James Freedman: The Art of the Steal - Pickpocketing, Magic, and Misdirection

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, screen rats, couch potatoes.

Welcome to episode, I guess this is 15, if we're gonna do numbers again, episode 15 of Television Times Podcast.

And today, we welcome the amazing James Freedman.

Now, if you were to go on Wikipedia, it would say that James is the world's number one pickpocket.

It's not a name he's given himself, and he disputes this lightly, but clearly he has a hell of a skill because he's adapted it into a stage show.

He does a lot of corporate things, and also he is a fraud ambassador and helps the police with various things that we probably can't talk about.

He is a magician, I believe, as well, and he is connected to many people in the magic circle, and he knows all those things, which invariably means I had to cut quite a lot of this podcast because there were a lot of secrets, a lot of things I know, a lot of things he knows from jobs I've worked on and people he knows and mutual friends.

So we had to cut some stuff and any personal information because he is someone that really does love his data to remain private.

Don't we all?

Well, he gives a lot of tips about that kind of stuff in his act and on this podcast.

So keep listening.

I had a few audio issues with this one.

I don't want to bang on about that all the time, but this one was the worst delay I've had online with any recording.

So it took me a really long time to put this one together.

So I recorded this one about six weeks ago and it was a bit of a choppy signal as well.

So it's just been a bit tricky.

So if you notice parts of this episode where James is just telling us stuff for a little while and I'm not really interjecting, it's just because the issue that we had.

And also I just wanted him to sort of speak and tell us the things he impart his knowledge to us, if you will.

So don't worry about that.

And we do get around to TV.

It's in and out, but the subject is there.

It's in the background for quite a lot of it, even if we might not be talking about it directly as you normally might expect.

Now, onto the next few weeks.

I am going to Edinburgh to do some recordings, as I've previously mentioned, I think.

So I'm not quite sure what's gonna happen with the Wednesday episodes on those weeks while I'm away.

I wanna get back because I'm going to have my hands full editing what I've done up there.

So I am sort of just thinking about what to do with the following two episodes after this one.

Might be a bit different.

Listen out for them.

Might be slightly strange.

Might be all right.

Might be normal.

I don't really know.

I haven't decided.

Anyway, let's get back to the episode.

Here we go.

Without further ado, here is me talking to James Freedman.

There's an old saying in Tennessee, an old saying in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says fool me once, share them on, share them on you, fool me, you can't get fooled again.

Welcome to Television Times, a weekly podcast with your host, me, Steve Otis Gunn.

We'll be discussing television in all its glorious forms.

From my childhood, your childhood, the last 10 years, even what's on right now.

So join me as I talk to people you do know and people you don't about what scared them, what inspired them and what made them laugh and cry here on Television Times.

No one ever got to their deathbed and thought, I wish I'd spent more time at work or I wish I'd spent less time with my family.

You know, last summer was the last summer and I should have put my foot on the gas and done more work from about April and I thought, no, sod it.

We just planned the best summer of things that a four-year-old and a six-year-old wanted to do.

I'm never going to look back and go, yeah, I should have, you know, because it was the best, it was the best thing.

Daff stuff, you know, sleeping in the garden in a tent and all those things.

I slept in the garden last year with my son, but I think it was just because it was too hot and it wasn't on a tent.

We just, it was one of those sort of midnight things.

That's it, it's too hot, we're going to sleep in the garden.

How old's your son?

He's nine now, so he would have been eight then.

And he fell asleep in the garden, but it started raining in the middle of the night.

So then they had to sort of de-camp and bring us all in.

And it was a nightmare.

I went to college at Rose-Buford in the late 90s.

The name of this podcast, Television Times, it was going to be called something else, but it was because I did a dissertation called Television Times.

I wrote a play, a musical, whatever you want to call it, and tried to put it on at college in the last term.

And then it didn't get put on because it all went wrong.

So I wrote a dissertation about that process and then got a degree.

Yeah, so the idea has been around.

I've just been looking at photos of me directing some play 25 years ago with the same name.

Oh, interesting, how those things like, dissertations that you're forced to write.

And it's only years later you look back and go, oh, that was probably that fork in the road or that was probably, I find it fascinating.

What I try to do at the beginning is I explain any kind of connection I have with the guests.

And I don't know you as such.

We have actually talked online a little bit and I sent you my book and we've had a little bit of a back and forth.

But I think our mutual connection is probably Derren, right?

Yeah, Derren.

And I think, and I mean, I probably stumbled on you on Twitter.

I'm not on any social media really.

I used to be on Facebook and then I decided I didn't want to be a reason why anyone else might be going to Facebook because it's the first place I might start if I was going to steal someone's identity.

So yeah, I guess it was that overlap.

But then your book, and it's funny, isn't it?

Because in one way, we know the danger of something like Twitter or social media when you're in this echo chamber and everyone you talk to sort of agrees with you and you find your home, which is not a good thing.

But one good part of it is that you end up sort of tangentially meeting people and coming across people and like us.

We may never meet, but I've sort of admired you from afar.

Thank you.

That was very kind.

I mean, I've been obviously watching videos of your work and I'd love to see you live, see what you do.

I mean, we should probably just say that James is the number one pickpocket in the world.

