Where to begin?
In 2019 the winner of Britain’s got talent was a mentalist called X. It was unlike other winners because throughout the competition, the true identity of the magician behind the mask was only revealed at the very end of the show. It was Marc Spellman¹.
What’s interesting about this story is that I heard from a good friend of his that before the final, the makers of the show tried to convince him not to reveal his identity at all. Ultimately the decision was his, clearly, but they really didn’t want him to.
And to understand why, we have to take a little step behind the curtain of television talent shows, into the twisted contracting of television talent shows.
This year’s Britain’s Got Talent had two excellent acts. It may have had more, I don’t know, I don’t watch the show on a regular basis. What happens is that people on magic forums say “OMG did you see _____ on BGT last night? It was incredible!!” and I go look up a clip on YouTube.
This year there were two such acts. The Witch and The Phantom.
The Witch
As you might imagine, I loved the Witch. the combination of methods to produce a very unexpected, shocking effect with a strong sense of theatre about it.
What I love about it is that there’s a core effect – apple full of maggots and shit – which becomes stronger with the application of fridge logic. For the most part this is a routine where very little happens. People pick apples, take a bite, then suddenly an arm blasts out of the performer’s chest, crushes the last apple and it explodes into a shower of insects, before the performer scurries away onto the stage cackling, and then just fucking vanishes. But then afterwards the audience thinks “All the apples came from the same bag. Any one of them could have bitten into that apple.”
Obviously I’m talking from a lay person’s perspective. I think that’s why the response from magicians was so divided. It didn’t contain any of the things magicians look for in a routine, no extreme sleight of hand, no complicated methodology, and the worst sin of all, nothing they could copy at their gigs the week after². Magicians tend to lose sight of the value of magic outside of its methodology. I can’t help but wonder if the second outing of The Witch was somewhat diffused in part by the fact that the judges had seen a lukewarm public reception of the first act and decided not to play along as much the second time.
I also think the time pressure ruined the ending this time around. I may be wrong but I’m pretty sure that’s one of those boxes where you can reach inside and take out something else, but then when it is opened there’s a thing in there which the volunteer couldn’t feel. I can’t say for sure but I think the intent was to have the ending play out differently where Amanda feels something furry, like a glove or a soft toy, and only after she takes her hand out reveal the rat. The typical jump-scare triple of heighten atmosphere of fear, defuse tension with a joke ending, then hit them with the scary part. Because Amanda was so on edge, we never got the joke portion, skipping straight to the scare and leaving us with a non magical narrative “Amanda picked Rodent from a list of fears and there was a box on the table with a rat in it.”
I must say though, the chair vanish at the end is a really clean illusion.
The Phantom
I originally only watched the first part of the Phantom. For the purposes of writing this I checked out the semi-final routine too, but was equally unimpressed. The premise offers so much. The idea of an invisible performer, is a rich vein conceptually. So why was the main effect an object divination? An effect which could be done by any visible performer?
I assume the thought process was that the theatrics of invisibility were enough to elevate a very straight forward routine. Unfortunately when I watch this act I don’t see objects mysteriously moving by themselves, I see a 19th century flea circus, but with better tech and larger props.
You could argue that I’m victim of the exact same thinking I complained about above, seeing the method before the effect, but I would argue that in this case what I see is technology, servos, motors, remote triggers, all of which the average lay audience knows about, and is almost certainly aware of. Anyone performing an invisible man magic act is going to be hindered by decades of behind the scenes documentaries about the special effects used in invisible man movies.
Also notice how the chalk moves on the board. or rather, how little of the motion we see. Notice how the camera cuts away and only comes back while the chalk is writing. I can only imagine this is because the chalk is held by an embedded magnet, and when it’s not writing, its hangs limply against the board so as not to press hard enough to write. You can see the smearing of the chalk between the letters on the final closeup of the word KEYS. If an invisible man was holding the chalk, it would depart from the board between the letters, which they obviously can’t do, so they leave that part to the audience’s imagination.
The second routine is even more elaborate and kind of spoiled from the get go by a visible stage hand helping Amanda into a box. This suffers a problem that the first act has but in even greater form. That is the problem of an act with no one on stage other than audience volunteers, being bossed around by a remote voice, interacting with props that are designed to look mundane but contain microelectronics, control cables and servo motors. Even in the first routine, that stick with the balloon contained something to burst that balloon… but I see those sticks discarded in the park after local music festivals and outside restaurants after birthday parties.
Also both of these routines kind of rely on Amanda being in on it. Receiving some kind of signal for a revelation and helping place the chalk in the first, and standing in the right place for an illusion in the second. In a TV studio with professional entertainers as the volunteers this is fine, but in a regular audience when this goes on tour? Ridiculous.
Anyway, now that I’ve broken down the two acts, consider this:
Why did two separate teams of magicians decide to put together character pieces which intentionally obfuscate the identity of the performer, when the main thing performers on BGT want is to become famous.
