft behind it.
If there are bolts involved, if there are padlocks involved,
if there are handcuffs,
if you're inside a chest that's inside a chest
that's inside a bigger chest that's underwater,
then I can appreciate the skill and concentration that's required.
If you've been loosely tied inside what looks like a duvet cover,
I'm going to be less impressed, mate.
APPLAUSE
Can I have two people from the audience, please?
LIGHT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS
I'm going to perform the world's greatest escape.
Please check the bag.
Check the bag and see if there's any trap doors. Right.
He gets put inside this duvet cover and loosely tied up,
but you can see he's trying to make sure
that it's not too tightly tied up,
because he's going, "No, not like that."
Now start tying.
What was quite funny is the whole of the act
is underscored with Diamonds Are Forever, which...
I didn't quite figure out what the tie-in was there, but it works.
Right, go and sit down.
LAUGHTER
That bag had quite a large hole,
not quite big enough for his head to get through,
but he tried on several occasions
to push his head through that hole. It didn't happen.
LAUGHTER
He used thin nylon rope. That's a no-no for escapologists.
Don't do that. It's like shoelaces.
Once you get a knot in your shoelaces,
they're difficult, aren't they?
It seemed to go on, like, for an eternity,
and he just couldn't get out.
Robert...
Cheggers comes to the rescue, tries to untie the knots. Can't.
Hang on... APPLAUSE
Has anybody got any scissors? Got any scissors?
Things have got to be bad when Keith Chegwin comes along
with a pair of scissors!
Keith Chegwin has to come along with a pair of scissors
and cut him out of the sack!
MUSIC AND LAUGHTER CONTINUE
Hang on, Robert, hang on. OK, hang on, just a minute.
That's better.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
You're a member of the Magic Circle, so I hear. Yeah, in Harrogate.
I've been going since I was six years old. Right. Great!
Er, Jim?
Robert, do the Magic Circle know you're a member?
Yes! Because that amazed me.
I couldn't see how anybody could make as big a cockup
of getting out of a bag...
But not only that, you showed such expertise,
the way the odd hand came out and then the other,
and I thought there was a lot of depth and thought that went...
and the way the two guys tied you up, it was all incredible.
Absolutely... I mean, you've set the magic industry back 40 years.
It's the look of defiance on the young magician's face,
though, as well, the sort of "I'll carry on, I'll keep going.
"I will be a big magician."
TV gold, that is. TV gold.
Over now to Norway for escapology on an epic scale.
Lord Christian has been wowing audiences with death-defying
escapes since his debut on Norway's Got Talent in 2012,
and let's just say he doesn't do things by halves.
The ice escape that Lord Christian did is one...
I wouldn't recommend.
I wanted to do something that was more extreme than I had done before.
It was in a frozen lake. The ice on the lake was a metre thick.
We cut a hole in the ice
and then we wanted me to jump into the hole
attached to handcuffs and chains,
get loose and then come back up through the hole.
I mean, that is very, very, very dangerous.
To be chained and shackled and to be dropped in water anyway,
but in Icelandic conditions... No.
The real danger there is you go down through
a hole and that's the only way up.
It's unbelievably stupid.
I think it was wrong because everything was so dark.
It was in the evening, everything was dark and the water was...
You can see nothing.
All the people had showed up, the TV was ready,
I was sitting on the chair waiting to jump into the water.
And I'm just breathing slowly, trying to lower my pulse,
to be able to hold my breath longer, doing the breathing techniques.
And then I jumped in.
I went straight to the bottom. It took maybe, you know,
three seconds or something, because it was eight metres deep there.
And as this weight hit the bottom, it got pitch-black,
because the mud was going up into the water, all the particles.
You can see nothing.
The freezing water, the lack of air,
holding your breath for that amount of time,
the fact that he could stray from beneath that hole
and end up metres away from the hole, then nobody would find him...
The water is two degrees Celsius,
so a little bit colder and the whole lake would freeze.
And it's just not a pleasant environment to do something in.
I spent around three, four minutes
to get out of the weights and handcuffs.
And that's about expected time, what we rehearsed.
As soon as I'm loose from this,
I will float up, because the help of the wet suit makes me float.
I mean, I would've expected underwater cameras so we could
see the fact that he's struggling, he's there, here, whatever.
But, no, we had no vision whatsoever.
All we had was the thought process of somebody being underwater,
freezing conditions, no air. "Is he out? Is he not?
"And is he going to make it?"
After three, four minutes, I float up,
and since the water was so muddy...
I thought it was going to be better when I came further up, but, er...
but it didn't, so I couldn't really see where the ice started.
So when I float up, I hit my head on the ice, and it was, er...
I knew I was in trouble then.
I just figured I would try to stay in the same area
and wait for the rescue diver.
TV COMMENTARY
The rescue diver wasn't able to find me.
I heard him diving, but I couldn't see him.
He could be a metre from me and I just couldn't see him.
