barry Barry not Stuart. Often seen standing on the left hand side.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could look into the future, take a snapshot of things that are yet to happen, then bring that snapshot back? Well we have done just that!
The crystal ball reveals Martin Kemp, N-Dubz and Rolf Harris… that can’t be right? Oh yes, it’s right. It’s very, very right.
SPOILER ALERT: For show number three we joined forces with comedian Stephen K. Amos. From the moment we met him until the moment we finished he constantly gave us shifty looks. Possibly because he was working on a magic show he never felt like he was being told the truth and was suspicious about pretty much all aspects of the show, including ourselves! Stephen considers himself a magic sceptic, so rather than be the guy who acts amazed he is the kind of person who is desperate to figure out how it’s done.
Invisible Machines Ltd staff 2011
The mouse trick genuinely was the first trick I ever learned. I inherited the trick from my Dad who had made one up from plans he saw in a magic book when he was a kid. The camel trick, however, was a first for us and a real challenge. The only other time we have worked with a camel was in Egypt when we filmed our “Tricks from the Bible” TV specials. Camels are big animals so making one appear was tough, with hindsight, the girl from the audience should have chosen that bloody snake!
Those of you who watch in HD and are eagle-eyed, cypher-solving loons, may have spotted the red buttons on our waistcoats. Despite their positions looking innocently random they actually are positioned to spell ‘B’ and ‘S’ in Braille on our respective torsos. Now there is no excuse to ever mix our names up.
B and S Braille waistcoats
To be honest I really thought that Chris Korn and Samantha Womack had the victory in the bag after making the entire audience doey-eyed for those rabbits, but somehow we managed to win for the first time this series! This meant that Chris Tarrant and Luis De Matos had to walk on broken glass and swords… I suspect the audience was full of people who had left “Who wants to be a Millionaire” with nothing.
In case any of you think the show is rigged, all the magicians practise the forfeit and go over the movements and camera blocking with the director and crew. The celebrities, however, do not. As you can see below I trained for the forfeit and used the swords as a lazy man’s way of removing dry skin from my heels.
Scottish sword dance
Next week we take Martin Kemp hostage, inspect the phenomena that Charles Fort called ‘Teleportation’ and attempt to create a fairytale for the 21st century.
SPOILER ALERT: In this episode we joined forces with comedian, musician and nutter Ade Edmondson. Ade was very interested to learn the secrets behind our craft and would laugh manically each time we taught him the deceptions he would be performing. He was great to work with, especially as he spent a lot of his early career as part of a double act, and so understood perfectly the dynamics that we wanted to achieve.
He really got into smashing the watches, so much in fact that, with the aid of a sledgehammer, he managed to embed a watch into the wooden floor of Stage D at Pinewood Studios. If the watch isn’t still there now, there will certainly be a watch-shaped hole where it was.
The car trick was fun to perform mainly from an historical point of view. Those of you who know your magical history will understand why we got a kick out of that particular illusion and along the way we learned exactly why hardly anybody does it!
TV sets are always so different to work on than stages. You can never really get a true sense of the space from looking at the cardboard mock-up before the set is built. I remember visualising doing the ‘x-ray machine’ on set just from looking at the little cardboard model and realised how different my visualisation was when we finally did it for real.
Despite Chris Korn making a car fly and producing a helicopter, he faced the forfeit, consequently having a motorbike drive over him and Amanda Byram. Seated beside me on ‘the throne’, Peter Jones was clearly very pleased that he wasn’t the one lying on a bed of nails. He told me it was something he “had no intention of trying”. Ade, however, wanted Chris and Amanda to suffer, even calling out “that’s cheating” when they donned the protective gear on their arms… how very friendly!
Next week we try and flog “The Digi-Cloth” and the “Achilles 3000″ with Stephen K. Amos.
The mind reading helmet may also cause brain damage
SPOILER ALERT: In this episode we were paired with BBC Breakfast presenter Sian Williams. Sian wanted to do something that would not embarrass her teenage boys, hopefully we succeeded in toughening her up a bit. We visited a sweetshop where she put her fist through Stuart’s stomach. We then taught her, and every member of the audience except one, how to read minds, as well as letting the audience in on the hard work that goes into a classic sword box illusion.
Whilst watching the other acts from ‘the thrones’, Bruno Tonioli made me laugh many times with comments that could never be broadcast and Ashley Banjo put most sleight of hand artists to shame by teaching me some of his finger dexterity work. I still can’t move my fingers like Diversity can, but now they all have carpal tunnel syndrome.
Barry fires a crossbow at Sian Williams
The crossbow stunt proved to be more tricky than we could have thought. Initially we wanted strings on the bolts because they move so fast that on camera you have to watch in slow motion to see them travel. In tests however, the moment a tail was put onto the bolts their flightpath became very unpredictable. One bolt went in the box, the tail was snagged and it was deflected up and over the protective surface placed behind the box. Luckily it was just a test and the box was unoccupied at the time. So in the interest of everyone’s safety the tails were abandoned.
