How Derren Brown uses comedy in his magic shows

As he prepares to tour his new show, Miracle, master illusionist Derren Brown talks to The Skinny about comedy and its use in magic.

There's no Graham Norton to challenge the Chatty Man tonight, just the small matter of Children In Need to contend with. So there are no Hollywood stars sweeping into Carr's space, just a hat-trick of TV favourites, with Derren Brown previewing his new TV caper The Great Art Robbery, comedian Adam Hills having a giggle over his debut stand-up show, Happyism, and Russell Brand discussing his Messiah Complex, out soon on DVD. And with One Direction busy on BBC One, The Wanted seize their moment to provide the music.

Doug Segal - I Can Make You A Mentalist

Doug Segal is one of a new breed of entertainers known as mentalists. He gets compared to Derren Brown a lot but as well as boggling your mind, Doug also has a comedic element to the show which many people find makes it even more enjoyable.

Tom Binns has a bit of previous on the radio. He was fired by a local radio station for dissing the Queen's Speech in 2009. Ten years earlier, Tony Blair's apparatchiks tried to have Binns sacked from Xfm for dissing New Labour (a badge of honour for any comedian).

His most recent work should garner awards rather than sackings. In Ian D Montfort Is: Unbelievable, his alter ego is a psychic from Sunderland, working with a live audience, and it's terrific stuff. He's nailed that fishing-for-detail schtick upon which mediums rely. At one point he senses a spirit on stage with him: "He wants to connect with a gentleman here tonight who's been watching some kind of sports, maybe in the summer of 2012 ..." (Long pause - he's an absolute master of the long pause.) "I've got, like, a big athletics meeting, or swimming, possibly."

Some proper Derren Brown-style stunts were hardly necessary - he's just very funny. He does politics, too, noting that in the US £3bn is spent on psychic services every year. "If this stuff's not real that's an awful lot of people being scammed," he mused. "I don't think the Americans are that stupid, do you? Or easily led." Pause. "Or if they were, the world would be in a right mess."

Sunderland psychic Ian D Montfort - the comic creation of Tom Binns - is back with a vengeance, not to mention some troubled spirits from the other side.

Simultaneously taking the mickey out of celebrity psychics he also practises the same astonishing techniques as Derren Brown. I cannot fathom how Binns manages to land upon such exact readings of the audience, but he does it with a deliciously dark wit.

Chris Addison will be pleased with this picture - there is very little bare flesh on show and certainly nothing suggestive of his nether regions. In a terribly British section of his interview by friend and fellow comic thespian Rebecca Front, they discover a shared aversion to nudity, especially their own, in performances.

As Addison remarks, his modesty is based upon his body resembling a stick man made out of Twiglets. Their similarities do not end here, however: both confess to having been goody-two-shoes at school and how many other modern comedians can claim to have been part of madrigal groups? Middle-class and brainy does not have to mean smug, though, and so this interview rubs along nicely. I look forward to Addison asking the questions of Derren Brown next week.

Simon's new career as an actor continues to proceed like snakes and ladders. This week, everything seems to be on the up.

He's being ­interviewed on BBC Breakfast about his new play and after that he's going to be Claudia Winkleman's guest on Radio 2. But a jokey remark about another guest backfires and he's slithering down the snake of infamy once again.

The namechecks for actual famous people being mixed in with Simon's fictional family feels completely normal now. I love the idea, for instance, that Simon has borrowed a large sum of money from Derren Brown.

But as his auntie Liz demands that they finally get around to reading her father's will, most of this week's best lines go to Simon's mum, Tanya, played by Rebecca Front. After finally splitting up with Clive, she's decided she's off sex for good.

It's not the actual decision that's so funny, so much as all the colourful ways she and her family come up with to describe it.

Ian D Montfort is a Derren Brown-Tommy Cooper hybrid

Writer, actor and stand-up comedian Tom Binns mixes Tommy Cooper and Derren Brown in his new Edinburgh Fringe show.

I'm going to say something which is going to make me unpopular with most critics - I actually like this show.

Having read other reviews of Campus, the vast majority, especially those in the tabloids, derided this new sitcom by the team behind Green Wing. Most said it was bad because it's too similar to Green Wingp. Are these people mad? That's like saying, "This country has a rubbish football team. It's too much like Brazil's."

Campus, like Green Wing, is great, especially the egotistical, power-crazed and bigoted vice chancellor of Kirke University, Jonty de Wolfe, played by Andy Nyman (most famous for being Derren Brown's right-hand man).

Nyman's character also got panned by the critics, arguing his remarks went too far, comparing him unfavourably to David Brent (the fact they have the same beard doesn't help, I guess). There are key differences here, though.

Brent is a middle-manager, is meant to be a realistic character, and in the end his incompetence results in him getting the boot. Wolfe is the master of a surreal and chaotic world, answering to nobody, and as such is able to get away with what he does because there is no-one able to stop him - at least not yet, but there is another character who is due to appear later in the series who might be able to stop Wolfe.

Among the other Green Wing associations made were comparing their characters to Campus'. The misogynistic English Literature professor Matt Beer (Joseph Millson) was compared to Guy Secretan - and to be fair there are quite a lot of similarities - and his relationship with Maths lecturer Imogen Moffat (Lisa Jackson) is similar to that between Guy and Caroline Todd.

I also read one critic comparing mechanical engineering lecturer Lydia Tennant (Dolly Wells) to Sue White, which I think is totally wrong. With all of her idiosyncrasies, odd mannerisms and pomposity I'd argue if anything that she's more like Alan Statham. It is in fact Wolfe who is most like Sue White, but only with much more power.

I have to admit, though, there are some problems with the show. Firstly, the camerawork is quite unprofessional, with some dodgy cuts (watch the scene when Wolfe is on a megaphone talking to a female student about a degree in arseology - his left hand is suddenly on a rail, then on the megaphone and back on the rail again) in this episode in particular.

And in the end I just know Channel 4 will axe the show. The first episode was watched by only 718,000 people, as previously mentioned several times it's been written off by the critics, and nothing I've written will change any of the minds of the bigwigs who run the network.

But in truth, the main reason that Campus is on Channel 4 in the first place is because they decided to axe Green Wing; so if you don't like Campus, don't blame the writers or the other people behind the show, blame Channel 4 for axing the original great work in the first place.