The Machine
Its difficult to know what goes on behind the scenes of BGT, primarily because of the airtight contracts and NDAs given to the contestants, but every so often an act will be so slighted by the process of participation that they will speak out, such as Superpowerless: a musician who was already a working professional with an active fanbase, hand picked by the program for the purpose of being ridiculed. Oliver Hindle was actually aware of the way mainstream media would attempt to portray him, and was cajoled into appearing on the show with promises that the programme would be professional and announce him the same way they would with any other musical act. Instead he was skipped past the initial auditions straight to the live show, where they filmed his act unflatteringly and interviewed him with questions primed to make him look like a basement dwelling incel dork.
Or, more topically, Matthew Wright. A marvellous magician who applied to the show with a routine based on mentalism and dogs, with a heartwarming story about rehoming and canine rescue centres. They liked the act so much that they took the entire plot and premise and handed it over to a non magician, a police dog handler, to perform with his own background as the theme.
Turns out, when you sign up to BGT, you sign over an awful lot of creative control, including the intellectual property from your act.
So rewinding to X’s decision to unmask, can you imagine the intent behind the desire to keep the mask on? I sure can. If Marc Spellman gave over his routine to BGT in the contract, and had never unmasked, Simon Cowell could keep the X show going for years with anyone inside the suit, no actual talent³ required.
If you think back to the early days of BGT there were always shots of tens of thousands of people queueing outside an arena sized audition office, where they would await their turn to show the judges what they could do. There were so many people clamouring to get onto the show, you had to really want it.
I don’t want it at all… and I got emails and facebook messages asking me to apply, because I had been prominent on magic facebook groups. I danced around this a little in the description above, but Oliver Hindle of Superpowerless had zero interest of going on BGT. They called him, and begged him to go on. The days of people clamouring to get onto the show are mostly over. Every act you see on the show now has been hand picked and groomed for the show. Some of them have been essentially created from nothing, such as the police dog act.
BGT has a magic consultant, which is good because magic can look terrible on TV if filmed in the wrong way, but that same magic consultant is responsible for choosing which acts will make it to the live auditions, including (but not limited to) requesting certain types of act, or bringing together multiple magic producers to create something like The Witch or The Phantom.
The great irony of all this is that the originator of all this, before BGT, before The X Factor, there was a show called Popstar, which sought to take the process of becoming a manufactured pop group and make it public. Unlike modern talent shows there was no public vote, it was virtually a documentary where individual hopefuls were whittled down to a small group who were then teamed up as a pop group called Hear’Say. The show even went on to follow them through early promotional activity leading up to the release of their debut single, Pure and Simple.
The audience reaction to this show impacted on the sequel series (Popstars: The Rivals) which generated a boyband and a girlband, and made use of public voting. Public voting also made an appearance in Pop Idol, Fame Academy and the X Factor, but increasingly these made use of a system where the public would vote for their favourite act, to keep ‘safe’ and the losers in that vote could be knocked out at the whim of the judges. Now what does that sound similar to?
If you said “The PATEO force”, well done. You are now cynical enough to reach the final conclusion.
A mode of television initially intended to pull back the curtain on back-room decisions about who gets to be famous have morphed into a system where people believe they make the decisions, even though the important choices are being made through an entirely obfuscated back-room process, where wealthy powerful men make and break careers as part of a money making scheme to trickle all the wealth to the top.
The performers in these decisions are a necessary evil to the media corporations, and they’re trying desperately to formulate a way to make a brand which can amass fanbase without a person’s name attached. A business model treats these people as interchangeably as shop assistants, as the gears of capitalism find another form of labour to alienate.
But yeah.
It was a really nice chair vanish.
¹ No disrespect to the guy, but if Spellman isn’t his real name, it’s a hell of a simplistic choice for a magician’s stage name. Spell Man. A man who does magic spells. That’s beyond George Lucas naming, all the way to J K Rowling levels of laziness. If it is his real name, frankly fair play to the guy for going all in on learning magic. My name is Smith but I lack the stamina and musculature for metal work.
² Jamie Raven sold a million Card Toon decks for Dan Harlan with his stick man routine… which wasn’t really HIS stick man routine, it was a stock performance of Card Toon. Indeed so appalled were some magicians with the idea of an off the shelf trick being used to somehow demonstrate someone’s claim to international fame, that someone squealed and the papers ran an article about how the semi-final winning trick could be bought for £14.99.
³ Talent can mean different things. Most people use talent to mean an attribute possessed by a skilful individual. In television and media talk the word talent refers to the person themselves. Often the person referred to as the talent is actually not necessarily needed for their abilities or talents, rather the talent is someone who is known and liked by the audience. In showbiz you have to keep the talent happy because 90% of the time the talent IS the show.