talkmagic.co.uk

Friday 26th April
Channel 4
9pm

From the Radio Times:

Bafta recently recognised the success of Dynamo and his Magician Impossible series on Watch with a nomination for best entertainment programme. That’s a welcome sign of how far screen magic has come back into the mainstream in the past few years.

Channel 4’s latest entry to the field is nearer to Dynamo than to the psychological mind games of Derren Brown. He once appeared on Penn and Teller Fool Us as Mr Benjamin Earl and showed off his dazzling sleight of hand with a deck of cards: here the tricks are on a larger scale.

On the preview taster, for instance, is a stunt where he transfers cards between two people by leaping between moving cars. That may or may not be in the first show, but whatever is, Earl is certainly a face (and a pair of hands) to watch.

Is this not better posted in the Events section? Also Ive found a trailer on C4's youtube channel.

http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic47269.php"%20target="_blank

Anyone else completely underwhelmed by this show?

I'm a big fan of Ben's; his card magic is brilliant. I understand that you can't do four one-hour shows featuring nothing but card magic, I think even I would get bored.

But the things in the show were just.....meh. Felt like a real wasted opportunity. I'll give the next one a shot but this one felt like all style with little substance.

That's exactly what i said, Style over substance. The show's main problem is it's too long. This should never of been put out as 4 hour long shows. It should of been 8 half hour shows.
I know that part of the problem is we are all looking at this as magicians, but that aside, the cards across, is still the cards across, whether you use a slip n slide, or 2 fast cars.Also there was far too much space between the set up , and the reveal of the pick pocketed items. It just wasn't impressive.And the needles in the dark room, would of been better if he had been strip searched, to make sure he had no torch, ( or pre threaded needles )

Tiny touches in presentation is all that's needed to turn this ok show, into a good show..

Didn't enjoy this one little bit. Television needs a new magic show to demonstrate what is happening with contemporary magic. This wasn't it. As others have said it dragged and was all style over substance.
Whilst Ben is undoubtedly a hugely talented sleight of hand magician I have always found him to come across as extremely arrogant. It's hard to care for a performance when the performer comes across so smug.

Maybe the underlying problem is that magicians don't specialise in TV performance magic, so their actual skills have to be mapped onto the screen. It's a bad fit.

My comments pasted from a Facebook discussion on the same show:

Sat through it. Thought it was pretty good, though some bits did seem a bit unnecessary. Such as the ending of the Jelly Baby sequence, and the 15-minute wait for the Anechoic Chamber (though the end result was an interesting ending to what I thought would happen for a trick involving a ton of thread and needles...). Other than that, it's a pretty good show. The obligatory audience-reaction-shots were fairly minimal, which is an extremely welcome change. That said, the two non-magic family members did start questioning a number of things being seen. They didn't really believe the bullet catch at all, but absolutely loved the prison intro sequence. Roll on episode two...

One further thing I would like to add is that any problems I see in magic TV shows are not the same problems as non-magic folk. Considering they're made for non-magic folk in the first place, maybe I am just being too darned picky when I shouldn't need to. Though the family did pick up on a few things as a bit "off," they seemed to enjoy it a lot more than The Amazing Mr Goodwin.

Wow, that peeing into glasses routine was just about the crassest thing I have ever seen. Thought I'd give the show a second chance but I'm out. The only part that amused me was Ben's shy bladder syndrome.

Ed Wood wrote:Wow, that peeing into glasses routine was just about the crassest thing I have ever seen.

This ^

I was worried that I'd turned on some Richard Desmond watersports channel by mistake.

Thought the first episode was okay and looked forward to the second, second one was just dreadful. I guess Ben got it commissioned with this format but it doesn't show him in his best light.

Think the continuity announcer doesn't get the point of magic shows - "So was it all just sleight of hand, watch on 4od to see if you can see how he did it".

I've only had chance to see the first show so far, the others are being recorded. I agree with Dale, an hour is too long for the content, the set up and approach to each effect was over-long and there wasn't enough going on to retain attention. The tricks were OK, his slight of hand is superb but not shown to best effect so far. The cards across/cars/reveal of stolen stuff wasn't good - we had no way of seeing the items being stolen and they could easily have been a selection from the Railway Lost Property Dept dropped in the car boot!

I may be a bit of a dinosaur but I had to turn the sound right down and rely on subtitles to minimise the mind numbing spec reactions which were constant repetitions of 'Oh My God'. Producers please note, specs who are a little more articulate and capable of other words in their reactions would add the necessary variety!

IN view of the comments above about show #2, I'm not exactly rushing to see it....... but I will but only because Ben is a good magician, sadly these shows don't seem to be up to his standard.

My opinion of the series so far has been similar to the above, I've been completely underwhelmed by the magic Ben has been performing.
The shows seem disjointed and don't really connect.

When you watch a Derren Brown show, you really get the sense that Derren is performing the stuff he enjoys, he is performing in his style. Same with David Blaine, Dynamo, Paul Zennon
But with Ben's shows I really feel like he is performing stuff that doesn't really suit him, stuff that he doesn't perform every day. It doesn't feel like his style ***.

I have only enjoyed one or two segments from each show, and I've found parts of each show slightly ridiculous


That all being said...
I thought the third show was fantastic, I enjoyed every minute of it, every single performance was enjoyable. It really seemed to suit Ben.
The theme for this show was "science" so it involved lots of magic with a scientific theme (I myself enjoy performing magic with a scientific theme so this may have enhanced my enjoyment), I thoroughly enjoyed this episode.



***I have seen Ben perform and lecture, I've also seen his performance sections on the Past Midnight set, I've seen his performance on Fool Us. The performances have all given me an idea of Ben's performance "style", and perhaps a bias towards those styles - this may be why it doesn't feel like Ben is performing the stuff he enjoys to perform, it could be entirely my bias from seeing him perform before. In his show he retains the same attitude he portrayed in his previous performances.

I've watched the second and third shows and I freely admit I enjoyed them! Not all the effects were mindblowingly superb - the paper balls over head/picture creation one deserved a better pictorial ending - but, even though some well known principles are in play at times, at least the presentation is different and a lot of thought has gone into it all. Agreed the beer into, er, coloured 'water' was a bit gross but it is a Channel 4 show after all! Magicians will never be totally happy at such programmes but they're not aimed at us.

so the last episode is on tonight and at present what ive already seen is brilliant magic but simply doesnt work for me. it just doesn't entertain me in the way dynamo and mr goodwin does, watch seems to have the perfect formula for there shows and if another channel wants the same they better get cheque books out.

check out this post here
ftopic47254.php