When the ice freezes in the winter, it doesn't freeze totally flat.
If it's wind, you know, you get this kind of thing.
So we did a lot of diving, and because of that diving,
air accumulated underneath the ice in those pockets.
I found an air pocket and I was able to do some breathing in
that air pocket and just wait for the mud to sink to the bottom again.
TV COMMENTARY CONTINUES
Eventually, the mud cleared up and I was able to see the light
from the hole, and then I swam to the hole and I emerged.
And that was after eight minutes.
I didn't even know I was hurt and bleeding from my head.
As soon as I came up, I saw the red on the snow. I was like, "Oh!"
In this icy water, even though you're wearing a wet suit,
it's freezing, so I had to get some time to get myself
and get some heat back into the body
before I was even able to speak to anyone.
I would never do it,
and I wouldn't have done it when I was in my late teens, either,
even though I was fearless then.
That's something that you just do not attempt.
It's a stunt I wouldn't recommend anyone else to try.
It's really, really dangerous to do something like this.
Another of Lord Christian's party pieces
is an escape made famous by Houdini.
Milk-can escape. It's not like a trick. This is real.
You're underwater, you are holding your breath,
you are opening real handcuffs and padlocks.
So it's not an easy thing to do.
Lord Christian was asked by his good friend
opera singer Are Hembre for a big finish for his Christmas show.
To teach Are this,
we first needed to teach him how to pick the handcuffs,
and then we had to teach him how to pick padlocks,
and then we had to teach him how to hold his breath.
He asked me if I wanted to join his Christmas concert, to make...
like, a magic touch on it, and I, of course, did.
And I also thought, "Ah!
"Maybe I challenge him to do my milk-can escape."
When Christian challenged me, I didn't know what to think,
because I can hold my breath
for 45 seconds and that's it, I thought.
I'm not so happy with water, either,
and handcuffs and locks, and so...
But whatever. We try!
I always like new things and challenging things, so why not?
And he wanted all the locks on in the first rounds,
which is crazy, but he wanted to try the whole thing,
so I locked it up and he went in,
and he did well, the handcuffs came out.
When the lid goes on, you think you need to hold your breath as
long as possible, so you just try to be calm.
To get up your hand over the lock and pick the locks, it's not easy.
HE LAUGHS Then the panic takes you, and, er...
and the seconds go very fast in the water.
Suddenly, I see a lot of bubbles on the water.
I just knew I had to get him out as soon as possible.
ARE GASPS FOR AIR
It's only ten seconds. When you have absolutely no air in your lungs,
that feels like an hour.
HE COUGHS
He was gasping for air when he came out
and knocking the top of the can and totally panicking.
When you get panic, it's many things going through your head,
and you don't think clear. HE CHUCKLES
I don't think Are would do the milk-can ever again.
Coming up, a glimpse inside the Magic Circle 1980s-style...
And sometimes I'm quite surprised
we got away with a few, erm, things for the dads,
let's put it that way.
..and dope on a rope.
Released my feet, held on to the bottom end of the burning rope,
and I was about to be brought down, and...
For a lot of magicians, the stage can be a lonely place,
especially when things start falling apart,
but help is often at hand from the trusty magician's assistant.
There's our dice!
Being an assistant can be utterly terrifying.
She can actually mess up the magician's show
if she don't know what she's doing.
A good magician's assistant can kind of make or break the act, really.
Usually scantily clad.
It's not very politically correct these days,
but that's certainly the way it was back in the day.
Nice, beautiful lady dressed in a glittery dress.
Sexy assistant.
It couldn't be more misogynistic.
It's like, "Come on, love, get in the box so I can saw you in half.
"But before you do, I want you to dress like a whore."
I always prefer an ugly assistant, not foxy ones in the leotards.
I want to see a big biffer.
There must be an old person's home somewhere just full of girls
in feathers and transparent tights.
It's very rare for the assistant to survive long. Period.
We think of the lovely Debbie McGee.
Basically, tan, teeth and tits.
Before political correctness,
TV used to get away with everything and anything.
This was a time called the '80s.
The Paul Daniels Magic Show was a Saturday early-evening show
that the whole family sat down and watched.
# Will you like it? # PAUL DANIELS: Not a lot! Not a lot!
There was something for everybody.
APPLAUSE
We had the top circus acts from around the world,
that didn't have the censorship that we had in England -
that weren't naughty, but their costumes were a bit naughty.
And sometimes I'm quite surprised we got away with a few, erm...
How could I describe it? Things for the dads, let's put it that way.
APPLAUSE
Amongst some of the acts that we had on our very family show
was an act called Sylvia Theron.
Sylvia had incredible talent and such strong legs.
The thing that got me into magic, I was watching
The Paul Daniels Magic Show, and out comes Sylvia Theron.
APPLAUSE
What she was doing was incredible.
There were moments where she'd be in a handstand and her legs would open.
She did her Hula Hoops and juggling off her ankles and legs.
