Derren Brown: 5 fascinating things we learnt from illusionist’s Desert Island Discs

Derren Brown’s five-star spectacle Showman will be screened on television for the first time on Sunday night (23 April).

When the illusionist’s show hit the London stage last year, it was described by critics as “mind-blowing” and “sobering”.

The content of Showman remains top secret, but to mark the broadcast, we listened back on Brown’s fascinating 2019 interview on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Here are five intriguing things we learnt…

The liquid latex anecdote

Brown told a bizarre story about using liquid latex years ago when he was living in a house share. “I put some of this latex on my eye just a little bit one morning because it looked like special effects makeup, it looked like, you know, I’d hurt my eye,” he said.

“I went down to breakfast and I loved the attention and when friends asked, ‘What did you do to your eye?’ I made something up.” He then put more and more on as the days went by until he looked “disfigured on one side of my face”.

He said: “But I couldn’t back out of it because I was telling people that cared that this was a real thing.” Brown said that one man he lived who was making beer in the bath was worried that fumes from the process had caused the disfigurement.

Brown called the whole affair a “really weird, twisted bid for attention”, saying that when he was performing: “I could take all that pathetic insecure mess and just funnel it.”

Luther Vandross and teenage shoplifting

Brown had a compulsive shoplifting habit as a teenager. He said: “I remember looking around my bedroom once as a teenager and every single thing in my room I’d stolen.”

He added: “I stopped because I set off the alarms sneaking out of the music department of Harrods with a Luther Vandross cassette tape in my pocket. I was so embarrassed and I thought, ‘That’s it, no more.’”

He wanted to be an international lawyer

If Brown hadn’t become an illusionist, he might have become a lawyer. Speaking about studying law and German at Bristol University, he said: “I thought I was going to be an international lawyer, but I realised soon that I didn’t want to become a lawyer. Or a German.”

Instead, he said he decided to find “what was fun in the moment”, adding: “I remember thinking, ‘If I take a cross-section of my life does it feel like it’s in the right place?’ And it did and that’s all that I wanted and it never moved beyond that.”

At university he sported a ‘Bad Spandau Ballet gay leisure pirate’ look

He told the programme: “I wore a cloak for many years, I had long hair, I may have had a drop earring for a week and I fancied myself as a philosopher poet but was somewhere more in the gay female leisure pirate.”

His behaviour was also quite eccentric. “I used to go to a cave that was hidden on one side of the Avon Gorge and I would sit, light a bonfire and read Nietzsche ’cause that was what I was like!” he said.

Why he doesn’t perform tricks for people in real life

When he was young, Brown’s timidity and social awkwardness meant that, to try to win people over, he would “always have tricks in my pocket”.

He explained: “It’s such a red herring in life, the desire to impress. It feels like that’s what you should be doing, but it’s the one thing you shouldn’t be doing in life because it’s the one thing people aren’t impressed by! It shoots itself in the foot, but for years that was my thing, I was always having to do a trick.”

Brown said he now never does tricks for people in real life because he finds it “really childish and silly and dishonest”.

Derren Brown: Showman will air at 9pm on Channel 4 on Sunday.