This is a global player original podcast.

Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project designed entirely to let me spend more time than I'd ever got on the radio with fascinating people.

And this week's guest is Darren Brown.

Darren, welcome. Hello. I'm more nervous about this than I usually am about interviews.

Oh, stop it at once.

Well, I am because you are usually in complete control of any environment in which I've ever seen you.

And so as an interviewer, I'm already thinking I may in the past have exaggerated, for example, how much of a

guest's book I have actually read. But with you, I'm not going, I'm not, I can't, because I can smell

a lot. Well, yes. And let's begin at the end, well, not at the end, but we're the career.

And then we'll go back to childhood and things like that,

because mentalist is a wonderful work. It's hilarious, isn't it? It was all right until that

Alan Partridge episode, it's no longer, no longer usable. But it's, yeah, because it has the

19th century connotations and beyond, doesn't it? And it sort of speaks to the whole gamut of everything

you do, which... Yeah, it was a very, when I started doing it, it was a very little known pocket of

that sort of magic world. I think its heyday was the sort of maybe the 20s and 30s, perhaps,

and then it was very much out of fashion um i had drifted into it because i started

off as a hypnotist and i i so that my love of everything went back to the kind of psychological

roots so the mentalism or the kind of mind reading edge of magic had always been the um

the real fun part of it for me uh and yeah because I've never really know what to call it, but...

No, it's not a word you come across very often until you sit down with one, I suppose.

And there it is. And you look quite different from how people will perhaps be automatically associating you with the...

Well, I had the goatee and I... I sort of had this battle with hair for a long time,

...