A friend of mine recently remarked that Paul Daniels, during a recent performance and interview in Edinburgh, was “Completely brilliant. Proper master of his art.”
I don’t know very much about Paul Daniels. When my friend made this remark, I could recall only four occasions during which I encountered information about him:
- I vaguely remember, at a very young age, seeing him perform an illusion on TV in which he pretended to pass a camel through the eye of a needle or some such, with, I think, the assistance of his wife.
- I recall that a childhood friend of mine had a
magic kit
with Daniels’s name on it, containing cups and balls, a plastic wand, and one or two other little inexpensive props. - I also vaguely remember having seen newspaper headlines mentioning his appearance on The Farm, an agriculturally-themed celebsploitation TV show in which David Beckham’s alleged mistress demonstrated upon a live boar approximately how she might (if the allegations were true) have treated Beckham’s penis, by bringing the boar to climax with her hand.
- Much more recently, I saw him mentioned in the news during the UK riots a few weeks ago, as having called for rioters to be treated violently.
So far, so shallow. Entrepreneurial, sure, and in that sense successful – but moreover sensationalist and somewhat cynical. So, to better understand why my friend might have thought the man was “completely brilliant”, I looked him up.
I began by searching for the performance I vaguely remembered: the one in which he pretended to pass a camel through the eye of a needle. I couldn’t find it online, but I did find a video of a 1981 broadcast in which he pretends to pass a lady through a hole in a giant coin. He was slick then, certainly: constant patter and activity to hold the attention; good diction; measured, purposeful movement; consummate showmanship. He’s much the same now, as you can see in this interview and performance from earlier this month in Edinburgh. (The latter isn’t, as far as I know, the same interview or performance my friend saw.)
Next, I looked up The Farm. It turns out he didn’t spend very long on the show, but before he left, he did entertainingly silence Vanilla Ice, who had been gibbering hawkishly about the behaviour of the US military. He did so with a quick, capable and surprising performance structured much like a magic trick: a deft feint – misdirection, in other words – and then a sudden counterintuitive outcome. But was it a masterful performance? In a narrow sense, yes: it challenged Ice’s behaviour and made him pause, and it drew the audience’s attention. But it didn’t challenge Ice’s dubious argument, and in that sense it was not masterful at all.
This is precisely analogous with illusionism in general: it uses performances to challenge expectations and draw attention, but the only true assertions it makes are that many people can be manipulated with trickery, and that, regardless, many people crave distractions that pique their curiosity. These are important assertions: they hold powerful ramifications for human economic and social structures. But to spend an entire career making them over and over again is essentially masterful only of repetition.
So much for the chimeras he creates onstage or onscreen; what of the man himself – or at least, what of him as an interviewee and as an individual responding to events in his own time, rather than as a paid performer?
In this interview with Penny Broadhurst, I was forcibly struck by Daniels’s emphatic expression, in essence at least, of two assertions that are obviously inconsistent with each other: at one point, he suggests that success results from the choice to apply oneself; but at another point, he claims it depends, instead, upon innate, hereditary abilities – which one obviously can’t choose for oneself. Evidently, then, he can’t be trusted to have thoroughly thought through what are apparently his earnest opinions; and this, I would say, falls short of completely brilliant
. Perhaps he was more circumspect during the interview my friend witnessed.
In his own time, like so many people, Daniels blogs on Blogspot and micro-blogs on Twitter. On Tuesday 9 August 2011, in response to the widely-reported UK riots, he used both mediums to expostulate on the topic. On Twitter, he suggested people who took part in illegal rioting, looting and violence against the police
should be sent to Afghanistan or similar war zone where you will remain in that war zone [sic] for a period of 3 years without any reduction of sentence.
He declined, though, to state why he thought this would be constructive.
He also proposed the reintroduction of National Service as a sort of universal panacea for society’s ills, presumably in ignorance of the fact that National Service was cancelled because it was found to cause more problems than it ameliorated.
He tweeted two more unsupportable pronouncements that day. One was, Human rights? They haven’t earned them.
