Nothing Is Impossible: The Real-Life Adventures of a Street Magician (21 page)

‘No, I don’t think there’s enough mileage in that,’ the guy replied. ‘I’ve got a better idea: we do a show where he does the tricks and then tells people how it’s done. Like, he robs a jewellery store and then reveals how it’s done. He…’

Dan couldn’t bear to hear anymore. ‘Look, let me just stop you there,’ he interrupted. ‘We’re not interested in any of those ideas. We don’t want to expose anything, that’s not what we’re about.’

At that point, the meeting pretty much ended. ‘Well, I really hoped I’d see some cool stuff today but…’ he shrugged. Dan just laughed. The person who had been the go-between and set up the meeting, was a little embarrassed at that point.

Dan stood up. ‘I look after the greatest magician on the planet,’ he said defiantly. ‘I’ve got a six-figure deal with a major distributor on the table. Just because I’ve come to this meeting, don’t be so naïve to think this is my only option.’ And, with that, he walked out.

Truth be told, we didn’t have anywhere else to go. But he wasn’t about to let them know that.

‘HOW DID IT
go?’ I asked Dan when I saw him that evening, but he didn’t need to answer. The look on his face said it all. It seemed like every door in the UK TV industry had been closed in our faces.

‘Look, D, I’ve been thinking about this on the tube the whole way home,’ he said. ‘We’re going to do this ourselves. We’re going to raise the money ourselves – we’re going to make the show ourselves. If we can only raise ten grand, we’ll make a show for ten grand. If we can raise fifty grand, we’ll make a show for fifty grand.’

I got really fired up. ‘You know what, you’re right. Let’s go for it,’ I smiled. ‘We’ve got a bit of money in the bank; let’s go hard on
the private bookings, raise some more cash and hire our own crew. Forget everybody else. We know we’ve got a brilliant idea. Let’s show people.’

We’d done Sports Relief a few months before, where I’d turned lottery tickets into cash for the charity for Davina McCall and Robbie Williams. The producer of Sports Relief was a man called Martin Dance who was a really nice guy, very supportive, and we had got on well. I always look out for people who I think are honest and straight talkers, people I think won’t speak rubbish to me. I phoned him up. ‘We want to make our own show and we want to make it independently. Will you come on board as a producer?’

It turned out that Martin was working at a TV production company called Phil McIntyre. What was interesting about that was that my first ever stage show,
An Audience with Dynamo
, had been promoted by Phil McIntyre. It was just a little show that I did in 2007 mostly for family, friends and my supporters.

Phil and Martin introduced us to a lady they were working with called Lucy Ansbro. It turned out that Lucy had worked in the same department at Universal that we were talking to about the DVD. It all seemed to be falling into place. We had a meeting with her, and got on really well.

‘Can you help us pitch this programme?’ we asked her. ‘We’ve been shafted by a lot of production companies; we’d like to make this as a co-production with you and Phil. It’s the only way we want to do it.’ Fortunately, Lucy was fully up for it and she started to help us look for someone to make the series. She’d heard of at least one channel that might be interested.

Fashions in television come and go, and now channels had started looking for magic formats again. I was at the front of the queue.

This was around the same time that the BBC commissioned a series called
The Magicians
. I had been asked to do that, as well as two other similar formats that had been developed. But I always said that I only ever wanted to do my own programme. I didn’t want to be a magician on a show in which I wasn’t the main focus. Not because I’m arrogant or because I think I’m better than anyone else, but it was the vision I’d always had. And, I knew that doing those sorts of shows wouldn’t further my magic. If you look at those series, it’s hard to remember any of the magicians’ names as individuals. No one knows who they are.

SELLING A MAGIC
show to a TV company is very difficult. It went a little bit like this:

‘Hi, I’m Dynamo. I want to make this show where I’m going to walk on the River Thames. Then I’m going to fly from one building to another, walk through a window, and I’m going to predict the future, live, on Radio 1. Oh, I can’t tell you how I’m going do it, but if you pay my company Inner Circle Films a certain amount of money, I’ll make it happen!’

‘So, what are we paying for, exactly?’

‘Well… you’re going to get all that. River Thames, teleportation, Radio 1…’

‘Yes, but can you give us a breakdown of the money that you’re expecting us to spend?’

‘Well, due to the secretive nature of my magic I can’t go into detail about what it’s for. So, actually, no, I can’t really tell you what I’m spending your money on, no…’

‘Right. Er, right.’

The conversations always went that way, so it was a hard sell. Luckily, this was where my years of experience and hard work paid off. I don’t think UKTV had ever seen a pitch like ours, because we had prepared for this for ten years. We were, if anything, over-prepared. By that point, because we were ready to do it ourselves, and were up for creating a pilot ourselves, we knew everything about the show. I knew what we wanted to do, down to the last detail. I was super-ambitious.

We also had an added incentive to dangle in front of them. ‘By the way, Universal Pictures want to support the project.’ So they’re like, ‘
We’ve got this magician who’s on the top of his game, he knows exactly what he wants to do, and he’s already got Universal who want to put money into it, right from the off. This is a no-brainer
.’

They gave us the green light. Now we just had to actually make the show.

FINALLY, AFTER YEARS
and years, we had a deal. We were ready to sign on the dotted line. I was so excited, so happy, I couldn’t believe it was happening.

We knew if the show didn’t do well, we’d be screwed. If
The Art of Astonishment
was a flop, it would really impact on us all. Dan and I might never work again. Because of what we wanted to do – walking on the Thames, flying to LA etc., – we were spending so much money that no one else would ever be interested in us if the show wasn’t a hit.

The original title,
The Art of Astonishment
, which was the title of a magic book by a magician called Paul Harris, also had to be changed. UKTV pointed out that the name was too long for the listings info that you get on your digital box as you’re scrolling down to see what’s on. They wanted something short and snappy, which we understood. Dan suggested
Magician Impossible
, a name that he’d mentioned to me a while ago. We thought it could work and the channel loved it.

We had a deal and we had a title, but that was just the start. Now we had to actually do what we said we would do. As always, we were making something out of nothing.

No pressure.

WE SET UP
a small office space on Oxford Street and we squeezed everybody in there – director, producer, production crew, runners, the whole lot. After two weeks of preparation, we started shooting. We had a really good team, but no one had ever made a magic show like this, on this scale. There had never been one like it before in this country. All of us went in there pretty much unprepared, pretty much blind, but somehow sort of knowing what we wanted to do.

It was a gruelling seven months. The production period was crazy and the number of things that went wrong was just nuts. One of our crew members got mugged at gunpoint in Miami. My friend and driver from the show, Gilera, wrote off our car on our way to the Snowbombing festival in Mayrhofen, Austria. Then, the first time I tried to walk across the River Thames, disaster struck.

The heavens opened and there was torrential, end-of-the-world rain. I pretty much had my foot on the water, the covert cameras were set up to film, but it was raining so hard that no one was there to watch it. Without the reactions of passers-by, it wouldn’t work. The magic would be lost.

The problem was, not only did we have to pay for an extra day’s filming, but we only had one more day left in the schedule to film. The deadline for series completion was that weekend.