In a swish apartment overlooking London’s Docklands, two scriptwriters, Whale and Purview, sit down to discuss ideas for a new James Bond script.

Whale: Okay, the studio wants four exotic locations for this film.

Purview: Only four? They must be cutting back.

Whale: Nah, they’re thinking about global warming. They want a more responsible Bond who thinks about the impact air travel has on the environment.

Purview: Okey Dokey. Let’s have an early scene where ‘M’ tells Bond that MI6 has adopted a carbon neutral policy.

Whale: Yup. Let’s make this some kind of sexy eco-thriller.

Purview: I’m not sure we can. We did the environment with Quantum of Solace and that plot about controlling water supplies and calling the antagonist ‘Greene’ and having him run an ecological business as a front for his criminal activities. Let’s make this film about terrorism instead. That’s topical.

Whale: We did international terrorism in Casino Royale.

Purview: Then what’s it going to be about? We’ve got to keep it topical and relevant.

Whale: How about making it a combo eco-terrorist story. With nukes. Iranian nukes.

Purview: That’s a good idea. Let’s hang on to that. Let’s start with the four locations.

Whale: One hot, one cold, one pricey, one wild.

Purview: St. Petersburg. We should use St. Petersburg as the wintry location.

Whale: The Winter Palace at Winter. Shots of crisp white snow contrasted with lots of lavish opulence with lots of gold and jewels everywhere.

Purview: We cut from a scene with a Bond girl skating on the ice of a frozen river to her putting on her diamonds in the evening.

Whale: Ice and diamonds - I love it. Okay, St. Petersburg works for me. We can have a Russian oligarch as the baddie. Yeah - good. Now what about the hot location?

Purview: I don’t we should actually set it in Iran. It would be too sensitive to have Bond going there undercover. How about doing a segment in Jamaica?

Whale: Bond’s been to the Caribbean so often that the audience will expect him to end up speaking like a West Indian.

Purview: Western Samoa?

Whale: Nobody knows where that is.

Purview: Nobody knows why you’d build a swanky hotel in the middle of the Bolivian desert but that’s what we wrote into the last script. What about Rio de Janeiro?

Whale: Puh-lease. Pictures of girls in skimpy bikinis and guys juggling footballs. So corny.

Purview: Somewhere in the Middle East then.

Whale: Not a bad idea. Bond can be involved in a chase through a shopping mall in Dubai. He pushes past a lot of Arabs all dressed in white. The baddie’s henchman is dressed in white too, so Bond momentarily loses sight of him in the crowd… I’m liking this idea. Lots of opportunity for product placement, as he throws the henchman through the window of a Louis Vuitton shop. Plus they’ll pay top dollar for the boost to tourism. We can have a scene with Bond flying off the top of that fancy ’sail’ hotel using a one-man helicopter pack on his back.

Purview: I like it. We’ve done rocket packs before, but not helicopter packs. As he helicopters down, Bond can set off some smoke flares, leaving a red, white and blue trail in the skies.

Whale: What about the glamour location?

Purview: New York. Perhaps we could stage a shootout in Grand Central Station. The crowd screaming, people leaping over ticket barriers and Bond having a fight on the roof of a subway train.

Whale: Nah. We’ve got to cut back. And Dubai can double as the pricey location as well as the hot one. We should do somewhere in the UK. You know, to fit with the ecologically responsible ’staycation’ theme.

Purview: How about Bond spends a weekend youth hosteling in the Lake District? He could encounter a hiking troupe of Swedish beauties, and bed them all during a wet afternoon under canvas.

Whale: I’m thinking more along the lines of Blackpool. Bond slides down a cable from Blackpool Tower whilst chasing an assassin.

Purview: Blackpool?

Whale: Blackpool. It can work. They’re making it more upmarket these days.

Purview: Perhaps. What if the assassin garrotes his victim from behind, just as they’re looping the loop on the rollercoaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach?

Whale: That’s a great idea. I love it.

Purview: We just the need the fourth location now. We should think about somewhere really different, somewhere nowhere like Bond’s been before.

Whale: The moon.

Purview: Too far.

Whale: Slough.

Purview: Not far enough.

Whale: Outer Mongolia.

Purview: Too barren, just like Slough.

Whale: Australia.

Purview: Too Australian. Then again, perhaps the nuke can be hidden under Uluru.

Whale: Sorry?

Purview: Uluru - Ayers Rock. They hide the nukes under Ayers Rock so the satellites cannot detect the radioactive signature, or something like that.

Whale: Brilliant. So far we’ve got a plot where Bond’s having a staycation in Blackpool, his old Navy buddy is murdered on the rollercoaster whilst Bond is in the queue for candyfloss, the murderer escapes but resurfaces in St. Petersburg, employed by some super-rich oligarch. His old buddy was entwined in the oligarch’s business interests in Dubai. Bond investigates, realizing it’s a cover operation involved in smuggling nukes out of Tehran. The nukes get hidden under Ayers Rock, where they will be auctioned to the representatives of a variety of rebel nations. And Bond has casual sex with a woman he picks up in Blackpool, shags a Russian beauty in the Winter Palace and then bonks her again in Australia, but only after he does the identical twin PAs to the chief auctioneer.

