Richard Wiseman: The Curious Psychology Behind What We Watch and Believe

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

Today's guest, I see this proves that I do not write anything down.

I just riff these things, by the way, at the beginning of the podcast.

There's no notes, I'm looking at nothing here.

I've just got to pull this stuff out of my brain.

So if it sounds a bit kind of, you know, slapdash, it's because it is.

Now today's guest, you were in for such a treat.

It's the brilliant Professor Richard Wiseman.

Now I've been reading his books for about a decade or more.

I first became aware of him via, now the big name drop on this podcast is always Derren Brown, right?

Because I worked with him for a while and we're friends and so, you know, sometimes I do feel like we talk about it too much, but in this instance, it's impossible to avoid because our lives are so intertwined with his because Richard has worked with him.

And of course, he's also a magician himself and a member of the magic circle, not just an author, but also a magician.

And at one point learned the trapeze and also was a juggler.

We'll get into that in the pod.

But of course, Richard is mostly known for being a psychologist and his books are phenomenal.

I've got so much enjoyment out of his books like Paranormality, 59 Seconds, Quirkology.

I'm now reading Night School.

You know, the guy's just brilliant and he has an amazing podcast, which we'll talk about as well.

And I've been listening to those.

And sometimes when I do these things, I check, does that person have a pod?

And they often do.

And I start listening to it.

I listen to a couple and then I sort of, you know, tail off and on to the next thing.

But with Richard's, I've been listening to them all.

It's one of those easy digestible sort of half an hour episodes on all kinds of things.

Just check it out.

It's brilliant.

If you need a short one, you know, you've got your big podcasts that are like an hour, the fun ones, the comedies.

But if you want to learn something and then actually, you know, take in some information.

And I love all the stuff that he talks about on there.

It's absolutely brilliant.

Of course, not just an author and a magician.

Richard has done loads of stuff on telly, loads of magic reveals.

And he's just a great guy and he's funny.

He's a funny man.

And that's what's important.

This is a funny episode.

I think there's humor in here that might not be in some of the ones we do with comedians.

I mean, seriously, this guy's hilarious.

Right, to my life, what's going on?

So as you know, I announced kind of soft launched it.

My Edinburgh show is now on sale.

It's called Steve Otis Gunn Is Uncomfortable.

And I am now writing that show.

I've got all the bits, but you know, I'm now putting it all together into, you know, I've got three months to get this thing workshopped and up and on.

I think it's going to be brilliant.

And I had a sort of weird night last night.

I was supposed to, you know, I'm starting going to the gym, but of course I haven't gone.

And the reason I haven't gone isn't because I didn't want to go, it's because I couldn't sleep.

I was up trying to go to bed early since the clocks went forward.

The kids haven't been going to bed so easily.

It's been getting later and later.

And sometimes we're not even like getting an hour to watch television before we go to bed.

Ah, hot take, Jury Duty.

Everyone watch Jury Duty.

It's fucking brilliant.

It's so funny.

We watched that on Amazon.

It's really, really good.

I'm not going to tell you anything about it.

Just go watch that show.

That's my hot take on the current TV show that you should all be watching.

So yeah, I went to bed last night, thought, yep, I can get some nice six or seven hours sleep and I'll get up at six and I'll cycle to the gym and I'll be back before I need to take the kids to school.

Nope, up till 2 a.m.

wide awake, eyes wide open.

Came downstairs, did a few emails to Australia for Australian upcoming guests, still sat there.

2 a.m.

I saw 2 a.m.

come.

And I was like, wow, I've only got four hours here.

I didn't have four hours because I was still awake an hour later.

It just kept going.

And basically I kept getting new ideas for my show.

I was like imagining myself on stage and I was trying to sort of put it all together, which is not something you should be doing when you're trying to sleep.

And I talked to Richard about my sleep issues and they are endless really.

And so yeah, I got so into it that I started coming up with quite good stuff.

So I had to put the light back on and make some voice notes.

So I didn't forget it all.

How annoying.

Anyway, that's enough about me and my life.

Let's get on and chat to the brilliant, wonderful, hilarious, professor, Richard Wiseman.

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.

Did you work with Darren?