Despite Sian’s ability to dodge crossbow bolts we were faced with the forfeit and had to put mind over matter and teach Sian to walk on hot coals. There must have been lots of Americans and Portuguese in the studio perhaps?!
In the next episode we’ll create some anarchy with Ade Edmondson.
Things have been quiet here on the blog for a while because we have been preparing for a new BBC One show called “The Magicians.” The show is the biggest and most ambitious thing that we have ever been a part of and in the shortest space of production time ever, we’ve planned some really interesting, inventive and devious new magical things.
Each show is a competition in which we, plus our celebrity partner, battle with two other fantastic magicians; Chris Korn, one of America’s finest sleight of hand artists, and Luis De Matos, Europe’s number one illusionist, the show is hosted by comedian Lenny Henry.
The first episode airs on New Year’s Day at 19:30 on BBC One.
This week I made possibly the geekiest thing ever. It is a deck of cards that are marked on the back. They aren’t marked by traditional tiny hidden markings on the corners however, the entire back of the card is marked by a QR code.
A QR code is a type of bar-code that is commonly scanned by mobile phones to exchange contact information, urls or as is the case here, text.
If you want to see what card lies face down on the table, you get out your mobile phone, launch your favourite bar-code scanning app, point the camera on the back of the card and then you will get a message stating the exact name of the card.
Want to try it? Get out your phone and see if you can use it decipher the cards below.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2010 is officially over and we have miraculously returned home with all vital physical and spiritual organs intact.
This year was our biggest Edinburgh so far with some really fantastic reviews, a complete sell-out run and ticket demand so high that an extra show was added. We’ve also been told that we turned out number 1 on the edtwinge website as the most positively Tweeted about show during the month. I think that many of those were audience members saying that they were scared walking home alone or couldn’t get to sleep that night. One of our favourites though, has to be the tweet of this guy, proving that the show can actually be a séance and speed-dating all in one.
A big thank you to everybody who gave us nice messages on Twitter and hunted ghosts with us, we hope to see the rest of you on tour very soon!
If you come and participate in our séance, currently running at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, you might, as the poster suggests, be asked to use a Ouija Board.
What exactly is a Ouija Board? Is it an ancient demonic tool, crafted by Satan himself to allow us to communicate with the other side? Or is it merely an innocent toy that has been grossly misinterpreted?
“The Talking Board,” or as it is more commonly known “Ouija Board,” is actually a fairly recent invention. American businessmen Elijah Jefferson Bond and Charles Kennard patented the first board with letters on it to be sold with a planchette (the pointing device you put on the board) in 1890. A keen inventor, Bond also trademarked the word ‘Nirvana’ and invented a steam boiler. In fact, he would have made an excellent addition to “Dragon’s Den.”
In 1901, an employee of Kennard, William Fuld took over production of the talking boards and marketed them under the name “ouija” from the French and German words for yes, oui-ja. The board grew in popularity from the 1920s-1960s and many similar boards were marketed by Fuld’s competitors. He filed several lawsuits at other companies who were using the term ‘ouija’ in their marketing. Fuld reinvented the history of the board and anounced that he alone devised it.
The true origin of the board, however, is claimed by Fuld’s rivals to date back much further in history. Fuji is a form of automatic writing from China first appearing on record in 1100 BC. With Fuji, no board is used, instead a large planchette with a pencil attached is placed onto paper and when the planchette moves it creates letters, pictures or symbols. This apparently was the inspiration for Bond’s invention.
Years of ghost stories, horror movies and tales of people opening doorways to the other side through improper use of the board has led many to believe that the board should not be sold as a toy. Despite this, Parker Brothers, who bought the rights to the Ouija Board in the 1960s, market many variations of the original design, including a lovely pink edition designed for teenage girls who want to find out if the spirits can give them a date for the night.
Google have added a closed caption button to some YouTube videos that amazingly automatically listens to the words being said in the video then tries to work them out and print them as subtitles on the screen. The feature is still in BETA and for a good reason. The translation for our trick below is not entirely accurate. Our cautionary tale about oral hygiene and demonic possession is now about “four oh hi jean I didn’t want to because it should.”
You could use this feature to write your very own abstract poetry. The opening of “This is a tale unlike all the rest about a young boy whose tongue was demonically possessed” becomes “this isn’t a lot like a little less about a young boy whose tongue was still on a clean cassettes.”
As for “OJ Simpson slapping away”… I wish we did put that in the poem now.
In Google’s defence, maybe the bots don’t like the Scottish accent?
To access the captions you currently need to view the video on YouTube and turn on the BETA function from the bottom right of the player.
Prepare to be spooked! Watch the above video and see if you can view a ghost in the static of an old TV.
You can email this trick to your friends and you can even embed the video on your very own blog or site as we’ve done here.
This is the first in a series of on-line tricks that you can perform yourself. Check out the others on the Barry and Stuart BBC Three webpage www.bbc.co.uk/barryandstuart
Satanic Messages in Kids’ Cartoons Oct 4, 2008
The Magicians Episode 5 Behind the Scenes Jan 31, 2011
Warlocks in Malaysia Feb 17, 2009
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