Nothing Is Impossible: The Real-Life Adventures of a Street Magician

by Dynamo

  Even after we had finished most of the filming and knew we had some great stuff, the pressure didn’t let up. When the TV ads came on to advertise episode one of Dynamo: Magician Impossible, we hadn’t even finished making the show! We were literally filming and editing a week before the show went on air. But, somehow, we did it…

  AT 9 P.M. on 11 July 2011, my first TV show Dynamo: Magician Impossible aired for the very first time. That evening I was doing a gig at the Savoy Hotel for an incredibly rich and powerful Russian heiress. I went off to the booking happily enough; I’d seen the show enough times in the edit suite and, because it was on the UKTV channel, Watch, rather than a terrestrial one, I wasn’t expecting a huge number of viewers. I was just hoping we’d get some good feedback from anyone who had the chance to watch it.

  As soon as I arrived at the Savoy, it quickly became apparent that the heiress’s wealth and importance was vast. She and her family had flown in for the night from Russia, and their private jets were quite literally waiting on the runway to take them home after dinner. Every two minutes, yet another delivery would arrive; all of the major hotels and department stores were sending over extravagant gifts of flowers, champagne, jewellery and designer handbags. There were just sixteen people rattling around in this huge ballroom that was filling up with expensive luxury goods. They were all speaking Russian so I had no idea what they were saying, but their money talked loudly enough. This was wealth on a whole other level.

  The gig was really fun; I went in, did my thing and the Russians loved it. I took one of the women’s diamond rings. Before her eyes, I changed it into freezing cold ice and then melted it in front of them. They weren’t sure whether to be angry or amazed because they didn’t know if they were going to get it back or not.

  I had been booked for two sets, and after the first, I went to a holding room where Dan was hanging out.

  ‘D! Look at this,’ Dan said excitedly, thrusting my phone under my nose. I was confused at first; he kept scrolling through the ‘@’ messages in my Twitter timeline. ‘But there’s loads of them,’ I said. He laughed. ‘Hundreds!’ Dan kept scrolling and refreshing and there was tweet after tweet after tweet. Not only were they coming at an alarming rate, but also literally each one read as if you had paid somebody to write the best possible thing that you could ever imagine. We watched as the number of followers started jumping up and then we turned to each other. ‘I think we might have a hit,’ grinned Dan.

  Before I knew it, I had to go back and perform once more for the rich Russians, my mind buzzing with the implications of what Dan had shown me. Normally I’d get a handful of tweets a day; suddenly there was over a thousand. And from that moment, it was non-stop. My Facebook ‘Likes’ went from a few thousand to half a million. I went from approimately 70,000 followers on Twitter to 700,000.

  The tweets were flying in from the likes of Tinie Tempah and Rio Ferdinand. Stephen Fry said the show was ‘astonishing’ and ‘simply magnificent’. Dynamo: Magician Impossible quickly grew into somewhat of a phenomenon.

  A week or so before the programme first aired, Dan and I had a meeting with the team at UKTV. ‘So,’ said Dan, ‘what are your expectations for a show like this? What kind of viewing figures will you be hoping for?’

  ‘What if we get a million?’ I wondered aloud, cheekily.

  The first-night viewing figures of Dynamo: Magician Impossible were 1.3 million. The highest Watch had had in their entire history was 738,000. We had smashed it. Not only did we exceed all expectations that day, but we bucked another trend. Normally a TV show has big first-night figures, which tend to drop off as the series continues. With Dynamo: Magician Impossible, the show built through social media and went viral – episode after episode attracted more and more viewers. Suddenly, we had this massive juggernaut. The first episode peaked at 1.5 million, with the numbers rising to 2 million people by the end of the series.

  I can’t describe how that feels. It was like the greatest bit of magic I’d ever performed. We’d made it happen. By ourselves. My family was so proud. After the first episode, Gramps cried tears of joy and my mum was so excited. She had a family fly all the way from Slovenia – the whole family – just so they could have their hair cut in her salon. She still gets random people who want to have Dynamo’s mum cut their hair.

