Today (7th of January) I appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us, shown on ITV and hosted by Jonathan Ross…and I fooled them, so very soon I’m flying to Las Vegas to open their show! If you missed the show, you can catch it again on ITV Player online, but the basic premise was for magicians to perform in front of legendary duo Penn & Teller in a bid to fool the pants off them. If you managed to fool them, you’d be invited to Las Vegas to open their nightly show on the Las Vegas Strip. Quite a challenge, but one I accepted and ultimately managed to do! (pats self humbly upon the back)

Being involved in the show was a great experience and one that I will never forget. I specifically chose to perform a sleight-of-hand piece of my own creation that is very difficult to do. I chose to avoid the traditional magic presentation and opted for a gambling/sleight-of-hand piece beginning by openly telling them what I was doing…Penn & Teller are renowned for explaining their methods, and I thought they’d appreciate the subtle homage. I wanted to challenge myself to do something very difficult under very difficult conditions and I saw this as an opportunity to test my ability in a high pressure environment. Walking out onto the stage in front of 600 people, bright lights, world famous magicians and a very cool TV host, not to mention millions of viewers at home is daunting enough, but on the night those conditions were even more challenging than I would ever have expected and so my skills were genuinely pushed to the limit:

I knew that the effect I was to show P&T was tough, but I also felt confident I could pull it off; that was until Teller handed me his own deck of cards. The trick I performed can be achieved with a borrowed and shuffled deck, but Teller’s own deck had been sat in his back pocket for the past few hours in a hot studio, and when I took them out of the box, they resembled pieces of damp cardboard, just like the sort of deck you’d find in the back of your wardrobe that’s been in the family for years. Like I said, I can perform this piece with any borrowed deck, in the same way a professional golfer can play with any golf club, or a tennis player can play with any racket. But if you were to give a pro golfer a borrowed stick from a nearby tree and the tennis player a frying pan, they’d struggle to pull off their best work! As you can imagine this massively effected my touch, timing and technique. Without going into too much technical detail I basically had to improvise techniques live whilst thinking about what Penn & Teller and the audience could see; I was surrounded by people and multiple HD cameras including a camera shot from above. The pressure was on to pull something amazing out of the bag, and with the deck I had to use coupled with hundreds of pairs of eyes on me, I am still shocked that I managed to remain calm, think clearly and successfully pull it off! I don’t think I’ve ever been in such an intense position before, but the adrenaline that I felt after I managed to fool them was enough to make me want to do it all over again.

Teller came up to me after the show and said that he had no idea how I was managing to locate the Aces from memory so effortlessly. He was even more impressed that I managed to do what I did with the deck he had handed me. I just wish I could have shown them what it looks like when the deck of cards is in a good condition! I chose to perform something on the show specifically to fool Penn & Teller and in a way that couldn’t be exposed, it isn’t something that I would normally do for the public but I was more than happy with the result. My main aim was to go on TV and really push myself to my limits, the fact that I get to open their Las Vegas show is a huge bonus.

As a professional magician, I perform for corporate and private clients all over the world. I also lecture for magic establishments at conferences and conventions, train other magicians and create magic for myself and other magicians. I feel like an incredibly lucky individual as I love my job and I feel even luckier now that this year has started with such an unexpected bang. I’m looking forward to opening the Penn & Teller show at the Rio in Las Vegas later this year, and with a few more exciting projects in the pipeline, 2011 looks set to be a good year. Watch this space…

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