dgmagic - UK magic blog by magician Dan Gifford

I had a bit of a nightmare last night.

I was booked to perform an hour of close-up magic followed by my stand-up magic act at a large family party. It had all sounded OK over the phone, the venue had a stage, there was a PA I could use, start times all set, children would be entertained separately by another entertainer etc.

The problem is, most things sound OK over the phone, especially when the booker hadn’t even seen the venue (I didn’t find that out until later!)

The venue had a large dance floor in the middle with a stage at one end. The DJ had set up on the stage, completely filling it. The tables and chairs were arranged all around the dance floor and couldn’t be moved in case they damaged the floor.

The children’s entertainer was performing in the same room and left just before I was due to start my stand-up act, leaving the kids sliding up and down the dance floor.

The close-up magic was fine, in fact it went really well. I suggested I should carry on with it rather than attempting my stand-up act but the booker said no, and the customer is always right.

So there I was, stood in the middle of the dance floor with the distant audience surrounding me and restless children unable to resist the shiny dance floor.

I quickly changed my act to try to make it play to people who couldn’t see directly, adding a couple of less visual magic tricks, but it was very difficult to get any kind of rapport with an audience so far away and spread out.

You live and learn.

On Watchdog tonight there was a report (here on the BBC website) about the dodgy dealings of an entertainment agency based in Birmingham. They were selling children’s entertainers and magicians who never turned up. Customers subsequently had trouble getting refunds. (more…)

A fellow magician at the Leicester Magic Circle mentioned a marked card scandal involving Protea Playing Cards in South Africa. It happened a few years ago, but the good old BBC still has the story on their site.

In a nutshell, someone managed to mark the cards used at casinos in South Africa and was selling the secret to gamblers.

The casinos could have lost millions… what a shame.

What is a nightmare for a magician? Performing to a room full of magicians? Well, yes, but almost as bad is someone who appears to know exactly what you are doing when you are performing to them - by that I mean the method used to accomplish the magic. This happened to me at the weekend.

Sometimes people guess a method and get it partly right. Some people just need an explanation, whether it’s right or wrong, which is fine. But this was really disturbing, this person was getting everything spot on.

Magicians reading this will probably think that means I wasn’t performing very well - there should be no way anyone could see the moves used to achieve a magical effect. But you don’t need to see moves to know they are there, or work out out what they might be. Magicians do this all the time when watching other (good) magicians. They know how a magical effect is achieved even without being able to actually see the moves - they fill in the gaps because their minds work in the right way.

The problem was this wasn’t another magician, it was a very perceptive 11 year old girl! Luckily, what I was doing was still flying by everyone with her - I don’t think they believed her when she managed to work out and describe exactly what I was doing.

How do you cope with this? Confusion.

I was into the next effect before she’d finished saying “But didn’t you just swap those two over and ….”. It became pretty comical, although I must admit I wasn’t laughing on the inside!

My site has gone up to PR 4!

Ah, I have a warm fuzzy feeling inside - Google likes me. Of course, it’s meaningless really. Doesn’t help your rankings in the search engines.

And Google doesn’t like a couple of pages I’ve changed recently, corporate magician and wedding magician pages. I changed the filenames of these pages and now they have PR 0.