I used to operate his shows.

Oh my goodness.

I used to sit at the sound desk and read your books.

So that's the right way around.

Yeah, exactly.

I think it was just one of those things that when I worked with him, sort of surrounded by magicians, we had so many conversations about the dark arts.

I think Darren must have mentioned one of your books and then I read Paranormality first.

Oh yeah.

Which I consider sort of Bible.

And then I read Quircolygy, 59 Seconds.

I've actually just got, and I didn't even know you wrote this one, I don't know how it passed me by, but I've just got night school.

Oh, night school, my goodness.

I need it.

Yes.

I'm having such bad dreams.

Well, we were ahead of the game there for sleepy stuff.

Yeah, no one was doing sleepy stuff at that point.

So yeah, yeah, but I hope you enjoy it and thank you very much for reading them.

No, I love them.

I've listened to some of your podcasts, your great podcast, On Your Mind, which I'm subscribed to now.

This podcast is mostly about television, but that's a jumping off point and we'll get there.

But something that I, I don't know why, it just popped in my head today.

I've been having these very visceral dreams.

And I want to tell you one little thing that I did in the dream, because you have a chapter in about lucid dreaming and controlling your dreams and stuff like that.

And I don't know if other people have told you things like this, but I had this one dream that was so real, that in the dream, I knew I was dreaming.

Or I kind of figured I was probably dreaming, but I needed a clue from my own psyche to tell me.

And the way it told me was brilliant.

It's something that made me look around at this bridge.

And it was kind of like a bridge in Camden Locking London or something like that.

And I looked up and it had a Dunlop sign.

But instead of Dunlop, it's spelled Dunlap.

One vowel had changed.

And in the dream, I sort of did a little tip of the hat.

Thank you, subconscious, for letting me know this is a dream.

I can now move on and now be less scared because this is clearly not real.

Oh, that's very good.

Right, excellent.

You got a very sophisticated subconscious going on there.

So that's great.

I think there's a bit in the book about how lucid dreamers in particular try and figure out whether it's real or not.

So, oh, great, yes, that's very good, excellent.

I want to sort of ask you this question really because this is spooky stuff.

If you don't mind me asking you a couple of things.

So just because I'm fascinated, right, because I have a friend who believes in pretty much all of that stuff, ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, the whole world.

And she's very smart and very clever and makes me think, oh, maybe I'm wrong because I really don't believe in it.

And yet I've had more experiences than she has.

And that is what baffles her because I know you say you've had experiences too, but you know what they are.

And when I moved into this house recently, I started to listen to Danny Robbins' Uncanny podcast with a very skeptical mind, obviously.

And I was going, well, I can explain that.

That's obviously nonsense, and I was enjoying it.

But then I started to experience things in the house.

I go to the toilet at night and I climb the stairs and I'd be in the loo and I could hear someone coming up the stairs and I'm like, well, clearly that's not real.

I'm imagining it, but I'm sort of feeling these kind of creepy little, I'm noticing all the little things in the house, but my brain is going, well, that's not real, Steve.

Obviously, it's not real, but because I was listening to that pod, I was somehow tuned in to all these little things that you see, you know what I mean?

And I was literally doing it to myself.

Awful, awful stuff.

Well, you're torturing yourself, but what you are doing there is, yeah, noticing stuff that otherwise you wouldn't notice, basically, and in doing so, scaring yourself silly, which can be a lot of fun, long as you know what's going on, and isn't so much fun if you think it's an actual ghost or poltergeist or something.

But yeah, no, I'm glad to know the book has had a hugely negative impact on your experiences like that.

And now, quite frankly, you're terrified of any house in case it's haunted.

No, I don't believe it.

But there are, you know, like my wife...

You say that.

I don't know.

I don't know what I think anymore.

I mean, I always leave that 1% open, but I worked on Woman in Black for a while and it has a big rocking chair in it, you know?

It's a big scary scene.

And I once went into some digs and theater digs and there was a chair like that next to my bed and I was like, no, you got any other rooms?

But that would be like taking your work home with you if you went in and there's a rocking chair there.

So the rest of us, that'd be like, there's a desk and a computer.

I don't want it in my house because it's not where I work.

