TV Review: On Sunday night, the illusionists got trigger-happy. On RTÉ1, Keith Barry did the "catching the bullet in the teeth" trick. "Magic has entered a new era," declared Barry. "It's time to push new boundaries."
Paul Daniels once did the bullet-catching trick, a piece of information that somehow takes the edge off things.
Magic has indeed entered a new era. Modern magicians have shunned the cloak and emphatic adjectives. They wear Savile Row suits and are neither Amazing nor Marvellous. They have surnames like Brown or Barry. The Amazing Barry, I think you'll agree, is not a name that sells tickets. Neither, come to think of it, is The Marvellous Keith.
Keith Barry is the latest in an era of laid-back, minimalist magicians, a local version of David Blaine or Britain's Derren Brown. His entertaining show, Close Encounters with Keith Barry, sees him wow the general public with card tricks and the odd old-fashioned death-defying stunt. A couple of weeks ago, he drove a car at full pelt down a country lane while wearing a black sack over his head and scaring the life out of RTÉ's Kathryn Thomas.
There just aren't enough penalty points to cover either offence.
In between tricks we are treated to snappy vignettes of him standing on dark foggy heaths surrounded by sticks of light, in order to thicken the mystery no doubt.
Sometimes he speaks portentously, as if his batteries are running down. This week he performed what he called "the most dangerous stunt of all", taking a bullet in the courtyard of Collins Barracks. The courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol, presumably, would not have been an appropriate venue.
Modern magicians do not have beautiful assistants, but Barry brought his mammy and his fiancée along for a look.
"The greatest fear I have is the fear for them," he said, the nickel leaking into his vocal chords. He should have more confidence in himself. The trick, as you might expect, went off without a hitch and was laced with a bit of drama and shattering glass for good effect.
"I just think there's a better way of earning a living," said his exasperated mother when it was all over. But all mothers say that. And no, there's not.
The most dangerous stunt of all mightn't even have been the most dangerous stunt of the day. Later that evening, there was Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette live on Channel 4. A couple of months ago, Brown asked for volunteers to come forward and load the bullet into the gun - 12,000 offered to do it. The man wouldn't want to have a fragile ego.
It was dramatic television, in which he appeared to put a loaded gun to his head and, live on air, pull the trigger several times before finally firing the loaded chamber at a sandbag. It was exquisite showbusiness, especially when he appeared to have got it horribly wrong and he sat in his chair, the gun on the table, shaking, seeming unsure whether to continue. No magic trick is complete without the magician seeming to have got it wrong and like wide-eyed children, we fall for it every time.
Brown's stunt launched Magic Month on Channel 4, even though he himself has never claimed to be a magician but a "mentalist". Unlike Barry, who can keep a secret, Brown deconstructs his tricks as soon as they are complete. Everything he does is based on the suggestibility of the human mind and the transparency of our emotions. We are, to our continued entertainment, predictable and stupid.
You might have thought we would be over magic by now. A few years ago, there were a slew of programmes blowing the secrets behind the big tricks, including one which showed how to do the "bullet catch" and which I now wish I had paid more attention to. Instead, it has staged a comeback.
Brown tramples over the fundamentals of magic and reveals the craft behind his tricks. David Blaine's current residency of a box over the Thames is not magic, but we consider him to be a magician because his fame came from street-hustling with card tricks and we refuse to accept an idea so prosaic as testing the limits of human endurance, instead insisting that there must trickery involved. Even when everything is laid bare before us, we will still invest it with magic. Keith Barry didn't really catch a bullet in his teeth and Derren Brown was probably never in danger of blowing his brains out, but where's the fun in believing that?
According to Prof Robert Winston in The Human Mind, to discover if a person is an introvert or an extrovert all you need is a drop of lemon and some tape. Those who can take a drop to the tongue and smother the most saliva on the length of tape are introverted and no fun at parties. According to scientific experiments, physicists lick for longer, which sounds like a T-shirt slogan you might see at a Star Trek convention.
Once again, Winston breaks science into candy-coated chunks and then dips them in honey. The development of the human brain, he explained, is like walking through this cornfield. Actually, he clarified, it's like riding these raging rapids. Hold on, it's also like conducting this full orchestra without being able to read sheet music.
As ever, there was not a pointed stick or blackboard in sight. Instead, there was quite a beautiful crop circle carved in the shape of a brain and moments when the camera swished into an individual's brain and rode the neurons like a rollercoaster. Winston makes presenting television look a doddle. He is long-established as the paternal voice of British science, his moustache twitching like a thatched roof in a hurricane. Or like a nervous caterpillar. Or maybe like an electric shoe buffer.
His fetish for explaining the complex workings of the human body through the medium of extreme sports continues. He rode the raging rapids just to illustrate a complex scientific theory. Somewhere out there, a kid will want to become a brain surgeon because of this programme, but will be mightily confused when he turns up for his first day of college and realises he's the only one wearing a jump-suit and a helmet.
According to Hitler: The Rise of Evil, the dictator's early life went as follows: he hated his father; he burnt his father's beehive; his father beat him; his father died; he raged at his mother; his mother died; he lived rough in Vienna, and he woke up one morning as Robert Carlyle.
It was all wrapped up in the pre-credits sequence. The continuity announcer had promised us that the lavish two-part biographical drama would be starring Stockard Channing; yet, playing his mother, she featured for hardly much longer than it took her name to flash across the credits. It was a confusion of scenes, bounding through the years, leaping through adolescence, a summary of a previous episode that never was.
The programme settled down when the young Hitler went to war and it developed into competently scripted and beautifully rendered historical drama, but it really only went through the checkpoints on Hitler's rise to power. It used the old tricks of the screenplay to update us on sweeping historical events. A newsboy shouted: "War! War! Austrian archduke's assassination leads to war!" You half expected him to add, "and in other news . . ."
There is some fine support acting, notably from Peter Stormare as the head of Hitler's thugs, the SA, and Liev Schreiber as Ernst Hanfstaengl, industrialist and Nazi link to Germany's sympathetic upper-class.
Carlyle is excellent in the title role, resisting the perils of playing a man both horribly familiar and always open to parody. Physically, he is rigid with anger, his speech a shower of phlegm and food, his eyes large and black. However, he is allowed to reveal nothing of Hitler's reported personal charm and the drama is utterly resistant to any notion of humanising him.
This is a CBS-funded film and is neutered by sensitivities. The rush through to adulthood perhaps suggests a nervousness about filling in the crevices of his character, in case this could be equated with sympathy rather than the need to understand.
For example, we were asked to believe that Hitler's anti-Semitism was, in part, picked up from the passing remarks of a fellow vagrant during his time in Vienna.
The Rise of Evil lacks nerve and finds refuge in superficiality. Hitler's soul may have been black, but here we are given little sense of the darkening shades.