That's what it says on numerous sites.

Would you agree to that claim?

I've never said that.

I'm not even sure if I'm the best one in my house because our five-year-old is amazing.

When he was only about two and a half, three, and it was the middle of lockdown, but you were allowed to go to shops two at a time.

And I took him into a shop, buy birthday card or an anniversary card for someone and you had to follow the arrows around, you know, in the way that...

Yeah, the one-way system.

We had to do this one-way system and I went all past the birthday cards, whatever the first one, and all past the second one, and got to the section that I needed.

And I was holding him by the hand, sort of dragging him behind me.

And as I turned around and looked at him, he had at least three toys, cuddly toys, and stuff he found interesting that he must have just picked up and somehow held with his one free arm and his chin.

Amazing, amazing.

It's really funny how kids seem to have these jeans because they're very similar things.

I got all the way home.

I took my son out.

It's got to be about three years ago now.

We went to beep beep.

He knew that we needed some double A's.

Now I have them and I charged them and it's fine.

I have enough at home, but he knew we needed some.

And we went to the shops, we wandered around, we got everything we needed.

We got back, he had a little day bag on.

And when we got home, he unzipped the front bit, he pulled out this packet of about 16 double A's and went ta-da, and I was like, oh, fuck, he's got the gene.

That's funny.

Something is genetic, because my son often reminds me of my late father and does things that he couldn't possibly have known my late father did.

And I don't think I do, all of them.

So yeah, you're right.

Have you ever shoplifted then?

Oh, terribly.

I, the front of the second book that I've written, I famously got sacked after, well, arrested and sacked in my first ever day at work after I left school.

I left school on a Friday and on the Monday, I started working in a, I think I had 45 minutes on the shop floor and then I went to lunch.

And just before I went to lunch, the manager said something to me like, oh boy, those shoes, they're not quite good enough for the shop floor, so I was like, really?

Because you need to get some nice black shiny shoes.

I was like, this is just like school, isn't it?

So I wandered out on my lunch hour and then on the way back, I thought, well, I haven't got any money, but I could probably nick them in.

So I went upstairs, popped them on, wandered out, instantly got picked up and started being carried backwards as usual into some office somewhere, taken out to a police station, arrested for shoplifting.

Luckily, I was still under 17, so it was a caution, but they took me back to and told them.

And then they removed me from the books.

It was like I'd never worked there.

They erased all memory of me working there.

And that was what led me to actually just go home.

That's first day and say to my grandparents, who I was living with, said, that's it.

You're gonna have to decide me.

I have to leave because you can no longer put up with my behavior.

And I told them what to write and I left home.

It was what actually got me out of the house.

So I left home at 16 after being fired immediately.

Well, I wasn't sure how much of the book was right and how much was a book or a fiction.

It's all true.

Some of it's rejigs, so it all goes as a story, but it's all true.

Everything in there is true.

Yeah, unfortunately.

I've only ever stolen one thing from a shop, accidentally, and it's seared into my memory.

I was lucky enough that it happened so young that it probably stopped me doing those things as a teenager.

I was with my mother in her hairdresser, which was sort of three doors away from the sweet shop, and I was given two new pence to go and buy some sweets, so I went three doors down, went into the sweet shop, where, I mean, we knew the people and they knew us, and picked up Pink Panther Bar.

They were good.

Oh yeah, like a pink Milky Bar.

Yeah, picked up a Pink Panther Bar.

Got very excited about this bar, started opening it, walking back, and as I got to the hairdresser, his hand on my shoulder was the shopkeeper from the thing, and I opened my hand and was horrified to see that I still had shiny 2P in my hand and hadn't given, I don't know what had happened, so it was a sort of inadvertent, weird, forgetting to pay.

Oh, is that stealing or is that just being a kid?

Well, now I'd be able to say probably not taking with the intention to permanently deprive, which is how the police would define theft.

Yeah.

But he obviously came into the hairdresser and told my mother, and I used to get anxious buying sweets after that, make sure I pay first.

You created your own anxiety.

I did.

Well, funnily enough, I know the definition of theft because several times, and as I get older, probably having a bit more, I've been on stage, stolen whatever, given it all back, walked off stage, tapped my pocket and discovered that I've still got an item.

If you're in a variety show or something, you can walk out and if you're in a corporate, you can walk out again and say, oh, still got this and make something of it.

If you're in the West End in your own show and you get back and you tap your pocket and you find something, it's just this blind panic.

I remember running around to the stage door thinking, well, they'll probably come there if they know it's gone.

That was awful.

That's amazing.

Though I did speak to some police when they said theft.

It's not theft.

No, they walk on stage, they're willing to be robbed.

The struggle I've had, I mean, in my mind, if I had to define the sentence, it would be like fighting the criminal mind.

Because my parents taught me.

It's just in there, and I can see all the time, like, some kind of, like, you know, it's like there's a, you know, like in those 80s films, where, like, in Terminator or something, you see all the things coming towards you, and the people coming towards you, and the grid, and the numbers.

And I can sort of see, well, I could sort of take that there, I could do it.

I mean, I wouldn't, but I could if I wanted to.

And I can see, like when you see people walking around with their phones in their back pockets, which is completely insane in this day and age.