  We couldn’t really celebrate on that first night because we were stuck at the Savoy. But I always remember that as the moment where both Dan and I realised that everything was about to change.

  AFTER THE FIRST episode aired, we were still filming the fourth episode as the schedule was running so late. I’m out on the street trying to record some stuff and around me everything is going nuts. Everything changed, literally, overnight. I couldn’t film in the way that I used to, because people were just mobbing me. It was so bizarre, but completely brilliant.

  When we were offered a second and third series, it felt like our hard work was finally paying off, although that brilliant offer brought a serious amount of extra hard work too. From July 2011 until Christmas Day 2011 I rarely took time off. I missed my family so much, after years of being so tight-knit it was hard. I missed Gramps especially. But we’d grab a phone call whenever we could and he loved hearing about my escapades. It was like he was living out some of his own dreams through me.

  But we had to work hard if we were going to achieve the things we wanted. On the day before Christmas Eve, we flew out to Nigeria for a private show for a former Nigerian President. It was my first visit to Africa, and it was a real experience. We had no idea what to expect. When we landed, a man appeared after we had cleared customs and asked us for our passports. Reluctantly, we handed them over, not knowing if we’d ever see him or our passports again.

  We were taken to a huge jeep with four armed security men; those guys rarely left our side while we were there, apart from when we went to sleep! We sped through the streets of Lagos, trying to take in the colours, smells and sights as we went. It looked like an amazing, energetic, crazy city, though we got to see hardly any of it. We were taken to a hotel, where we went straight to bed. I performed the next day and then we were put back in the jeep and taken to the airport. Thankfully, the man who had greeted us was there with our passports.

  We hopped back on a plane, the streets of Lagos a blur, and arrived in London for Christmas lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s house for his TV show. Boxing Day was the first day we had a chance to breathe and reflect. I drove up to Bradford to see my family and then on to Birmingham to spend time with my girlfriend before heading back to London in the early hours for a couple of hours’ sleep. On 27 December, we were back to work.

  There are many challenges when it comes to taking magic to television. There are only so many things you can levitate, for instance. You can levitate anything, but it’s the ideas you run out of. You can levitate yourself, you can levitate a cup, you can levitate a chair, a person… What are you going to do next? How big is it going to get? Are you going to move the moon? How many things can you levitate? I’d rather look at doing something new than rehashing the same old stuff.

  If you’re a rapper or singer writing lyrics, to a certain extent you have an infinite toolbox. There are millions of different ways to rearrange words and there are different ways of delivering them – through various tones, levels, speeds, etc.

  But with magic, you take one phone, you make it disappear. You take a cup, you make it disappear. If you do that back to back in a show, it’s the same effect. It’s no different in the spectator’s eyes. Regardless of whether it’s a phone or a cup, to the spectator it’s essentially the same thing. The magician has made something vanish right in front of your eyes.

  With series one of my TV show, Dynamo: Magician Impossible, there were around 100 effects – around twenty-five per episode. So 100 effects means 100 new pieces of magic that couldn’t just be a repetition of the same one, but using a different object.

  Twelve years of my ideas were thrown into series one, so the big cha
llenge came with series two and three. I had a matter of months, not years, to create the magic for them. I’ve got to produce the same amount of material, with the same number of hours and airtime to fill, but with only six months of creativity feeding into it. Television eats material. When a stand-up comedian does an act for TV, he can’t really use those same gags for his tour. Everyone’s heard them already.

  Obviously, there are certain things that I’ll always do; they are associated with me and have become my speciality. A comedian has his own trademark delivery and in the same way, I’ll have certain magic effects that are ascribed to me. The variations on the Polo mint appearance, levitating, walking through glass, moving tattoos and suntans about the body, and so on – they’re all things that crop up regularly in my work.