Purview: That’s the basic plot resolved. We need some more gadgets to add to the heli-pack.

Whale: What about an invisible car?

Purview: Ridiculous. Imagine how many accidents you would have driving an invisible car on the road. People would keep hitting you in the tail.

Whale: And I remember we had one already - in Die Another Day. Maybe we should give the bad guy a gadget. Like an electro suit. And Bond can kill him by pressing a big red self-destruct button placed right in the middle of the suit’s chest plate.

Purview: That was in Die Another Day too.

Whale: The bad guy should have a gun which fires only one bullet, because he’s that good.

Purview: And what if he’s being attacked by two people? He waits until they’re lined up, one behind the other? Anyhow, The Man With the Golden Gun had only one bullet in his gun.

Whale: Okay. How about the bad guy has a fetish for Bond and keeps a mannequin of him in his lair? Then Bond can take the dummy’s place and catch the baddie by surprise.

Purview: That was in The Man With The Golden Gun too. Roger Moore was so wooden it was hard to tell which one was the mannequin. We should think about having some kind of space weapon. They’re very sexy, in a sci-fi style.

Whale: No. Definitely not. You Only Live Twice. Diamonds are Forever. Moonraker. Goldeneye and Die Another Day. Space weapons have been done to death.

Purview: Let’s leave the gadgets for now. Gadgets are passé anyway. We should talk about some set pieces.

Whale: Bond should invite himself to the nuke auction. He quickly drops the pretence as the baddies know who he is anyway. They’ll put him up for a couple of nights in the lavish guest facilities and the Bond’s oligarch antagonist allows him to sleep with his woman, before eventually deciding to kill him. Bond survives and blows the whole place up, leaving the Nukes safely buried underneath Ayers Rock.

Purview: Of course. That all goes without saying. We need Bond’s antagonist to have a sidekick with a special weapon or skill.

Whale: Killer hats.

Purview: Oddjob in Goldfinger.

Whale: Killer teeth.

Purview: Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Whale: Killer thighs.

Purview: Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye.

Whale: Killer fishing rod.

Purview: Mayday in View to a Kill.

Whale: Killer moustache.

Purview: That would be new. How would it work?

Whale: A gay guy soaks his moustache in poison. It gives off fumes that would kill Bond if he kisses him.

Purview: I’m pretty sure that’s not been filmed before.

Whale: We need some good action scenes.

Purview: Bond is chasing the sidekick in Blackpool, but he escapes and makes a dramatic getaway.

Whale: By miniature jet plane.

Purview: Done before, in Octopussy.

Whale: By stealth boat.

Purview: That was in Tomorrow Never Dies.

Whale: By bobsled.

Purview: Check out On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Whale: By lunar rover.

Purview: See Diamonds are Forever.

Whale: Sliding downhill on a cello case.

Purview: That’s how Bond escapes in The Living Daylights.

Whale: Hot air balloon.

Purview: What kind of ridiculous getaway vehicle would a hot air balloon make? It slowly floats on the wind, there is no way to control its direction, is in plain view to everyone and can easily be followed by the cops who just need to wait until it comes back down to ground. It’s a silly idea. Plus it has been done already, in The World is Not Enough.

Whale: Phew. What’s left?

Purview: Bus. The sidekick jumps on the number 42 bus. Bond would give chase but his car is stuck in terrible congestion. That fits with the environmentally-conscious theme. M can then give her spiel about MI6 going carbon neutral when Bond returns to the office and debriefs.

Whale: After which, Q gives Bond a special folding bicycle to use on future missions.

Purview: Good idea, and its the extra gadget we were looking for.

Whale: Exactly.

Purview: I think we’re nearly there. We just need to write a few double entendres. Bond is as ‘hard’ as Ayers Rock. Bond is as ‘hard’ as Blackpool rock. That kind of thing.

Whale: Yeah, and we need a title. How about ‘Golden Day for the Kill’?

Purview: ‘Tomorrow’s the Day I Licence to Die’.

Whale: ‘Diamonds Never Die’.

Purview: ‘Dr. Thunderfinger’.

Whale: ‘A View to a Killing Licence, in Gold’.

Purview: ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Gold’.

Whale: ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Solace’.

Purview: ‘The Spy with a Love Licence from Russia’.

Whale: ‘Moonfingering the Octopussy’.

Purview: ‘Eye Spy Golden Die’.

Whale: ‘Die Today, Kill Tomorrow’.

Purview: ‘The Spy Who Kills in Gold Blood’.

Whale: ‘Live to Kill Another Day’.

Purview: ‘Licence to Live, Dying to Kill’.

Whale: ‘Never Say Die’.

Purview: That’s it. ‘Never Say Die’. That’s our title.

Whale: You know, sometimes I think we should try to be more original. But after twenty-two Bond films, what would be the point? ‘Never Say Die’ - we’ll make another killing at the box office…

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George Orwell wrote about Salvador Dali:

“One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.”

In recent weeks, I have been struck by an analogy. Professional musicians are turning into new miners. I do not mean that they squeeze into dark holes and come out all sweaty and dirty, though I am sure plenty of them do. I mean that they are embarking on a great struggle, but one I think they have no hope of winning.