But there's so much opportunity, and so much blatant thieving still goes on, which really surprises me.

Like up here recently, I was having a cup of coffee, and two lads just ran into the Sainsbury's Local, and ran out with a big case of Budweiser, arguably the worst beer.

And they ran around the corner with it, and there's cameras everywhere, and it's not even that expensive, what, 12 pounds or something?

And I went in, I said to the security guard, you do know, because I try to sort of be on side with it a little bit these days, like, you do know you were robbed just then, right?

And he was like, yeah, we can't do anything about it.

They'll never find them.

And I was like, they'll never find them.

Now, with all of this technology, you would think that I wouldn't dream of doing something like that.

It would just be absolutely crazy, because you would think with all the cameras and the police aren't going to go chase some lads nicking beer, are they, I guess?

Well, the police are understaffed, underfunded, under-resourced, and everyone's, particularly the government, seems to be screaming at us, all the police is full.

I have the same terminator filter as you, although I've never thought of it like that.

But just every day, you go, oh, I see this, I see that.

So spotting opportunities.

And I suppose that's the puzzle solving, problem solving part of my brain and a magician's brain.

It's that thing of, oh, I could do this.

I do a talk, actually, for companies.

I say it's serious.

It's not that serious, because I'm doing it.

But it's one of the more serious things that I do with my UK Fraud Prevention Ambassador hat on.

And the talk is called How to Commit Fraud.

It's not called How to Avoid Fraud, How to Protect Yourself from Fraud, How to Stop Fraud.

It's definitely How to Commit Fraud.

And it was written as a reaction to the situation I found myself in a lot, where a journalist would say, James, can you talk about the latest scam?

It's usually not that new, but...

And can you demonstrate it?

I say, yes, and then I demonstrate it, whether it's for print or broadcast.

And then the compliance lawyer calls out at the work somewhere and says, don't explain it exactly, miss out some details, because we don't want to be liable if someone reads this paper or watches this broadcast and then commits fraud.

And I think it's hogwash.

The bad guys already know how to do it.

And if the good guys don't know exactly how they are doing it, you can't possibly protect yourself.

The analogy I've always used for years now, if you'd never heard the word burglar, and the only thing you knew about burglar is someone trying to help you, you said, oh, don't forget, burglars come into your house and take away your valuables when you're not there.

Everyone on the planet would lock their doors, and not everyone would lock their windows.

It's only because we know, oh yeah, burglar could come in the window.

So over the course of an hour or so, or longer into these companies, I'm teaching them how to use someone's credit card when you don't know the PIN number, or how to open someone's biometric thumbprint phone with a children's toy.

And I say at the beginning of that talk, statistically, it's about 1%, 2% of you are gonna take this information and try and use it in a bad way.

And I'm okay with those odds, because if the 98, 99% know what you're up to, then the 1% or 2% aren't gonna get very far.

So I think everyone has that.

Probably the top question I'm always asked in interviews is, oh, you could make a fortune.

You could make a fortune with your skills if you stopped entertaining.

And I always say, well, you could go shoplifting in Sainsbury's, but you don't.

So yeah, it's a choice.

I don't find it a struggle.

There was a case a few years ago, this chap who could well afford to buy anything he wanted in the shop.

On his daily commute or weekly commute, once a week, he was going into a Tesco, picking up a bottle of champagne, scanning it on the self-service thing, putting it on the scales and then paying and going.

And the scam was that he was scanning a barcode for a bottle of Prosecco that he had already obtained, that he had in his hand.

Oh, the carry your own barcode trick.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so he was scanning something the right size.

And I remember speaking to another magician who you and I both know.

He said, yeah, what we would have done.

And he immediately came up with an improvement, which there's no need to disclose here and now.

But every well-versed magician listening to that goes, ah, yes, I would apply the sonata principle and I wouldn't get caught with the barcode.

Well, yeah, there's a way to get, I do know the barcode trick very well for very, I could talk about that for about 20 minutes if I wanted to.

But yeah, there is, I think the wine thing, I showed people for a laugh how to weigh a bottle of wine as onions and it was always two pounds 36 no matter what.

And if you lied the bottle down at the bottom of the bag and still legitimately bought another one that was sticking up the top, people would think that is the wine that you've bought if you know what I mean when it comes to the age restriction.

Because a lot of those tools only show age restriction without listing how many items.

Anyway, cut that because people will do it.

Everyone thinks about it.

I can't remember which anniversary it was for Tesco, but the queen visit a store and they showed her one of those self-service tools.

And her first question is, how do I check these out as carrots?

This is, can't people cheat?

That was the first thing she said.

She's thinking about it.

Everyone thinks about it, not everyone does it.

Ultimately, any system, whether it's a lock or a password or whatever, if you have to give genuine users access, then whatever those genuine users need to get access, I can pinch that.

So I can persuade them to give up their passcode or physically steal the physical key.

So high-tech security is sometimes the illusion of security.

Yeah, it's very concerning.

It really is.

I mean, it doesn't happen often, but I can't believe I do it, because I am someone that goes around at night and I shut every window and I just think, I could leave that open, but what if one guy gets the ladder and comes in and nicks the Mac?

Let's just close it.

And I'm always thinking about that kind of thing.