So I can understand that.

Yeah.

There's a very good Woman in Black that's been going a long time, hasn't it?

Yeah, I did a lot of those sort of scary things, going around the world scaring people.

That was a lot of fun.

That sounds great.

But my wife, she's a carpenter and she got a chair that was similar to that recently and bought it into the house.

And I took one look at it and went, that's going in the shed, right?

I mean, if a chair is haunted, it's definitely that chair.

If you've worked on lots of productions, and presumably seen quite a lot of chairs, none of which are now loud in your house, it must be quite challenging, I would have thought, to kit out the house.

Did you look at like a four-micro table coming in and go, no, no, 15 years ago, I worked on a show and having that in there.

Exactly, I worked on Grease once, so I can't go into diners.

When I worked on Women in Black, it's just triggered something for me.

When we worked on it, there was this one moment where the actor on stage swore that he saw another woman in black in the wings.

Wow.

And then all these psychic type people came out and they started walking around sort of doing all these measurements and trying to find out if the theater was haunted, as they all allegedly are.

But he was literally on stage, she came on and then behind her.

But hold on a sec, presumably there's an understudy for the woman in black.

Often not, weirdly, often not.

Was it ever you, were you ever the understudy for woman in black?

That would be the best thing ever.

No, the only thing I ever did was I went on as the bear and going on a bear hunt once.

That was about it.

Right, and because of that, you can't have bears in the house.

People bring bears around, you go, get those bears out of here.

Everything's trauma, exactly.

Who's running the desk if you're on stage as a bear?

Was it at that point, you're just like, the show's running itself, anything could happen.

Weirdly, yes, I would go out front and I would start a series of sound keys and then I would run around, go on as the bear, come off stage right and then run around before the music ended.

Which did you enjoy more, twiddling the knobs or being a bear?

I enjoyed being the bear.

It was funny.

And did you ever get the whole thing wrong?

So you did one, the kids shows, the bears, but you uploaded all the cues to Women in Black.

No, but I did a tour of an Inspector Cools in Australia while I was...

Yes, I love that, JB.

Priestley.

Yeah, I did.

I worked on those two shows for a long time, seven or eight years.

And one of the actors was about to go into Women in Black and he'd been in it before.

And I was helping an Australian production learn the show by using the auditorium in Melbourne.

So he went to sleep in his dressing room and then suddenly through the tunnel, I heard all these sound cues from Women in Black.

And he thought he was...

Oh!

He didn't know what was happening because he was rehearsing for that.

He thought he was having a bad dream and he ran on the stage, so it was quite confusing for him.

It's been some crossover.

That would be terrifying.

Yes.

Anyway, it's a lot of talk about theater, isn't it?

But hold on a second though, it should be Women in Black, presumably, given if there's the actual Woman in Black and then there's the ghost behind her of another Woman in Black.

If that was true, which I don't think it was.

They'd have to change all the posters and everything.

Cost of fortune.

I think there was a time when one of the guys playing Mr.

Kips' girlfriend dressed up as the second Woman in Black and stood at the back of the auditorium to freak him out.

I know that happened.

That's very funny.

That was good.

And he was terrified.

I won't name him.

That's very funny.

So what are your experiences, like your own personal experiences that you have gone, well, clearly, that's not a ghost, but?

Not many, actually.

I had night terrors for quite a while.

And so I routinely, you don't wake up from a night terror.

You sit up with your eyes open and you see this kind of demonic entity at the end of the bed.

And often you scream.

And in doing so, you wake up the person who's laying next to you, if somebody's sleeping with you.

And they wake up properly, and then you go straight back into deep sleep.

And so they have the worst night's sleep ever.

And you don't know anything about it in the morning.

And that was my life for a couple of years.

It was, yeah, I thought it was hilarious.

But Caroline, my partner, was absolutely furious.

Yeah, so I had that quite a lot.

And then I actually went on some forums online for people who had night terrors.

And one of the things that they'll do is to book into the ground floor of a hotel if they're staying in a hotel.

Because what you are scared of is thinking, oh, there's a demonic entity in the room, I'll jump out the window.

And so you want to be on the ground floor.

And so I did that for a while.