Twenty-five years ago, the coalminers of Britain’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) went on strike. They fought bitterly and they were desperate, but ultimately the strike ended in shattering defeat. They were not without popular support. Pictures of Police brutally clashing with pickets gained them favour, though this was balanced by stories of the harassment meted out to the strikebreakers who went back to work. In the public consciousness, the miners were defeated by an implacable opponent: Prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In the Ridley Plan, her colleagues had already outlined some of the essential steps to be successful when faced by a national strike by the coalminers. These included building up stocks of coal in advance and contingency planning for the import of coal at short notice. There was no doubt that the easiest way to envision the strike was as a battle of wills between Thatcher and the NUM’s leader, Arthur Scargill. The reality, though, is a little subtler.

Thatcher made vital decisions that allowed her to successfully confront the miners, instead of caving in to their demands for fear of power cuts, but she also had more powerful forces on her side: the tide of economic necessity. Put simply, British coal was more expensive than other fuels available for power generation. Cutting the cost of national subsidies would make it easier for Thatcher to cut taxes. Cutting the cost of electricity bills would reduce the cost of living and hence also buy her support. In a democracy, a major national strike needs to be seen in terms of overall imperatives. A politician that delivers power cuts is unlikely to maintain popular support, but a politician that delivers reduced taxes and reduced household bills is likely to gain support. It is a simple equation, but no less valid for its simplicity. Thatcher made a political calculation, and it paid off for her. In contrast, Scargill made the wrong calculation, and the cost of that error was the subsequently more vicious dismemberment of the British coal industry.

Recording artists are embarking on a similar crusade to that of the miners. Like miners, they have long depended on the state’s institutions. They do not work for a nationalized industry like the coalminers did, but they do rely upon an economic model that needs to be upheld by laws that are especially favourable to them. For most of the population, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that flattery is the only recompense available when the product of your mind is copied by someone else. Most ideas cannot be patented, or copyrighted, or trademarked, or protected in any other way. Though it is called intellectual property, the ‘intellectual’ element of such property is very narrowly defined, so that there can be a useful test and way to enforce laws that control who can exploit it for economic gain. If I copy an exact string of words I infringe copyright, but not if I relay the gist of a story. I break the law if I repeat a song note for note without giving the compensation due to the rights owner, but I do not break the law if I am inspired to write a similar song. This imbalance between the laws that govern exact copies and the absence of laws to govern similarity tends to favour people who already have wealth and power and can therefore have privileged access to distribution networks. The wealth and power of successful recording artists depends on a pillar maintained by the state, the institutions of law and order that govern what we may or may not do. Without copyright law, and the levers of the state necessary to enforce it, there would be no copyright infringement and no way to make money from owning copyright. But like the coalminers, there is an economic threat that musicians now face, and just like the miners, they are unwilling to do so. They have also slipped into the same trap as the miners, insisting that their fight is a moral one, when the truth is that the battleground is the economy.

The law only works if the great majority of people are willing to abide by it. The wonder of democracy is that we can replace governments without bloodletting, but even the worst tyrant can be overthrown. Authority for every law, every institution of the state, depends on the acceptance of the people. The horror of Orwell’s 1984 is that the state might penetrate not just into your home, but into your mind, in order to control you. We expect some things to be inviolable, including our own minds. That there are limits to law is a maxim. Where to draw those limits is a question of practicality as well as morality and economics. Like any other practicality, the answer to the question can change because of new circumstances. We find that through history, it is often morality that changes to suit practicality, and not the other way around. Nuclear stockpiles to kill every human are morally repugnant, but we can expect more and more nations to join the nuclear club for purely practical reasons, and the moral justification is always the same: “if them, why not us?” Cloning, slavery, education and child labour, pensions and the treatment of the elderly, democracy, feudalism, the role of women in the workplace - all have been the subject of moral debates and all of those debates are seen through the prism of what is practical at any given point in time. As practicalities change, so morality changes with it. Slavery for farming would be repugnant now, but is not so obviously repugnant in a time where there are no machines to bear the brunt of farming work. Expecting genteel ladies to work was also repugnant at one time, until the First World War made it essential to utilize every human resource at the nation’s disposal. The same is true of copyright, yet like the coalminers, the musicians are living in denial about the consequences for the economic model that rewards them for their work.

Just like nuclear proliferation, which we can abhor and try to delay but recognize as inevitable just because of the spread of technology, copyright abuse will inevitably increase. When copying involved taking a book and writing it out again in longhand, then there was no need for copyright law. Now that copying has been completely divorced from physicality, and that we live in a world with a globally connected network to share digital content, and there are people in the world with the nous to write software and implement solutions to solve problems they want to solve, copyright abuse is inevitable. Its abuse is inevitable thanks to the glorious hypocrisy in the heart of every human being: the belief that laws are there to protect them from other people, not there to stop them doing things they want to do. Everybody thinks like that, and no end of ‘education’ will stop people ’stealing’ music so long as they feel the cost of music on the free market is too high, and the damage done to the creative artist is little or none. Any very many people do feel like that. So whilst the economic imperatives are different to those that savaged the British coal industry - we are talking about ease of access for a limitless and free ‘black market’ in music, not the relative cost of extraction and the kilojoule content of coal versus gas - the economic imperatives exist and cannot be ignored.