So I do these things, and I've got friends who say, you're paranoid.

I mean, I scratch the numbers off the back of my credit cards, you know, the security number, because I know what it is.

And if I lose the card, I just don't want the hassle.

All my worlds, whether it's magic or pickpocketing or fraud prevent, they're all about that thinking head.

I worry if I'm passing that down to my kids, because like the other day, I bought my son a new, well, secondhand new bike.

I'm not buying him a brand new bike.

Kids are ruined bikes.

But we went and got him a pretty good bike.

And the first thing I did was get a cheap extra lock.

Because my little trick is, I'll leave this in, is I always use one big, one good lock.

Always use, always go through the front wheels, because they'll never take the back wheels off because it's just too much hassle.

Always go through the front wheels, lock them together.

But then I get another lock, however cheap.

It doesn't matter.

And I just put it on the wheel of one.

It doesn't even have to be attached to anything.

Because if a thief sees two locks, they'll move to another bike.

That's my thinking.

That's what I believe.

So I just always do little things like that.

Sometimes it's not even attached.

You know, it's just there so they can see, oh, that's not worth that.

Just anything to make them go somewhere else is my thing.

And he thought, oh, that's good.

It's a 50B lock, the second one.

You can break it with a pair of scissors.

I don't know you should worry about that.

I think this sort of awareness, critical thinking is something that we do have to pass on to our children.

And there seems to me to be a higher proportion now of younger people who just accept anything at face value.

Someone said to me last night, oh, did you see XYZ?

And I said, no, where did you see that?

On the internet.

And that was as specific as they could be.

It was on the internet, the internet.

Oh, well it must be true then.

So I mean, fraud's very simple.

I tell you a lie and you give me some money.

That's sort of all fraud, isn't it?

I tell you a lie, you give me some money.

So all frauds start with a lie.

And there is a slide in the talk I give where I say it could be a small lie, like a bum doesn't look big in that, or a big lie plastered on the side of a bus.

And there's a picture of a bus with a lie on it that you can imagine which one.

Yeah, once that lie is bought and the hook is in, that's maybe one stage.

But then if they see some evidence to the contrary, so the scammer ringing you up pretending to be from your bank doesn't know something your bank should know, you may start to question your belief.

But if you're convinced that it's someone from your bank or you're convinced that the magician is cutting someone in half, then even evidence to the contrary that should pop the bubble and make it all fade away as an illusion, you dismiss.

And I find that interesting in the world of fraud.

Once people are so convinced, they're so focused on the lie, they cannot see the truth.

And that's a really interesting place and something that is fun to play with.

And I'm lucky that I've found a niche where I can play with it without being a criminal.

There's a thing in The Times today, actually, that's this guy who was paid by a bank to chase down bad debts.

And so he was, I think, researching people who owed the bank money, but he crossed the line and broke their privacy.

So the headline in The Times, Debt Collector Used Voice Changing Software to Pretend to Be Customers.

And he'd ring up their electricity company or phone company and find out what the direct debits were and find out their mortgages so that he could ascertain for his client whether they have money to pay.

So it says, Debt Collector Used Voice Changing Software.

And I tweeted it and said, well, we've all done that, haven't we?

Because my last show, that's exactly what I was doing, using that software to sample someone's voice who came out of the audience and then ring her bank and see if I could persuade them to transfer some money to me.

You know, that dance of deception, I find fascinating.

Who was the first person or character you saw on television that gave you that fuzzy feeling in your loins?

I can't decide between Betty or Wilma, if it was the first one.

No, Jacqueline Smith and Cheryl Ladd have to be up there, but I was older then.

I was sort of in my teens when Charlie's Angel came along, Daisy Duke.

Daisy Duke, right.

Remember Daisy Duke?

I think you should go back to the cartoon.

Wilma or Betty.

It wasn't Wilma though.

Was it Wilma?

Was it Wilma more matriarchal in a way?

I don't know.

Probably.

But I don't think that was a...

It wasn't like a sexual crush, but just the fact that there was someone who was, you know, softer than Barney and Fred, I suppose, and Dino.

But no, there were characters with whom I identified first.

You know, I think that's probably the way a person's a bit cool.

You know, I want to be...

I wanted to be Inspector Gadget.

I mean, or Top Cat.

Top Cat was a huge favorite.

Top Cat was great.

It was great.

It was best cat in America, right?

Yeah, it was.

I love Top Cat.

And when I discovered the Phil Silver Show and that the whole thing was just based on Bilko, I became a complete Bilko fan and sort of lost my love a bit for TC because he was a copy.

Did you know that as a teenager?

Because I didn't know that until way later.

I knew, yeah, Bilko while I was still at school, yeah.

I tell you something.

Was it on in the kind of, in that sort of BBC Two black and white sort of time around six and seven, they used to put on black and white stuff?

I don't think they put it on for children.

I think it was just sort of late night repeats and my mum had been a fan of it and I think she told me all about it.

Now, a quick chat about public information films.

Oh yes, because you did it.

You put that post up.

I saw it before, but I saw that post of that insane firework explosion in that person's driveway in America recently and you put a thing up about the firework prevention movies about Charlie and I showed them to my son.

I remember not only seeing those on TV and finishing with literally a maimed child's hand with fingers missing that had been blown off.

