I've been watching Close Encounters with Keith Barry (Saturday and Sunday evenings, 9PM on Living TV 2) which seem to be a mix of very old and established ideas mixed with stunningly new perplexing routines. The US Consultant on the show is Kenton Knepper so it has some good pedigree! The one which I particularly noticed last night was where he had a guest snooker player on the show, gave the guy a red backed deck of bikes to put in his pocket, took a blue backed deck, spread them face up over the table then let the guy bang the black ball all round the table. Whichever one the ball came to rest nearest was the selected card. Of course, the red back deck was then retrieved, fanned and shown as having just one face down card - the card selected by the random black ball. OK, all well and good and a standard ID routine so far - Paul Zenon used this routine once on one of his TV shows. However, in this case, the selected card had a large black cross solidly printed across it's face and the face up ones shown during the card spread didn't have any such crosses. No idea how this was achieved but it showed yet another way of using a tried and tested item with a subtle twist to it at the end. Last week's show included a performance of the original Paul Curry version of Out of this World - complete with marker cards and changeover in the middle.
He did a nice variation of the torn and restored card - usual start whereby spec 'freely selected' a card , the card was folded, the corner torn off and handed to the spec as a receipt. The folded card was wrapped in paper which was ignited and everything disappeared in a flash. Keith then drew everyone's attention to the empty card box and asked the spec if they could see what the brand of cards was. The answer came quickly, 'Bicycle' brand and Keith said that was almost right - in face it should read ' Icicle' brand (it sounds better verbally rather than written!), he opened the box and out slid a rectangular block of ice, just about the size of the whole card box, and frozen in the ice was the selected card with missing corner which, after breaking the ice off, was found to match the corner which was held by the spec all along. Not hard to figure out how to do this but I rather liked the Bicycle versus Icicle part - nice touch.
Other effects so far have included driving a high speed sports car blindfolded whilst a terrified young lady Irish TV Reporter sat in the passenger seat trying to see the route and send/scream the directions mentally and verbally so he could brake and turn at the right times. As the shows were taped in 2003 some things have moved on - last night featured Kerry Catona lending Keith her wedding ring (which vanished and reappeared in a salt cellar) which she treasured because Brian McFadden had given it to her. Perhaps she wouldn't say the same these days (see
http://www.malefirst.co.uk/20462004-ent.html )! Most scary one this weekend was where there are four wooden bases, one with a spike and four plastic cups covering them. Keith was blindfolded whilst a spec placed the cups over the bases then mixed them up. Keith then added to the confusion by getting the spec to look away whilst he mixed them up a bit more so nobody knew which cup had the spike. The twist here is that Keith didn't place his hand over the cups and squash them as anticipated, he used the spec's hand instead and got the guy to say (scream!) whether he thought the spike was under that cup or not. If there was no spike guessed then Keith crushed the cup with the spec's hand - nice touch, I know a few people I'd like to do that to! Have a look at
www.magicweek.co.uk under TV Magic and, for the next few days, you'll see a photo of exactly how all that appeared.
If anyone hasn't seen Keith Barry yet, he's a skilled and confident young chap from Southern Ireland so many guests, locations and so on are from Eire and the shows have some similarities with the Derren Brown Mind Control style of programme with a bit of David Blaine thrown in and a whole bucket load of pure Celtic charm and blarney. Once you've become accustomed to his fast talking style, you can settle back and watch a talented magish at work - all great fun!
(Check out
http://www.keithbarry.com/ for all the info)