The musicians, like the miners before them, are living in denial about economic change. One can sympathize. Nobody wants to believe that their chosen path has been invalidated by forces outside of their control. If you make a career decision in your teens, it will be painful to recognize that it was based on outdated economic assumptions by the time you reach your late twenties. A retreat to an argument for morality is as misguided as the miners believing they could successfully demand subsidies from the rest of society. In a way, they can, because they can try to make it so difficult to change that people put up with long-run inequity rather than a shorter period of more severe turbulence and trouble. The price of doing so is inequity; musicians are demanding to be raised up and protected by society that does not offer similar protections to everyone else. Plenty of ideas receive no legal protection. Copyright does. This inequity most of us would agree is tolerable. But that this inequity needs to be backed by surveillance is a demand too far. A law that cannot be enforced without spying on people in their homes is a law that belongs in Orwell’s Airstrip One, not a law that belongs in our Britain. And we know that copyright can no longer be effectively enforced without surveillance. That makes it a law that should not be enforced, because the morality of protecting the right of musicians to enjoy the economic benefits of their labour is outweighed by the morality of protecting all citizens from surveillance by authoritarian forces. If anything, the musician has become far more morally reprehensible than the miner ever was. The miner just expected to get paid more than the true value of the coal they produced, and if they do not get it, they would cut everybody’s electricity until the government backed down. Unfortunately for the miner, there were no power cuts and the strike went on far longer than the average miner could afford to live without pay. In contrast the musician expects not just the state, but unrelated businesses to pay the price for the surveillance they demand. And they do expect surveillance of everybody in the UK. Electronically monitoring who does what on a network is surveillance of everyone who uses it, no matter how much ignorance and subterfuge is offered by musicians in order to make it sound more reasonable.

One of the reasons to dislike Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM who lead their ill-fated strike, was his authoritarian tendencies. There is little doubt he was loved by many of his union’s members. He was seen as a man who worked hard for the cause of miners, was honest and faithful. But when he called for a national strike by coalminers, the NUM lacked the facility, or interest, to ballot its own members on whether they wanted to strike. Now I see Lily Allen in much the same light as Scargill. She has the same ability to inspire love and devotion in some, but suffers the same deficits when it comes to an excess of pride and a lack of humility. Allen is a would-be leader for the musicians, and for much of the rest of us. In recent weeks, she has been the most outspoken of the increasingly politicized fight to protect the economic interests of recording artists. What Allen lacks is an interest in listening to points of view that are different to her own. I have never met the woman, but I draw inferences from her behaviour. She started a blog to persuade people to her point of view, but tore it down after she received ‘abuse’, by which she means she did not like being pointed out as a hypocrite. Allen then went on a media rampage, threatening to quit music and appearing in The Sun to immodestly explain how she ‘understands the internet’, with the implication presumably being that anyone who disagrees with her must not really understand the internet, although there are many learned individuals from all walks - lawyers, academics and even musicians - who sincerely believe copyright is in desperate need of reform. This media blitz was cleverly and pointedly designed to distract attention from the revelation, made prominent on Michael Masnick’s Techdirt blog only hours earlier, that Allen had infringed the copyright of other musicians herself. When she was unknown and trying to get attention, she made ‘mixtapes’, digital music files that spliced her music with that of other artists, in the hope that they would be downloaded and help her to gain popularity. Embarrassingly for Allen, the mixtapes were still available for download on LilyAllenMusic.com, even whilst Ms. Allen was denouncing the evil of ’stealing’ from recording artists by abusing their copyright. When the hypocrisy was about to get mainstream press attention, the mixtapes were finally pulled from her website and she went into overdrive - talking about anything and everything except her own infringement of copyright laws that she now rather pompously considers to be sacrosanct.

If you want the proof of Lily Allen’s copyright infringement, I downloaded the files from LilyAllenMusic.com to ensure the evidence was never lost to the public domain. If you want, you can listen to Lily Allen’s mixtape1 and mixtape2. I know that by offering these files I am guilty of copyright infringement myself. The funny thing about morality is that sometimes the morally right thing is to break a law in order to highlight a greater moral wrong. I am not deaf to the pleas from celebrities to protect the interests of hard-up old session musicians, but I am cynical about them. And I am not persuaded that heralding an era of unprecedented spying on the private individual is a price worth paying to ensure the poorest musicians earn a little more money. A better solution to the poverty of some who work in the music industry would involve the richest musicians earning a whole lot less, but the music industry has been incapable of finding solutions like that. That makes them as selfish as much of the rest of humanity, including the people who want to download music for free.