Yeah, it was pretty grim, wasn't it?

It was always the ones where they were...

I mean, maybe I've made this up as well.

Maybe I've filled in the gaps.

I seem to remember there being one about kids not playing on railway tracks and then a kid being electrocuted and stuck to something.

Absolutely.

I once had a moment on a railway track drunk in late teens.

Yeah, it was like this.

All over the friends said, oh, come on, and sort of pulled me up off this track.

And it only seemed like a couple of seconds later that the train went by, but I'm sure it wasn't.

My mother doesn't listen to me.

She'd be horrified.

Yeah, the stupid things we do when we're young.

But yeah, those public information weren't just on TV.

They were before anything you watched at the cinema.

Someone would bring a film to the school and a projector and you'd watch a film.

So, I mean, you'd watch a film for entertainment or education, but there was no video record.

They would always be preceded with, you know, don't talk to strangers and don't throw fireworks or just common sense.

There's a general feeling of being snatched in a car, which I remember feeling a lot in England.

And then, as I wrote in my book, You Shot My Dog and I Love You, available online, there's a scene, there's a scene, fucking not a film yet.

There's a bit in the book where I'm being chased by a policeman on a bike.

And it was a little bit like Terminator 2, you know, or one of those films where I just had this feeling that I had to get away from this guy because I've been brought up that any adult literally is going to snatch you.

I don't think I knew about like perverts or things like that, not if that's the word, people that would do things to children.

I just knew that they would kidnap you and take you away and you'd never see your family again.

But with all that advice that told children that might happen or allowed them to think that might happen, what is also, if you're being followed, go to a front door and knock on it and say, can I come in?

Go to a complete stranger's house and let yourself in.

So I remember after Cubs once, we were buying some chips.

You had to take 2P, I think call boxes used to be 2P, and then I think they went to 5P, I think, or a phone box.

You had to have 5P to be prepared in your kit.

And of course you spent it on the way home after each Cubs Scout meeting.

And we were in this chip shop, and someone else was ahead of me in the queue, and he got these chips, and as they were handed to him, he didn't pay, he just legged it out the shop.

And about 6 of us who were in the queue were so shocked, we all just ran after him.

We weren't chasing him.

It's like, oh God, we don't want to be here when the bloke from the chip shop comes this side of the counter.

So we all ran away.

And this boy ran, and he ran up the road where I live and started running.

So I thought, well, I don't want to be running past my house.

So I just went to a stranger's house and rang the bell and said, there are these people chasing me.

I don't know why.

And took refuge in this house.

I hadn't done anything, well, I'd run, but I hadn't done anything wrong.

I remember just being shocked and thinking, oh, we must all get out of here.

Oh, horrible memory.

The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up.

Nothing to do with, well, I was going to say nothing to do with TV, but when you ask me, think about the shows.

Which was really enjoyable actually to just sit back and go, not in a chronological order, but just go, oh, yeah, I remember this terrifying thing.

Have you gone back and watched things, because little intros and theme tunes and stuff, because sometimes you think you don't know something and you watch it and you go, oh, yeah, I remember that.

I only watched one, because I'm badly prepared, but I couldn't remember the title of this show.

But I did remember the fence flipping up and the people going, well, it's called The Return of the Double Deckers.

And it was the double decker gang who were like seven kids who lived in a double decker bus in a junkyard.

And I found the credits for that one.

Oh, God, this is ringing bells.

But when I was a bit older, things like, you know, I like rum, there was a show called Crown Court.

I used to come home from school and watch.

I loved Crown Court.

And subsequently, when I did law A level, I used to go to the local Crown Court just to watch because I found it really interesting.

But I realized later, I was at a training or it was like a team building day.

And I was part of it.

But I got to sit in all the other speakers.

And this chap said, take out a piece of paper and write down everything you wanted to be when you were a kid.

So I wrote down magician, forensic scientist, barrister, I mean, just a whole wide range of stuff.

And then he said, now go through them and find the common denominator.

What is the common thread amongst all those things?

So I sat staring at this page, forensic scientist, magician, problem solving, convincing, couldn't quite get there what it all was.

And then he finished his talk.

Over lunch, I said to him, I couldn't get there.

And he, with some brilliantly skillful and probing questioning, he said, what was it?

When did you want to be a forensic scientist?

I said, well, it was that show Quincy.

Remember Quincy?

Starring...

Underage woman on a boat in the intro.

Jack Klugman?

Jack Klugman, that's right.

Jack.

We don't need Google.

No, no, we've got it in.

And I said, Quincy.

And he said, so what bit of Quincy?

I said, well, at the end, when he's persuading...

We talked about Crown Court, which I think was the barrister.

We talked about magician.

He said, oh, the common thread is an audience.

And it was the jury.

It was that persuading the jury of something that wasn't true.

He was right.

Do you remember a TV performance that influenced your career?

The one that I absolutely is like seared on my brain.

And so before video recorders, Michael Parkinson did a magic special.

So he's gonna have Just Magicians, and that was his producer, John Fisher, who was a member of the Inner Magic Circle.

And the magicians were going from memory.

So please forgive me, magicians out there, when I get this wrong.

I want to say Ricciardi Jr.

