The Mighty TV

Recently, I was watch­ing the You­Tube clip of David Roth’s per­form­ance on the Penn & Teller show. I was inter­ested in see­ing his hand­ling of the open ser­vante. A glance at the pic­ture will tell you that the dir­ect­ors of the show made my stud­ies very simple. In fact, the Bird’s Eye view of parts of the routine are almost like out of an instruc­tional magic book. Okay, the logo cam­ou­flages it pretty well in this case … 🙂

This made me aware of the dif­fi­culties when per­form­ing on TV. I’m not a big fan of these types of record­ings because obvi­ously they want to give the audi­ence an all-around view. But why? To make the per­form­ance more attract­ive? Or is it the notion that an audi­ence these days has the right to see everything on their mega screens in detail? I am in no way cri­ti­ciz­ing the P&T show because these guys know what they do. And I am sure David was informed and agreed on all this. And there was­n’t really an expos­ure of the secret (at least for the laymen).

The prob­lem for me is not so much the secret-keep­ing aspect. In my opin­ion, this recod­ing atti­tude reduces the magic to a sort of puzzle. The routine is broken by the dir­ector and the per­son­al­ity of the per­former and the flair of the per­form­ance sort of gets lost. The focus is only on the hands and the props used. And all that is done so that a few stu­pid and bored couch pota­toes sit­ting on their sofas have a good view of things they don’t under­stand any­way. I don’t think this is the right way to make magic more attractive.

The solu­tion? I don’t really have one. I don’t per­form on TV, and when asked to do so (yes, I have been asked quite a couple of times in the past), I always refuse. I note that some per­formers handle it very well and they over­come these obstacles. But what I have seen with the major­ity of magi­cians appear­ing in morn­ing TV shows and talk shows (often inex­per­i­enced ama­teur magi­cians who are blinded by the appar­ent fame and pub­li­city) is a dif­fer­ent world.

Usu­ally, they don’t have the lux­ury of work­ing with the dir­ector who under­stands and respects the needs of magic on TV. There­fore, we see a lot of flashes and unin­ten­tional expos­ures, which is a sad thing. A solu­tion? I don’t have one … except maybe: “Don’t do it!”

Pass it on!