She could do anything with these hoops on her legs.
And the hoops were on her feet and her ankles. How she twirled them...
Not that I've ever had a go.
APPLAUSE
I thought, "If that's magic, I'm getting into this."
So to speak.
We end now as we began,
with Yorkshire escapologist Shahid Malik.
Having diced with death as a human bonfire, for his next trick
he decided to hang upside down 70 feet in the air from a burning rope.
What could possibly go horribly wrong?
I think around about 1979, I had this brilliant idea
of doing an escape on a TV show called Saturday Night At The Mill.
It was a late-night show, sort of a magazine-type show,
a bit like The One Show.
But I thought it'd be a wonderful idea
to do something in the darkness with fire.
We hired a crane, I did the escape from a burning rope, and, erm...
it didn't end very well.
We'd been going out, I think, maybe for a year at that point,
and I wasn't with him that night.
It's great because it's in the garden at Pebble Mill.
They always loved getting in the garden there.
Obviously, we were all at home watching very eagerly.
..a man who lays his life on the line almost daily, Shahid Malik.
I suppose I do lay my life on the line. It's my job.
The programme had started, and the phone rang.
And my mum ran to the phone and said,
"Sorry, we've got to go, we're watching Saturday Night At The Mill.
"Shahid's going to be on it."
This is the burning-rope escape.
I shall be suspended upside down
at a height of approximately 70 feet in the air
in a regulation straitjacket.
And just to make things a little bit harder,
the rope will be set on fire.
And Shahid said, "No, it's me. Don't put the phone down.
"It's actually me."
And he only had time to say,
"I'm just ringing to say something has gone wrong,
"but look, I'm talking to you now, so don't panic."
"But I have to go now to do the end of the show."
Right... You chose it! Yeah. Start getting yourself ready. Thank you.
We watched it knowing that something was coming up
but not knowing WHAT was coming up.
My ankles were tied together
and then strapped to a piece of rope,
which was doused in petrol.
If I take the right precautions and work everything out in advance,
then it's a controlled environment.
As long as I know what I'm doing, it should be OK.
We have a member of the audience here.
Now, you've actually checked that rope, haven't you? Yes.
It is a perfectly normal cotton rope.
They want to see the rope and feel the rope, make sure there's no wire
or steel chain down the centre of that rope,
in which case it's never going to snap.
OK, so it will burn. Yes.
I was tied into a regulation straitjacket.
What's a regulation straitjacket when it's around? I never know.
Who wrote the regulation?
It's up to the escapologist
to convince people that this is a straitjacket.
Let them examine it, make sure that there are no expanding arms.
All that is vital in order to give the audience a good performance,
because if there's any doubt in the audience's minds,
then you're not going to come away from it looking good.
Yes, the rope will be then set on fire.
I've got about two to three minutes to escape.
Give them a performance of a lifetime.
'I've done the burning-rope thousands of times.
'That's my main staple of my outdoor escape act.
'It's got height, fire, drama, time limit.'
It's got all the elements of a spectacular stunt.
I was then inverted and hoisted to a height of about 80 feet.
He's been bound by his legs, he's dangling upside down,
and then the rope is on fire.
It's brilliant! All the ingredients are there.
You've got danger and spectacle
and an idiot dangling from a rope.
There's a lot of wriggling. He's getting out of the straitjacket.
The writhing about and the struggle is vital.
You've got to create some kind of slack
in order to extricate an elbow and dislocate a joint,
get the arm out and then start working on the buckle...
..an intense sequence of things that you wouldn't believe,
and if you don't do them in the right sequence
in a regulation straitjacket, then it's not going to happen.
I managed to escape very, very quickly, all perfectly done...
He's broken free, audience love it, and then...
..dropped the straitjacket.
I then began to invert myself so I could release my ankles
and come down holding on with one strap, like Superman.
And that's where it all went wrong.
Released my feet, held on to the bottom end of the burning rope,
and I was about to be brought down, and...
SCREAMS IN AUDIENCE
It's so beautiful. It's so wonderfully British.
It was your classic moment of terror and shock.
I think I fell about 70 feet, and before I knew it I'd hit the ground.
I lost consciousness, and I remember waking up in an ambulance.
They put me on a bed, pulled my legs and my arms and said,
"Yeah, you're fine, you're OK," put me in an ambulance,
brought me back, and within 45 minutes I was back in the studio
minutes before the show ended to let them know that I was OK.
Well, that was done just a few minutes ago,
and, as you can see, Shahid is fine.
I felt sorry for Jenny.
I am OK, and I want everybody at home that I'm fine.
Oh! Thank you for being fine, too! Still alive!
Jenny was frightened to death by what happened,
because she was there on the spot.
You fell about 40 foot, 50 foot? I just think I must be mad!
We think that you are very brave.
No, I had to come back, because I haven't been paid yet, you see.
Oh, I see!
Shahid, thank you! Thank you very much.
I never got paid for that.
Subtitles by Ericsson