Fred Capps, Ricky J and Bara, the greatest theatrical pickpocket of his day.

I was about to stay up and watch it.

And I watched Bara dance with these guys from the audience.

Literally dance, even to the extent of, sorry, I'm saying literally dance.

He didn't dance, but it was a balletic.

And he was picking these pockets.

And I went to school on the Monday and tried to do it, take pens out of my friend's pockets.

And with the exuberance of youth and complete lack of fear, I tried to do it.

And actually some of it was like a pen sticking out of a pocket was pretty easy.

And some of it wasn't.

I know that by the end of my schooling, I was doing that as a party piece and stealing ties.

And I wasn't doing magic shows on stage, unless it was the end of term or stuff.

I was doing kids parties and things.

I was doing walk around sleight of hand magic, but pickpocketing was always the extra bit.

I used to steal the ties from the fourth form on their way into lunch.

So by the time I was, I don't know, 16, and they made you a briefing, you had to stand at the end of this long corridor and let in the kids to lunch, like 10 at a time.

And so that was great, because you've got an audience of 10 for two minutes, you could show them a quick something, and they'd go in, you get another audience of 10 for two minutes.

So literally you could have something kind of working after a fashion, because you'd done it a few hundred times in the week.

And I used to steal the ties off the fourth form so that their friends could see and they couldn't roll it up behind my back, put it into their blazer pocket and send them into lunch, where they would get bollocked by the master for being improperly dressed and sent to the back of the queue of 500 kids.

And so, definitely by 16.

So borrower, absolutely.

And years later, I happened to mention to John Fisher about this thing, and he said, would you like a video of it?

And my heart stopped for a couple of beats, because of course it was pre-video, but he had the access to the machines because he was working for the broadcaster.

So he gave me a video of it, and I watched it.

And some bits I had forgotten, some things I'd missed, but the interview that preceded the demonstration, I was pretty reminded of it.

So for it to have seared its way into my brain at such a young age, I think, yeah, huge influence on me.

When I was reading your Wikipedia, I didn't know this, and I mean, I should have been able to guess it, but when my wife first moved here, she's Canadian, 2009, whatever, we were really into the show Hustle, which I know is a little bit silly, but we really enjoyed the caper of it all, and you worked on that, right?

You were an advisor?

The first two series, I was an advisor.

How did you implement your skills into that show?

With different bits, I remember, well, of course, the highlight for me of that, I got to work with Robert Vaughan.

I mean, the other members of the cast were all brilliant, but I got to work with Robert Vaughan, the last surviving member of the Magnificent Seven, you know, it's like, wow.

That's wild.

And there was a bit his character had to do where he's cheating at poker, so we came up with a nice way for the cards to be switched or apparently be switched in his hands that looked right.

There was some pickpocketing bits in there.

Yeah, that was a really fun show, actually.

I remember talking to the writer early, early days, he's still writing it.

And with all these con plots, you know, con men plots, the people they're conning usually have to be really dislikeable and horrible, so that you sympathize with the person doing the conning, like in The Stink, and Hustle used that device.

So he said, oh, they're going to be really horrible and people who are, you know, taking money from people who can't afford it.

I know it's not the same, but it was almost like watching Dexter, where you want him to kill that guy because that guy deserves it.

And with Hustle, I felt that it had that same, it was the same era, right?

It's almost like revenge entertainment.

I mean, great writing to get you to sympathize with a bunch of crooks.

And you did.

Literally that.

Anyway, we were talking about this unlikable person who's going to be the victim and get scammed.

And Tony said to me, oh, he's like a yuppie, he's horrible yuppie.

And I remembered something I'd heard someone say at the height of sort of yuppie eighties-ness when I was in my first job, postgraduate job.

And the phrase was, a waiter says, how would you like your beef, sir?

And the oink I'd heard said, just rip his horns off and wipe his ass.

And I remember mentioning that.

And months later when that episode aired, I thought, oh, I'm not gonna watch it because you don't get to see the finished product.

And my contribution to that episode had been tiny.

And they go to the restaurant and the waiter says, how would you like your beef, sir?

Said, just rip his horns off and wipe his ass.

And the waiter says, and this was the brilliance of the writer adding to it, does sir mean blue?

Character says, I mean, if a decent vet can't revive it when you bring it to the table, you've overdone it.

So yeah, hustle.

And of course, that spawned or spurned or was the seed of an idea for The Real Hustle.

The Objective then produced a great show, which I did teeny tiny bit of pickpocketing.

But Paul and Alexis, who starred in that with Jess, already knew all the magic they needed to know, but they didn't know pickpocketing.

So it was fun.

I really enjoyed both shows.

They're a lot longer ago than I'm thinking, aren't they?

I'm thinking, oh, it's like ten years ago.

It's way more than that.

Much longer, but I wouldn't like to guess.

What's a TV show that you're usually too embarrassed to admit to liking?

Yeah, well, nothing I would say.

I mean, if I was too embarrassed, I wouldn't tell you now, but things like, well, I'm not into it anymore, but Meet the Baylifts or Beat the Baylifts or whatever it was called, you know, The Sheriffs are Coming, those sorts of programs, I've found almost addictive at one point.

Is that the things that are on after, like Homes Under the Hammer, the next sort of show, where they just?