This suggests that either Daniels does not understand what is meant by the concept of a human right (i.e. a right which is earned by being a human), or he believes the rioters were not humans. Maybe he thought they were mutant poppy seeds, and that sending them to Afghanistan for three years would let them be nurtured into cash crops.
The other was, I hate Communism and what it does to people. I watched their soldiers shooting women and children. I told [my wife] that [the Tiananmen Square massacre] would happen!
This is a strange trio of sentences. Perhaps they were intended to be unrelated to each other, but their being bundled together suggests otherwise. Is Daniels asserting that when troops shoot women and children, it is necessarily the Communism of those troops’ leaders that is to blame? If so, then a massacre like Tiananmen would indeed have been somewhat predictable, but so, too, would several quite different things have to be true that are not true: America under George W. Bush would have to have been Communist, because its troops shot women and children; the Mormons of the Utah Territorial Militia in the 1850s would have to have been Communist; General Custer would have to have been a Communist, as would the leaders of the Nazi party; etc. Clearly, this is nonsense. The shooting of women and children may be reprehensible, but it is not a behaviour that can be rationally attributed to Communism.
Bizarrely enough, on Blogspot, Daniels said, I thought ‘outlaws’ were OUTSIDE the law and therefore not party to it,
and expressed frustration that people had not been allowed to shoot the rioters with rubber bullets, despite the facts that the rioters had been widely reported to include women and children, and that Daniels, as mentioned above, seems to hate
the prospect of shooting women and children. Rubber bullets may have a lower risk of lethality than conventional bullets, but can injure and kill nonetheless.
From the information I’ve presented above, it seems fairly clear that Daniels is intolerant of law-breaking. It’s also clear, though, that he’s inconsistent. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that despite the harsh treatment he wants to see meted out to strangers who he believes have broken a social contract, he’s applied what seem to be rather different standards to the criminal activities of two of his sons.
After Daniels’s son Gary Daniels instigated a fraud that cost the NHS £20,000 to investigate and a further £12,500 in wrongful charges, instead of letting him go to prison, Daniels intervened, persuading the court to give Gary a softer sentence, and letting Gary move into his mansion. For perspective, let us note that many of the people who have been prosecuted for looting or rioting – some of whom received substantial prison sentences – were found to have caused comparably tiny values of damage, and in some cases no damage at all. Yet I don’t see Daniels offering to write to courts to try to reduce their sentences, nor accommodating them in his home.
Daniels also previously defended Gary after police found that Gary had wasted police time by faking a burglary. This is a rather remarkable case, in that because Gary admitted to the police that he’d wasted their time, they decided not to prosecute him. Perhaps if a rioter in their district simply admitted to that police force that he or she had run riot, they would be similarly lenient?
Another of Daniels’s sons, Paul Jr, was not quite so fortunate: Daniels either chose not to or was unable to prevent him being sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment after he was found guilty of insurance fraud and securities fraud. This isn’t Paul Jr’s only conviction, either; he’s also been convicted of dealing illegal drugs, drink-driving and selling illegal pornography, although Daniels did at one point forgive him his crimes and help him to set up a business; which, again, seems at odds with Daniels’s attitude to criminality in the wake of the riots, especially his remark about outlaws.
Reading about these two sons of his, I began to wonder if Daniels’s desire for the reinstatement of National Service mightn’t stem from a subconscious theory that had those sons been engaged on National Service, it could have compensated for his fathering and kept them out of trouble.
Over the course of writing this blog post, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that my friend’s comment, if taken out of context and applied to Daniels in general rather than Daniels in the specific performance and interview my friend saw, was half right. Daniels is a master of his art, and that art consists of misleading at least some people into believing that he has, with ease, achieved something difficult or impossible. He can make audience members believe – at least on some level – that he has slipped a lady through a coin, or that he has falsified another person’s argument about military ethics; and he can convince himself, and perhaps one or two others (to judge from the replies he received to the blog post and tweets I mentioned above), that there are simple solutions to complex problems like criminal disorder. His mastery of this art, or rather, his exploitation of it, has brought him fame and fortune. But his hypocrisy and his unfounded proclamations show him to be not merely short of completely brilliant, but far from it. Too bad.