10 Friday April 8 2022 | the timespodcast
The magician conjures a mental mess
D
erren Brown is the
television magician
who used to
hypnotise people into
robbing banks and
attempting to
murder Stephen Fry.
A few years ago he
followed a well-worn path for overly
self-serious TV personalities and
reinvented himself as a philosopher.
He has published a book on the
subject, Happy, which, disappointingly,
offers only banal life advice, not
hints about hypnotising yourself into
enjoying existence.
His new podcast, Derren Brown’s
Boot Camp for Life, is, unfortunately,
the work of Derren Brown the
philosopher, not Derren Brown the
hypnotist. At least I think so. MUST
KILL STEPHEN FRY MUST KILL
STEPHEN FRY. This is an Audible
production (you have to pay), so it
comes with the jazzy, if intrusive,
sound effects and production
gimmicks you’d expect from a
company owned by Jeff Bezos.
As philosophy goes, Derren Brown’s
Boot Camp is not exactly Plato’s
Republic. Brown suggests that
“emotions can be our best friends and
our worst enemies”, that “thinking is
harder than you might think” and alsothat we may be “riddled with anxiety
about whether our life has any real
meaning”. He reminds listeners that
Jean-Paul Sartre once observed that
“hell is other people”. And so on.
A lot of it has the air of having been
idly googled into existence. Brown
manages to fill a lot of airtime reading
out a Reddit post from its “Am I the
Asshole?” forum. Even the experts
don’t seem to have dug terribly deep
for their advice. One tells Brown that“we evolved to live in small bands” not
huge cities. Which, ever since Yuval
Noah Harari published a children’s
edition of Sapiens, is a fact known to
many preverbal infants.
Presumably the show was
commissioned because an industrious
Bezos underling believes that Brown’s
name recognition will induce people
to take out subscriptions to Audible.
But Brown doesn’t really seem to have
much idea what he wants to use allthis expensively produced airtime for.
At one point he invites listeners to
identify their deepest personalities.
“Catch hold of the thing that is you,”
he urges, like a PSHE teacher talking
down the clock on the last day of term.
I preferred Brown the magician,
but all that remains of him is an
irritatingly whimsical way of talking.
“Reddit” is pronounced as if it’s a
baffling foreign word; Sartre becomes
an excessively Gallic Sarrrrtre. I would
have preferred a hypnotism podcast,
but sadly this isn’t it. I think. MUST
KILL STEPHEN FRY MUST KILL
STEPHEN FRY.The journalist John Sweeney has
history with Vladimir Putin. Sweeney
once disguised himself as a “professor
of mammothology” to confront the
Russian president at a museum in
Siberia. He managed to get in some
questions about the shooting down
of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17
before he was bundled off into a
basement by a team of Kremlin goons.
It was typical of this admirably
insane streak of bravery that Sweeney,
63, made sure he was in Kyiv ready for
Putin’s invasion. Clad in a fluorescent
orange beanie, he has become a
familiar sight around the Ukrainian
capital. The launch of a podcast,
Taking on Putin, is exciting because
Sweeney’s previous endeavour was the
gripping Hunting Ghislaine, about the
search for Ghislaine Maxwell.
It’s not quite clear what final shape
Taking on Putin will take, but the first
episode (released last week) is
promising: an ominous, atmospheric
dispatch from the heart of a war zone
in Sweeney’s inimitable foghorn of a
voice. I’ll be tuning in.FABIO DE PAOLA/REXDerren Brown’s
Boot Camp
for Life
{{(((Taking on Putin
{{{{(Derren Brown adds
cod-philosopher to
his profile with this
whimsical series,
says James Marriott
podcasts
He invites us
to identify
our deepest
personalities
Derren Brown seems unsure of how to use his expensively produced airtimeI’d have preferred
a hypnotism
podcast