I don't understand Homes Under the Hammer.

I mean, I qualified as an auctioneer years ago, and never conducted a commercial auction, but I've done millions now of pounds worth of charity auctions, and I love doing them.

And if anyone listening ever wants a charity auctioneer, I don't charge.

It's a charity auction, that's the clue is in the title.

But Homes Under the Hammer, no, people doing up houses, sort of, you know, depends if it's, not if it's a two up, two down.

It's always a really run down small house in Durham that costs 28 grand and you can age the episode by Martin Robert's hairline.

I wouldn't even know that that was the name of the guide.

No, can't get into it.

It shows that I'm very happy to scream and shout about.

My current, you know, must see it, must record it, can't miss it, is The Repair Shop.

The Repair Shop, my wife watches that.

The Repair Shop.

Yeah.

Just phenomenal because it is at its heart, a bit like Antiques Roadshow perhaps was once.

It's a show that features objects, but is really about people.

And the most important thing is people.

You know, the most important things aren't things.

Okay, let's do another one.

What was the first TV show you saw, usually when you were a kid, that scared the shit out of you?

Oh, that's easy.

It was The Cybermen.

They terrified me.

It was The Cybermen on Doctor Who.

Well, my memories of Doctor Who is that John Pertwee was the doctor, but I think, yeah, hiding behind, literally hiding behind the sofa.

And what I remember most, and it'd be interesting to check, see whether it's a false memory.

Because when you first see them, you go, oh, this will be fine.

This is like The Tin Man in Wizard of Oz.

And they're terrifying.

But they're terrifying because they're sort of half cyborg, half human.

I think they've got human hands, haven't they?

I'm looking at their hands now.

They have sort of, they look like they wear metal gauntlets at the ends of their hands.

That's from what I can see.

I never thought of it, but the cybermen terrified me.

And now I help people with their cyber training.

The Daleks never terrified me, partly because one of my father's cousins, who did some extra work, was a Dalek.

And I could never look at the Dalek and think anything other than, oh, this cousin.

Yeah, you got the trade secrets of who's behind the mask.

I just remember being hugely disappointed at family weddings and stuff that he couldn't do the voice.

Not that it was electronic.

Why can't you do the voice?

No, I just do that and move the sink plunger around.

So the Daleks never scared me.

Davros did a bit.

Well, again, he was half, wasn't he?

It was horrible, though, wasn't it?

Yeah, I remember him scaring me.

I guess it was a him.

That definitely...

Yeah, but on the benchmark of scariness, where Cybermen were at the top and then, I don't want you to honk your horn, but then the child catcher, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Oh, yeah, well, no, you can have that because I definitely saw that on television.

So Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

It was on telly, wasn't it?

I did go to the cinema to see that.

Of course, annually, if not more.

Now, it seems to me, with the preponderance of channels, they'll say so-and-so films coming on, and I'll say, wasn't that on like two days ago or three days ago?

I've started to try and like smarter, younger people do already, decide, you know, is there anything I want to watch?

But I don't sit down for three hours at television like some people.

I can get lost on YouTube, you know, with the most weird rabbit holes of, you know, how to do something or how to pick something.

But I would rather be reading a book at the moment.

It's like a menu, isn't it?

When you go into somewhere with just a giant menu, you can't decide.

You've got to go in thinking, well, I kind of want to have that or that.

Anyone that goes on to Netflix or Disney and starts flicking around looking for something, you're not going to watch anything.

And my attention span has completely shrunk.

I mean, at the moment, if I'm at home and before I do this, I have breakfast or lunch, whatever, I sometimes throw something on.

If it isn't a podcast, it will be like a Tokyo, what's it called?

Midnight Diner, Tokyo Story, something like that, 23-minute little vignette or something.

But even that, I'm like looking at my watch going, come on, guys, it's a bit long.

So I don't know how I'm supposed to get through.

All these things, whether it's radio or telly or anything on a screen or a device, they all have the same, I think it was Twitter, I think, but it might have been Facebook, I saw something and they were talking to people about what's your goal.

And these developers of the app were saying, well, just to keep you on your screen on our things.

So who's the competition?

And this person said, well, other apps and sleep.

So they actually don't want you to go to sleep.

The things I thought I missed during the pandemic were that moment of stepping out on a stage and meeting an audience and just that anticipation, but literally the first three seconds of a good evening.

I missed that, I thought.

Obviously, I missed seeing family and friends, that social thing.

I mean, the speed with which we all took to various platforms in order to stay connected.

So I missed that.

But then when we got to the point in the lockdown madness where you were allowed 30 people in the garden, that must have been towards the end, you had 30 people in the garden.

Finally, I started getting some work and this lovely chap who I've known for too many years said, we're going to have a party for 30 people.

Will you come and do your act?

You could only be in a garden, but they sort of made a tent with no sides.

And it was a very, I mean, it was a black tie event in a garden.

And one of the guests there had a baby.

The baby was a very few weeks old.

And the baby was a few weeks old and this was their first outing.

And just as they started having their meal, long before I had to do any hard work, this baby started crying.

And I said to the mom, would you like me to take the pram, you know, just rock her so that you can enjoy your meal?

Oh, would you?

So I am the lady in charge of the catering team.