To borrow from Orwell, one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Lily Allen is an attractive artist with a talent for catchy songs, and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a musician is that he or she makes music. If it makes us want to whistle or dance, it is good music, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. Yet even the best celebrity in the world deserves to be pulled down if they use their celebrity to turn the internet into a prison camp. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

And Lily Allen is wrong about music dying. Music lived before copyright. It will live after copyright. People make music with no profit motive, even in these crazy materialistic times. Take a listen to this sensational song by Dan Bull, which rather amusingly analyses Lily Allen and her arguments…

Stage and television magician Derren Brown is something of an enigma. That is not to say his ‘magic’ or his stage persona is enigmatic. It is enigmatic, but there is no such thing as magic. Enigma is the path taken by the con artist that wants to entertain. There is only trickery and the presentational flair to make the perfectly possible seem like an aberration of nature’s laws. Brown is good at both. He is talented at sleight of hand. He is talented at manipulating individuals and using suggestion. He has the storytelling skill to gild a simple illusion with half an hour of anticipation. Magicians like Brown are inevitably enigmatic by necessity, if their illusions are to be entertaining. But the enigma of Brown runs deeper than showmanship. Brown sometimes does things that are far from necessary. In particular, he has a wonderful talent for exposing sham, when he wants to. At other times, he is the opposite. He can wrap up the most straightforward of tricks with pseudo-scientific codswallop. So what is Brown: president of debunkers or crown prince of bunkum?

As the opening illusion for his new television series, Brown correctly ‘predicted’ the numbers to be drawn by the National Lottery. I say he ‘predicted’ the numbers because, of course, he did no such thing. He just implied he had predicted the numbers in advance, waited until the numbers were drawn, then used some simple deception to reveal a previously hidden ‘prediction’ which perfectly corresponded to the lottery draw. All of that is fair enough. It is yet another variation on a very old theme: “think of a number, don’t tell me, I’ll write it down… what number did you think of?, look at the number I wrote on the paper… wow!!” What made the trick slightly different was that Brown promised to reveal how he did the trick. The disappointment was that, in the follow-up show, he did no such thing. No secret was revealed. He just talked nonsense and showed some other tricks that had nothing to do with his original illusion.

Brown claimed to have predicted the lottery numbers using a combination of automatic writing and the wisdom of crowds. The prediction was not revealed until after the draw, because Brown was not allowed to. Two straightforward observations should be made. To begin with, the National Lottery cannot stop people from predicting the National Lottery and telling everyone their prediction. Let me give you an example. 8, 10, 22, 27, 30, 39. That is my prediction for the next National Lottery. If it turns out wrong, then roll it over to the next lottery and keep on doing so until eventually it turns out right. Now everybody knows my prediction, the National Lottery’s secret police force should be banging on my door, desperately trying to shut me up, though even they do not know what the results will be… and hence should have nothing to fear from my tomfoolery. Wiser people in the audience would also have noticed Brown was not daft enough to tell the particular ‘crowd’ of gullible people their collective prediction. He added up their numbers, divided by the number of people involved, but did not share the ‘prediction’. For all we know, he added up their numbers, divided by the number of people involved, subtracted twelve and multiplied by the number he first thought of, before throwing his irrelevant arithmetic in the bin. The important part of the trick was not to reveal the prediction prior to the actual lottery draw, even to the people making the so-called prediction.

All of this is fine enough, but Brown publicized himself by saying he would reveal how he performed a trick, and then did not reveal how he performed a trick. What a very tedious lie, neither magical nor enigmatic. You might as well applaud makers washing powder that claims to clean clothes whiter than white, but actually leaves them grey.

Perhaps realizing how much of a risk he was taking, Brown even gave a comical, and equally irrelevant, spiel about how he did NOT do the trick. He did NOT do the trick by having an insider rig the National Lottery. Presumably the denial was meant to deceive those people who had seen through his ‘wisdom of the crowds’ codswallop into thinking the ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge’ denial was the real revelation. But it was not a revelation either. It was perfectly accurate denial in that Brown is obviously not the ringleader of a conspiracy to rig the National Lottery. Any insider willing to rig the National Lottery, and ruin their career in the process, would expect a much bigger payout than could be offered by Brown’s television production budget. On top of that, if any person seriously implied that the lottery could be tainted, then Camelot, the business that runs the lottery, would sue that person to the point of extinction. Brown is telling the truth when he says he did NOT rig the lottery draw. It is also true that the moon is NOT made of cheese, that the streets of London are NOT paved with gold, and that I am NOT a monkey’s uncle.

Brown augmented his program by showing the ‘wisdom of crowds’ doing a reasonable job of guessing earlier lottery draws. In each example, the likely explanations of how the trick was performed are mundane, and have nothing to do with the final illusion. Based on previous tricks, Brown could have simply performed the stunt with multiple groups, and only shown the results that came out well, or he would have planted one or two assistants into the group, and had them do some mental arithmetic and submit numbers that would alter the group’s totals and hence decide the result. My guess is he used the latter technique. A similar trick in one of his stage shows involved audience members - probably including Brown’s helpers - writing ‘random’ numbers that would total to give a predetermined answer.