But it does mean if you book into the ground floor of a hotel, you could be surrounded by people who think there are demonic entities in their room.

The fearful floor.

Exactly, screaming all night long.

So I've had that.

Extra padded walls.

I've done a lot of fake seances.

And there'll be work with Darren on that.

There'll be with Andy Nyman, who's co-director of Darren, actor.

And in fact, in the film of Woman in Black, Andy's in that, the first film.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

So we did fake seances together for a while, which means we kind of summoned up ghosts on a nightly basis and did a large number of them.

And all of that time, all of the summoning, all of the sitting there in pitch darkness and never felt a single thing, never saw anything that we didn't produce by trickery.

So no, I don't think I'm a, I'm not really a paranormal magnet in that sense.

Sorry to be so diss, I can make something up if you like.

No, no, no, that's interesting.

Were you always a skeptic?

Well, as a magician, I got into magic very young and so magicians tend to be pretty skeptical because they're producing paranormal instances kind of on demand as it were.

There's a normal explanation.

So yeah, most magicians, not all, but most magicians tend to be quite skeptical.

And so yeah, my pathway was getting into magic, then getting into paranormal stuff.

So as a kid, I bought The Unexplained, which is this great magazine, superb.

Oh, it's great.

I loved all that stuff.

UFOs, one week.

Loch Ness Monster and fairies and ghosts.

Issue three came with a cutout and keep, a Zena card set, you know, the five cards from Jebby Ryan's ESP testing.

So you could test your psychic bonds.

Yeah, my granddad used to do that to me with the triangles and the wavy lines.

Yeah, triangles, wavy lines, star.

Yeah, did you have a psychic bond with your grandfather?

My granddad used to take me to psychic meetings when I was eight or nine.

Oh, he was a spiritualist.

Yeah, he used to get the psychic news.

I used to deliver it to him in my paper round.

And I never, ever believed in it.

I always thought it was nonsense.

Going to the psychic meetings is what solidified that belief, because it was all just...

It was clearly rubbish, but he was going for it, you know.

Oh, well, that's interesting.

So, yes, I've tested many a psychic.

And my favorite moment, actually, which I think is in Paranormality, which is I said to a psychic, what's the most annoying thing as working as a professional psychic?

And she said, well, people make appointments, but then don't turn up.

Is your follow line, she didn't see that coming.

No, I just smiled.

And so, yes, so we did all that.

Anyway, so I did the ESP card testing with my brother.

And it turns out we didn't have a psychic link, which bizarrely he had predicted two days earlier in an envelope.

But we did all that.

And then I was watching television in my teens and Sue Blackmore is a parapsychologist came on.

And she said, Oh, I don't believe in psychic stuff, but I'm interested in why people have experiences, why they believe these things.

And that was a real light bulb moment for me.

I thought, Oh, my goodness, you can look at the psychology of this stuff.

And so I switched from doing math, physics and chemistry, which I was doing then as A levels, and just decided to go and study psychology.

And from there, I then did a PhD in parapsychology up in Edinburgh.

And it's been part of my life ever since then.

And I do love it.

I'm very, very fond of the field.

I was council member of the Society for Psychological Research for 10 years and so on.

I just loved the, it's so bizarre.

And my favorite thing ever in all of that was a guy at the SPR, Psychological Research, who was desperate to have a paranormal experience, but hadn't had one.

And then one day, they were doing a lecture down there and he made up an A4 notice and he was going to blue tack it onto a glass door.

And so as he moves towards the glass door with this A4 sheet in front of him, what he doesn't see is it's an automatic opening door.

So it slides open silently.

He goes through it essentially and it slides back behind him.

So from his point of view, he's penetrated a glass door, paranormal-ly, right?

And it's the only paranormal thing ever to happen to him.

And I saw it all, it was beautifully timed.

It was like a sitcom.

And I never had the heart to tell him that actually it was just a sliding door.

He thought that?

You know, he was quite convinced.

When he tried to get back in, he couldn't open the door from the outside.

So I never told him.

But yeah, so I do love the field.

It's full of very strange but lovely, lovely people.

Is this true, that you performed in Covent Garden when you were very young?

It is true, yeah.

