Derren Brown - Pushed To The Edge

[Luke Imp]

Tonight on Channel 4, 9pm.

The illusionist returns with his most ambitious experiment to date, aiming to persuade an unwitting participant to push another person off a roof, seemingly to their death. The illusion investigates the powers of social compliance and how authority, peer pressure or ideology can be used to make people carry out horrific acts. His subject is Chris Kingston, a 29-year-old member of the public who is unaware he's being filmed or manipulated at a distance, and the setting is the gala launch night of a fictitious new charity called Push.

 

[nousername]

Watched it again, briefly, this morning and picked up on the Weekend at Bernie's reference, which I missed last night.

Often his work is quite dark, but last night I found myself laughing almost the whole way through. He was really pushing people into the slap stick comedy territory. Worked nicely though.

Going to go on a Derren Brown binge today on YouTube. So many I missed out on.

 

[markpvfc]

I watched this tonight. I don't normally like his experiments as much as his usual shows but I enjoyed this one. Plenty of funny parts as well as the interesting idea behind the show, can't help but wonder how far along I'd have gone in that situation.

 

[Benji]

This was great. Part social experiment, part cringe comedy like The Office (UK).

 

[Luke Imp]

I enjoy his programmes like this one, although it was always going to 'work' to a point because the person chosen had already shown to be easily swayed into doing things in the audition part.

I found it quite weird how easily them types of people can be persuaded into doing some of those things (particularly the 3 we didn't see the full episode on).