It's 30 guests.

All the people getting paid, apparently don't count in the 30.

The virus knows not to spread to people that are being paid.

So we took this baby.

And so the client then was laughing, taking pictures of me holding this baby and having a wonderful time, this smiley child.

And I realized that night I had missed babies.

That sounds a very odd sentence on its own, but there have been babies born in our family, wider family, who I hadn't yet met.

You know, we all need that.

Babies need it, actually more than adults do.

If you don't cuddle a baby, it doesn't survive, however much food and water and other stuff you give it.

So, yeah, that, perhaps it's the child in me, but that connection with young people, I didn't realize I had missed it quite so much until Out of the Blue, There It Was Again.

It does make you recalibrate, and I did for not long enough, and I should go away after this and think about how I am grateful, because I am grateful for so much that goes on.

That's beautiful.

That's really, really nice.

We've strayed a little bit from TV, but I think that's fine, because this is a free flow chat and we see where it goes and where it ends up.

So it's been in there.

I'll wrap this up now because I'm going to take up too much of your time.

I normally end a different way, but I'm going to ask you to end this slightly differently because of your skill set.

What piece of advice, if you could give people one piece of advice right now in the current climate of text scams, email scams, all the scams that come our way, what is the most valuable piece of advice you could give them right now?

Get a password manager.

That's one.

That sounds like quite a scary thing.

What is a password manager?

I don't understand.

I should probably have one.

I don't know what to do.

Hell, I don't know what to do and then people won't do it.

But what a password manager will do is make your life easier.

You shouldn't be able to remember your passwords.

If you can remember it, it's a bad password.

If a website says it must be at least eight characters long, I'm not really interested in the eight.

I want to know what's the maximum it can be.

Can it be 50?

Because I don't mind having a 50 character password because it takes exactly the same amount of time for me to put my thumb on or to type the master password because a password manager will spot things that you can't spot.

And a good password manager will tell you when that terrible password you used of football 12345 exclamation mark is a terrible password and it won't let you use it.

Hand in hand with that is then to go to your phone and delete all the passwords that you have let your phone remember in clear text available to anyone who knows the four digits or six digits.

So keeping it really simple so I don't scare people off actually taking some action.

Get a password manager.

There are lots out there.

They're all pretty good.

But I'm hesitating to give a name because I have no connection with the one I use.

So you know what I'm going to just because I want to help someone who might be listening.

So I use a thing called one password.

So it's the number one and then the word password.

It's simple to use.

It's easy.

It'll look after you.

I mean honestly it'll save you time.

You won't ever be screaming at a website again, oh I forgot my password reset.

You'll know.

In fact, I've only got two posters in here, one of the Svengali and another poster of Fight Club, which has got two signatures on it, Edward Norton and Hilda Bonham Carter would be, and you've worked with both of them.

I have worked with both of them, yeah.

Both lovely, actually.

I worked with Edward Norton on The Illusionist.

Don't know if you've seen the film.

I have to be honest, I always get it mixed up with the other film that came out at the same time.

Prestige.

Yes.

And why does that always happen?

Well, because it had a big thing there.

I did the premiere party for The Prestige.

Apparently, the biggest red carpet, it's got to be the biggest or the grandest, the biggest red carpet London's ever seen because they carpeted all of the square or something.

No, he was really brilliant.

And Eleanor was the best pickpocket student I ever had.

As an actor, yeah, because she didn't start with, so what she said, what's going on here?

Where did their eyes go?

I've actually, in my hallway, I've got the notes that she stole in Les Mis, which they didn't want afterwards.

I wanted the sign that said, beware pickpockets, and within a day, they'd struck the set.

And also in my hall, I've got the poster from The Illusionist, which was outside the theater advertising The Illusionist.

And that is a scene where it's been ripped down, and he sees the bits.

So he sees these kids ripped, and they're doing it.

I like this with the director going, please be some left, please be some left, because it was a prop.

And there were two left, so I got one, and I think I got the other one.

It's either him or his son, right?

So yeah, James, that was a bit of an abrupt ending, I guess.

We did say goodbye to each other, but we were talking about secret things while we did, so I think we now had to cut that in a way that wouldn't just sound really sort of, you know, choppy and awkward.

So the song I'm gonna leave you with today is called How Lucky We Are.

It's one of my personal favorites.

I wrote it in Japan back in 2006, and I was just inspired to play it after James talked about how grateful he was for certain things after COVID, and it just got me thinking, oh, I should play How Lucky We Are.

I really love that track.

It's quite Japanese-y in the way that the subject is about two people who meet online and kill themselves in a rental car.

It was just that when I was there, there was a lot of that going on.

It had a huge suicidal rate, and it just got me thinking that, like, you know, we are so lucky, especially people who live in the West.

It's such a shame when, you know, people for whatever reason decide to end their own lives.

That's a big downer.

The song's actually quite good.

I hope you like it.

How lucky we are.

Recorded in 2006 in Tokyo.

Arigato gozaimasu.

Thank you for listening.

Please come back for another episode of Television Times Podcast next week.

I will be here, you should be too.

Keep following us online, leave a review.

Nice ones, of course.

We'll see you then.

Sounded like it was rhyming, but it was just weird timing.