I like Derren Brown, but I sometimes get frustrated about how he skirts around the truly naturalistic explanations for what he does. He tells us he doesn't believe in any psychic or supernatural abilities and that it's all trickery, but he leaves room for people to think there is something supernatural about it. Still I suppose he's a showman not a debunker. All that stuff about the wisdom of crowds is very interesting where there is actually a pattern to discern, but it's obviously nonsense when applied to a truly random occurrence like the lottery. So that wasn't the explanation. He said several times he didn't do anything illegal, and fixing the lottery by weighting the balls would have been illegal and would never have been allowed by channel 4, so that probably wasn't the explanation. If you look at the footage very closely it seems to have been a fairly simple split screen effect with artificial camera shake. He would never tell us that's how he did it because that's far too simple, and is basically cheating on his own terms... that's probably what he did though.
Yeah ... less than impressed with these new programmes Mainly because the rational explanations for what he's doing are withheld or are fabricated. So he's not claiming to have special powers, but he's not telling us how it's done ... what exactly is he doing?!
