Magic for MTV set

I was idly tonguing my Yamaha sexophone at the weekend (it's like a saxophone, except it is fitted with nipple clamps, a catheter, a car battery and a quart of lubricating jelly), when I thought of a way to help an old acquaintance of mine.

He's an erotomaniac busker (so sex-obsessed that he's even written a musical called Guys and Inflatable Dolls) whose greatest desire is to expose himself on the London Underground, but he is terrified of getting arrested for flashing, and he recently came to me in despair, asking for advice.

After some thought, I've devised a way in which he can fulfil that desire to his heart's content, with no risk of falling foul of the law. How? By flashing inside a Photo-Me booth on the station platform, then watching from a safe distance as the photos pop out of the machine and are glimpsed by passers-by, thereby combining nononsense sexual perversion with an amusing touch of magic.

Sex and humour are important weapons in the arsenal of most successful magicians. Jerry Sadowitz can render an audience breathless with laughter before astonishing them with his close-up skills, while the hordes of screaming girls at David Blaine's recent public hanging eloquently testified to the illusionist's erotic appeal (I used to hang around there, too, incidentally, but only in the hope of getting robbed - well, without pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all).

Yet the presenter of Derren Brown: Trick of the Mind (C4) is smug rather than funny, and singularly sexless to boot (with his thinning hair and strangulated Herbert voice), so why is he enjoying such televisual success? Because he has learned how to coolify magic by replacing glittery sequined suits and glittery girl assistants with glittery MTV-style post-production techniques. He hopes viewers won't realise that once unlimited editing is permitted, nobody can or should believe anything they see.

There's no denying Brown's intense screen presence, whether he's pretending to blow his own brains out, or other people's minds. "At no point are actors or stooges used in this show", he promised us at the start of Friday night's new series (just as he'd sincerely promised us last year that he was using real ammunition in his Russian roulette stunt), after which he was free to resort to editing, repeated filming and other TV effects to bring us not merely illusions, but illusions of illusions.

Never mind MTV production values: I know for a fact that his chess tournament trick was devised in the Victorian era (I was a regular visitor to Davenport's magic shop in my youth, and remember reading the antique book from which it comes), while the street mind-reading routines simply rely on multiple shooting, until he gets the results he requires.

As for bamboozling a cabbie until he couldn't remember where the London Eye was, anyone can do that. Simply hail a taxi after 11pm, ask for any location south of the

Although C4's "next big thing" is largely a triumph of style over content (and heavily indebted to Can't Stand the Heat), the style was admittedly impressive. The ITC Avengers retro feel was well reproduced on Friday (right down to the allusions to Steed's brolly), and Steve Beresford's theme music (all hammer dulcimer and Swingle singing) was a brilliant pastiche, yet the lack of serious invention at the heart of the programme made it seem hollow and empty.

Only when my old mucker Stephen Fry sat with Brown at a small table was the illusionist freed from all suspicion of camera trickery, but even then it wasn't the disappearing card stunt that impressed me. No, it was the way he momentarily made Fry's jaw drop ("I just want to burn him at the stake and watch his witch's heart bubble"), thereby also making his jowls disappear.