Brown said he would reveal how the trick was performed, but he did not do that. The most common explanation for how the trick was performed involves TV camera trickery. That seems very plausible, given the trick was performed in front of a camera crew but not an audience. Why else would Brown, stage magician, be scared of performing in front of a live audience? What clinches it for me is that, in the early shorts, the leftmost ball appears to be on level with the other balls. Just before the prediction is ‘revealed’, this same ball is distinctly higher than the others. Somehow, it is now squeezed between the side of the stand and next ball to it, leaving a little gap underneath it. How did that happen? Was there a minor earth tremor, or a very major quantum fluctuation? It is more likely that somebody, hidden by a split-screen camera trick, was in a bit of a rush to change the balls during the seconds between the lottery announcement and Brown turning them around to show the ‘prediction’. The balls had to be placed tightly within a stand so there would be no clue from their having rolled around. Unfortunately for Brown these balls were a little too tightly packed in this particular stand, causing the leftmost one to stand proud and reveal how the trick was performed. The real trick was in creating the illusion of a handheld camera filming the entire event, by cleverly swapping between a shot of a real handheld camera and one that had been placed on a stand and programmed to perform predetermined motorized movements that mimic the shakes and judders of a human cameraman. Why do this? Because then you could film a precise match between both halves of the split screen, whilst using the shakes and twitches to help hide the transitions where the splitscreen is in use.

Instead of making any real revelations about his latest trick, Brown talked about a hitherto unknown ‘deep maths’ and encouraged the audience to believe in superstitious nonsense. He was a whisker away from endorsing a latter-day variation of numerology. If he had to fill another ten minutes of airtime, he may have started talking about the innate clairvoyant powers we all possess, and all sorts of other balderdash. Compare Brown’s deception in this show to some of the performances he has given previously. In the past, Brown has used a masterful combination of truthfulness and powers of suggestion to undermine nonsense whilst generating results that both entertain and startle. Brown has persuaded people he can talk to the dead, by picking up on hints and reactions from the audience. In doing so, he prefaced his act with an explanation that he has no special powers. Instead of listening to the dead, Brown said he was reading the audience, but many in the audience rejected this truth and preferred a supernatural explanation for what occurred. In another show, Brown convinced people there was foolproof system for gambling, only to later reveal that he had bet every possible option and only highlighted the examples where he won. For example, he showed how to toss a coin so you get ten heads in a row. To do it, you just toss a coin repeatedly until you get a lucky sequence of ten heads. No mystery, only probability. In Brown’s case, it took nine hours of filming before he produced the desired sequence on film. In The Heist Brown showed how a skilled manipulator can pick the most suggestible people from a group, then train and educate them to behave differently and respond to subconscious stimuli. The end result was that three out of four ordinary people performed a hold-up which they believed was real at the time. Though disturbing on one level, the results are well known to any student of human nature. Whether the Milgram Experiment, suicide bombers or the Manson family, there is a litany of demonstrations about how ‘ordinary’ people can be influenced to do the most terrible of crimes. In all of these shows, Brown has revealed himself a talented enough storyteller to not need to lie in order to entertain. Or rather, he can let the audience in on how the lie works, and intrigue and amaze even more as a result. It may not be magic, but is much more impressive.

In films and television, people always get cast according to how they look. Short people are angry/pushy/talkative. Slim young women are feisty. People with kindly faces are kind. Old people of colour are wise. Attractive women are the reliable, trustworthy gals you would like to shag, or the double-crossing, duplicitous vixens you would like to shag. Take note of the clever way ‘creative’ people keep you on the edge of your seat in that last example: beautiful women are either very good or very bad, but not somewhere in between. Being an overly-avid watcher of Star Trek, I have observed how Hollywood can take this to its logical and ridiculous conclusion. In Star Trek, especially the later series, there are countless alien races who look much like people, except there is something stuck to their forehead or their ears or their nose. When a new alien race is introduced, you can pretty much tell how they will behave just from the way they look. If they look very human, with a few dabs of henna to represent tiger stripes running down the side of their neck, or only have altered ears, then that race will either be good, or the type that seems good but turns out to be devious and dangerous. Foreheads that look like armour plating and pointed teeth are sure signs of aggressive tendencies. Any make-up where you have no idea what the actor underneath looks like, and you can guarantee that race will be difficult, and before long somebody will be threatening to fire torpedoes if they do not get their way.

Real life, unlike television and the movies, has no casting filter to match a person’s qualities to their looks. Bad people may look kindly, and old people may be fools. Short people may be shy, and attractive women may be dull but harmless. Of course, we may be daft enough to allow how somebody looks to influence our judgment of people, so every time a redhead gets angry, it confirms our knowledge they are a temperamental lot, but every time a redhead turns the other cheek when provoked, we fail to notice. Thanks the halo effect, good-looking people will be assumed to be intelligent, even if they are not, and ugly people will be assumed to be stupid, even if they are brainier than Einstein.

Thinking of the conjunction of Star Trek and miscasting, I started wondering what television and movies would be like, if all casting logic was outlawed, or if actors were given jobs based on a lottery. Recasting every movie since the dawn of time would take longer than I have time to do here, so instead I will focus on a genre where characters tend to be heavily stylized: science fiction. Here, in no particular order, is my list of ideal recasts, and enjoyable miscasts, of major and minor science fiction characters from through the ages (plus a few other random characters to keep you on your toes). If you know your sci-fi, it may give you a few giggles. If not, then try recasting a few of your own favourite films and shows, and imagining what the results would be like.