  Early on, one of my signature pieces of magic was pulling a Polo mint out of my neck. The first time I did it was on my second DVD, Concrete Playground, in 2006. I’d been doing two different things at that time and I joined them together. One of them was taking a necklace and sawing into my neck, and the other one was taking somebody’s ring, or a Polo, swallowing it, and making it disappear and then reappear on the same chain.

  I decided to combine the two ideas, because I always thought that sawing my neck captured people’s attention, but it didn’t really have any purpose. So I thought if I swallow the Polo, saw the necklace into my neck, and then cause it to appear back on the necklace, then the illusion goes full circle.

  I always try to tell a story with my magic; there has to be a journey and there has to be a purpose.

  I have a few other specialties, of course, but I like to constantly mix things up. For example, in the first series of Dynamo: Magician Impossible, one of the things people talked about were the different levitations, using both myself and inanimate objects. In the second series, I did something called a suspension in Rio; I balanced on a bench just using my hand. Suspension is different to levitation; it’s about balance rather than floating. There was the magic that I did with The Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown’s guitars, where I suspended a guitar on a chair. In the second series I did it with mobile phones. I’ve tried to touch on certain things but do them differently each time. So there are similarities, there’s continuation, but there’s also progression.

  In the second series, I taught people, so to speak, how to put the phone inside the bottle. Everyone always asks me about the phone in the bottle, so I explain how to do it: I borrow someone’s phone, wave it and it shrinks to a miniature version of the phone, and then I can drop it into the bottle. When it’s in the bottle, I shake it, and it grows back to its normal size again inside the bottle, and I pass it back to them. That’s my ‘explanation’.

  After series one aired, I really listened to what people were saying – what they liked, what they didn’t, the magic that really enthralled them and the magic that they weren’t so taken by. I’ve tried to play on the talking points and pick the types of magic that everyone really loves.

  I get ideas for new magic everywhere. It used to be that I would be inspired on the bus or tube, though I can’t get them so much these days. Nowadays it’s riding around in my car, other times when I’m at the office. I won’t lie; the toilet is often a good place of inspiration for me too. The best way, though, is usually through chatting to random strangers. For some reason, people talk to me and finding out what people like gives me inspiration. I used to put coins into bottles, and then one night, some guy goes, ‘Do that with my phone.’ I was like, ‘OK,’ and I put his phone in a bottle. It’s been one of the most talked-about things I’ve ever done. A fan gave me a fantastic idea recently. He told me the best thing I’ve heard in a long time and it’s something that I’m working on as I write.

  One thing that I try to do to stand out and progress is to embrace popular culture and modern technology. I took my magic to the DVD format, then to MySpace and from there to YouTube and Twitter. I was the first person to perform magic over Twitter, which I got Snoop Dogg involved in. I guessed which card he was thinking of. I guessed the three of diamonds correctly, otherwise that would have been embarrassing, with our combined ten million followers. Similarly, it was important for me to have an app for Dynamo: Magician Impossible while the show was on air. It’s about embracing the ever-changing world that we live in. For me, it’s essential for both forming ideas and keeping my content fresh. If you don’t keep up, you get left behind.

  SINCE I WAS a teenager, I’ve studied the art of magic. The thoughts and theories have changed a lot over the last few years. Some people don’t believe that magic can be simplified. They think it’s much more of a fluid thing. There are many different types of magic.

  You’ve got ‘appearance’, which is making things appear. One of my favourite moments from the second series was the scene in episode one with my nan. I did her crossword for her in about two seconds – I made the words appear in a flash. As usual she wasn’t impressed. ‘Oh yeah, I see,’ she nodded nonchalantly. One of these days I’ll do something that will really impress her!

  ‘Disappearance’ is obviously the opposite. You’ve seen me make coins disappear and reappear all over the place. In the second series, I even made myself disappear after a crowded event at an HMV store, leaving just a pile of clothes behind.