Imagine a universe where…

Jerry Seinfeld is Doctor Who
Thom Yorke is Wolverine
Jackie Chan is Chewbacca
Judi Dench is Laura Roslin
Daniel Craig is Buck Rogers
Oprah Winfrey is Wonder Woman
Christian Bale is Bender Bending Rodríguez
John Travolta is HAL9000
Cameron Diaz is Darth Maul
Sidney Poitier is Fox Mulder
Stephen Fry is Scruffy the Janitor
Victoria Beckham is Lady Penelope
Tom Cruise is Parker, Lady Penelope’s chauffeur
Richard Pryor is Colonel Tigh
Madonna is Arachnia, Queen of the Spider People
Gary Coleman is Mini-Me
Chuck D is Riddick
Lindsay Lohan is Number Six
Bob Hoskins is Bilbo Baggins
Humphrey Bogart is Rorschach
George W. Bush is Zapp Brannigan
Patrick Stewart is Agent Smith
Bette Davis is Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Gary Oldman is Captain Nemo
Hong Kong Phooey is the Kwisatz Haderach
Gordon Brown is ‘Crash’ Gordon
Patrick McGoohan is Gaius Baltar
Milla Jovovich is Turanga Leela
David Bowie is David Brent
Arnold Schwarzenegger is Lemmy Caution
Brangelina is a teleporter accident
David Duchovny is Commander John Koenig
Paris Hilton is Jabba the Hutt
Gérard Depardieu is Jean-Luc Picard
Diana Rigg is Lady Jessica Atreides
George Lucas is Guido
Ricky Gervais is The Blob
Tommy Lee Jones is Dixie Flatline
Ricardo Montalban is Commander William Adama
Hugh Grant is Doctor Manhattan
Natalie Portman is Servalan
Steve Martin is Ming the Merciless
Eva Green is Tank Girl
Isaac Asimov is Hari Seldon
Queen Latifah is Lieutenant Commander Uhura
Harrison Ford is Arnold Rimmer
Peter Sellars is James T. Kirk
Britney Spears is Kaylee Frye
Leonard Nimoy is Dr. Horrible
Bono is Roy Batty
Barack Obama is Harry Tuttle
Kathy Bates is Lieutenant Saavik
Richard Branson is J.F. Sebastian
Gwyneth Paltrow is Captain Mal ‘Tightpants’ Reynolds
Bill Shatner is Klaatu
Halle Berry is Dr. Susan Calvin
Timothy Olyphant is Jango Fett
Ian McKellen is Kerr Avon
Eleanor Roosevelt is Ellen Ripley
Salma Hayek is Princess Leia Organa
Burt Reynolds is Han Solo
Roseanne Barr is Barbarella
Nathan Fillion is Arthur Dent
Beyoncé Knowles is Zefram Cochrane
Elizabeth Taylor is Pris
Chris Rock is The Master
Sharon Stone is THX 1138

and…

Bill Hicks is President of the United Federation of Planets

It might take a lot of CGI, but that would be a movie I would gladly pay to see!

I was walking down Regent Street a few weeks ago, and as you often do in that part of London, I saw a minor celebrity. In real life, Gok Wan, host of the UK makeover show How to Look Good Naked looks as you might expect. He is a tall bloke, with unusual features. He was well dressed, but not in a showy way. If it was not for the small film crew around him, most people would not notice him. Even with the film crew, few of the Regent Street shoppers gave him a second look. But there was one thing I noticed about this fashion guru. Standing around, not doing anything in particular whilst waiting for his crew to do whatever they were going to do, Gok Wan looked content.

It would be hard not to like Gok Wan. Normally I find television about fashion, and especially fashion makeovers of ‘ordinary’ people, to be dreadful. Fashion does not bear rational analysis, so most explanations of what looks good or does not look good are absurd and pointless. All that television can do is just show us the clothes and tell us what styles are more prominent this year. The only way to really know if an item looks good on you, is to put it on and stand in front of a mirror. The golden rule is not to worry about what other people think, because everyone has different taste. Trying to dress to please others is always going to end miserably. Gok doles out his advice on his show, and most of the time just says sensible things, though every so often he makes a dud suggestion. I mean, Gok may think the woman looks good when dressed like a rock chick looks good, but if she is a hippy, it will not be good for her. The way you look has to somehow reflect who you are. The occasional bad idea is okay, because Gok is paid to come up with ideas and not every idea is going to be good. He can be proud of his day’s work if four out of five of his ideas really do suit the person being made over, especially if they keep following his advice in future.

The secret of Gok’s success does not lie in his fashion sense. Most of his advice is so obvious that anybody, if forced to take some time out and think about how they look, would come up with independently. Wear nice clothes. Try to work with the shape of your body, not against it, nor hide it. Accentuate your best bits. Get a decent hair cut. Wear make-up that is right for you. The biggest ‘trick’ in the Gok Wan book of beauty involves the selection of underwear. In other words, wear the modern day equivalents to the corset - which is hardly a new invention. Select undergarments with the right combination of lycra and wiring to squeeze or support where a woman’s figure might benefit from squeezing and where it might benefit from support. But in the end, the title of his show is a complete misnomer. If the women Gok Wan dresses look good naked, it is not because of the way Gok Wan dresses them. Even the haircuts and make-up are a form of dressing-up, so when stripped down to their naked glory, the women look no different after a Gok Wan makeover - except in one place.

What makes Gok Wan’s show enjoyable, when most makeover shows seem designed to manipulate and mould the shapes of the poor women who appear on them, is that he does not really try to change the way these women look. There is no talk of cosmetic surgery, or dieting, or any of that. Sure, he makes them get into underwear that boosts where boosting is needed, and flattens where flat is best, but for the most part he selects items that also would be comfortable. Where the moral of most fashion makeover shows is that if you look good, you will feel happy, Gok Wan has realized it works the other way around. Feel happy, and you will look good. Most of the show is dedicated to boosting the self-esteem of the woman being made over. He does not change the way they look naked, he just encourages them to have a positive self-image. Everything is designed with that in mind. He devises situations where random strangers will speak, without prompting, in flattering terms about the woman’s appearance. He challenges any negative thoughts they have. He gets the women to pose naked for an artful photography. He parades the women, dressed in sexy lingerie, on a catwalk alongside real models, so that friends, family and passersby can all clap and cheer. To top that all off, Gok Wan’s straightforward and irresistible encouragement leaves the women with little choice but to be positive. The title of the show is a misnomer. It should be called, “How to Believe You Look Good Naked”, or better still, “How to Know You Look Good Naked”. Having confidence in your looks is self-fulfilling - you will look better as a result. The women who goes on Gok’s show get a huge confidence boost, and so will tend to make better decisions about how they look in future. Simple, really. The one place where Gok really changes the way a woman looks naked is her face. As they take their clothes off, he gets them to put a smile back on.

The feeling good, looking good philosophy of Gok Wan has its limits. For the most part he realizes people will not look good if they do not feel good, so comfort cannot be ignored. However, Gok does sometime forget himself - on one episode he suggested high heels for a pregnant woman! Not every idea is a winner, but that is forgivable if there are plenty of them and most of them pay off. Gok does play the part of the myth-buster to some extent, by running experiments where groups of women try unmarked beauty products. These often conclude that the cheap supermarket labels are better than the expensive brands. But in the end, Gok does not battle convention. Gok has no sympathy for body hair, even though the human race has had body hair for millions of years. Our ancestors were perfectly able to find each other attractive without the needing razors and depilatory creams. The fascistic idea of stripping the body of all unwanted hair should be deeply troubling to an intelligent mind. We are animals, and hair grows on our skin. Hair is a sign of sexual maturity, so the obsession with its removal suggests some confusion in the associations between youth and beauty. Gok may give advice on how to sooth the skin after the purging of every last follicle, but that hardly compensates for his ruthless imposition of a societal norm that causes pain for the women on the receiving end. Those women may well question whether they really are less beautiful with a little bit of hair sticking out here and there, no matter how many other people pull childish faces of disgust as if their bodies did not have the exact same design feature. Conventions like this are impervious to a rational mind, so I can understand why Gok Wan can only parade women on a catwalk after their bikini-line has been waxed. Nevertheless, it is worth pondering how Gok Wan would react if confronted with some other notable beauty conventions that have come and gone. Would he have discouraged Coco Chanel from getting a tan, and dispelling the dominant fashion that women should be pale? How does he feel about real tans, still craved by many, despite the cancerous risk and the terrible long-term damage it does to the skin? If real tans are not safe, and pale used to beautiful, why do some people think fake tans are beautiful? Tanning is a safe but useful example of how our conventions can be re-examined, but history tells of societies that encouraged systematic deformity in the name of beauty. Some ancient peoples forcibly moulded the shapes of baby’s heads, in order to artificially change them. The binding of women’s feet was accepted in China for a thousand years, and lasted up to the start of the 20th Century. The use of brass rings to elongate a woman’s neck is still practiced by the ‘long neck’ people in Burma and Thailand. Nobody is entitled to say whether a majority is right, or a minority is wrong, to make the aesthetic choices they do. Perhaps one day people will look back at Gok Wan’s disgust at body hair and find his behaviour as perplexing and discomforting as we would when shown images of bound feet and deformed heads that are meant to be ‘beautiful’. But if you cannot change the world, change yourself, and at least the women are smiling at the end of Gok’s changes.

Gok Wan satisfies the 80-20 rule. Most of the time he gets it very right, so we can forgive him if he sometimes gets it wrong. He has realized that no end of fabric or tailoring will make someone look good, unless they feel good. I have no pretension to being a fashionista, but in that same vein, here is my own three-step approach to looking good naked:

Eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full. Being hungry is your body’s way of telling you to eat more, and being full is your body’s way of telling you not to eat any more. Your body knows best, so trust it. Keep your body happy, and it will look better.

Do some physical exercise now and again. We are animals, and our ancestors lived by chasing and gathering our food. Your choice of exercise does not really matter - our ancestors used their bodies for purposeful activities, not body-sculpting sessions down the gym. Our bodies are meant to be used, and look better if they get some use. Your body will thank you by giving you more energy, which will brighten your mood and make you more positive.

Take a deep breath. Relax. Smile. Everybody looks good when they are happy. So be happy and stop worrying about looking good naked.