  ‘Penetration’ is passing one object through another. For example, when I push someone’s phone into a beer bottle. Another example is when I walked through glass in front of Rio Ferdinand. I penetrated through the glass and appeared on the other side of the window.

  ‘Transposition’ occurs when two things change places. This might happen when I, for example, take Coca-Cola and swap it with Sprite. This goes right back to the first magic trick Gramps showed me where you make red and green matches switch boxes.

  The magic that has made a lot of headlines are my predictions. There was the thing I did with the Euro 2012 bet, but I’ve also used this when predicting the news on Scott Mills’s Radio 1 show. I went to the Radio 1 studios a few days before with a locked and sealed safety-deposit box. I gave it to Scott and told him not to open it or try to tamper with it in any way. Two days later, I returned to the studios and live on Scott’s show I asked him to go through the pile of newspapers that were in the studio. I asked him to pick one and choose a positive, uplifting story that he felt compelled to read on air. He chose the Metro from that day (20 July 2011) and, after rifling through the paper, he finally picked out a story about a record-breaking mountaineer who had scaled Everest three times. ‘We’ve a lot to be proud of,’ read the headline.

  At that moment, I announced that I had somewhere to go and I took off, leaving him with the key to the box. After I left, Scott opened the safe and inside was a sketch, drawn by me all those days before. It was of the very same story he had chosen and I’d drawn it as it was laid out on the newspaper page. I’d written the headline ‘A lot to be proud of’ and sketched the mountaineer in his red jacket with his ski goggles on his head and so on. Scott and his team were dumbfounded.

  I’ve always done predictions with my friends just for fun. We’d make a little wager on things and over the years I got quite good at it. I have quite a sharp memory, so I use memory and mathematics to think, ‘OK, this is going to be the outcome of this event.’

  It is risky doing predictions because once you commit to it, you can’t change your mind. Lots of times, my magic doesn’t always work out how I had envisaged it in my head, but I can easily freestyle my way out of it. I have so many ideas to hand; I rarely know what I’m going to do at a gig anyway. Lots of times I use props on the spot or even create new magic as I go along.

  With predictions, however, there’s no freestyling your way out of trouble. I don’t really like creating too much hype either. I prefer to let the magic be strong enough on its own, and then the hype comes anyway. But with predictions, the minute you leave an envelope with someone and say, ‘All right, that’s the prediction in there, open it in a week,’ then you have expectation bu
ilding for a whole week. If they open the envelope and the prediction is wrong then you’re left standing there looking ridiculous.

  I’ve only really done two major predictions in my life: the newspaper article sketch on Scott Mills’s radio show and the Euro 2012 accumulator bet.

  For me, predictions are more nerve-racking than walking on water, but the predictions I’ve done have gone amazingly well. I think they add to the legacy I’m trying to create and they fit in with my style. I would never do something that’s not me just because it’s an impressive piece of magic. I’m very careful that I am consistent in who I am and what I do.

  PEOPLE OFTEN ASK me why I think the first series of Dynamo: Magician Impossible was such a success. I’ve thought about it quite a lot.

  One difference with the show, and this is a really important thing, was that we didn’t want to pre-promote what I was going to do. Every other magic show announces its intentions: ‘I’m going to do this; you’re going to be amazed.’ And when you do that, you build expectations.

  With the River Thames, we didn’t tell anybody what was happening. I went down to the river at 9.30 p.m. and just started walking. The bystanders who were there were people who just happened to be walking past. We didn’t advertise or promote it; we just did it.

  A few days later, pictures of me standing in the middle of the river in my bright red jacket started to emerge online. Within an hour, it had gone global, with the story cropping up in Australia, India, Germany and South Africa. I watched it spread around the world overnight. People could feel the authenticity, so we got people’s interests piqued straight away. It was mad seeing news articles come up online in languages from countries I’d never even been to.