Performed would be too strong a word.

What year is that?

I'm just intrigued.

86, 87, something like that.

Cool.

Yeah, were you down there?

Yeah, sort of.

I was down there when I was about 12, doing various scams, because my parents taught me how to steal, how to manipulate and use all kinds of fraudulent means for monetary gain, essentially.

I feel extreme guilt about it now, but like as a kid, it was fun, like shaking a fake charity box and people would put money in and-

My goodness.

Sell scratch cards with dates changed that my dad used to forge and all kinds of stuff.

So-

Right.

Covent Garden was the playground for everybody, it seems.

Right, looking back, how do you feel about that?

I feel, as James Friedman said, after reading my book, he thinks that I'm one of the few people that definitely cannot be scammed, because we were the scammers.

So I'm glad I got taught that stuff, because whenever I get any kind of phone call or text saying, this is Amazon, you're but, please.

I can't fall for that stuff, I just can't.

I probably will one day.

I'm sorry about ringing you up like that.

I mean, I try a different voice every time, but what can you do?

Yeah, it's just, I feel bad about the things I did, but I was a kid and I was sort of taught those things.

I'm glad I know the skills.

I just don't use them, I guess a bit like karate.

It's a real struggle to not steal when you've been taught to steal.

As I've spoke to Darren about, it's really impossible to like turn it off all the time.

You see opportunities, you don't do them, but you're like, are you not scared that someone's gonna turn around and do something not very pleasant to you?

In what way?

For what?

For the past?

No, no, no, no.

If you saw someone's phone sticking out of their pocket and you thought, I'll have that.

Well, no, I wouldn't.

My thought would be, why I've got to tell them that that is insane to be doing.

So I will go up to them.

It's very difficult.

Fighting the criminal mind, as I call it.

That is interesting.

I suppose a little bit like that with magic because you're constantly looking and thinking I could inflict living hell on somebody by doing a card trick at any moment.

So yeah, I was in Covent Garden with a good friend of mine, Adrian Owen, who's now a very famous neuro-psychologist and we did a comedy juggling act.

And as I always say, I'm not saying it was bad, but they're still booing.

It was, boy, it was bad.

And the thing about, what's interesting about performing street stuff, and we only there for a couple of weeks, is that unlike a normal sort of show, people can just walk away if you're not very good.

They just walk away and they do.

And so it's kind of heartbreaking, but you get honest feedback.

But we had no money.

We had less than no money.

And so we had to survive for these two weeks.

At the time, my girlfriend was a nutritionist.

And so I said to her, how do we survive?

And she said, you could just have porridge, but with grapefruit segments cut in.

And the grapefruit segments will prevent scurvy.

And you can probably get through two weeks like that.

And that's exactly what we did.

It was at this point where we encountered some technical difficulties, but we soon resumed and got back on track.

Here's the rest of the conversation.

So you've been on a lot of TV shows and you've been interviewed multiple times.

I've done hundreds and hundreds of interviews.

Yeah, I looked on IMDb, there's a lot.

Yes, the first one I did was Richard and Judy.

Richard and Judy, yeah, yeah.

And I was a little bit nervous because it was going out to millions of people.

Yeah, yeah.

And Richard Madeley could see I was nervous, took me aside.

And he said, you see those people over there, paramedics, they're on for a later item.

He said, if they mess up, somebody dies or gets injured or ill or whatever.

If we mess up, it's just a bit embarrassing for a few hours.

Yeah.

And I've never forgotten that.

Yeah.

So you get this overinflated sense of, you know, TV or radio, whatever is being important.

And actually, to be honest, we're just messing around for a living.

So it's all fine.

Everyone should just relax about it.

And I wasn't particularly nervous after that.

So how did it feel?

Like all the pressure of the lights and people staring at you, or did it just pass by and a bit of haze or?

Yeah, no, I mean, it is sort of a little bit scary, but you get used to it.

Also, as long as you say something, as long as you've got an answer and you don't freeze, then probably you're okay.

Yeah.

And as long as you speak in reasonably short sentences, and as long as you look at the host, so they can take you through it.

But I ended up doing a couple of hundred of them.

So what's your favorite experience or appearance that you've had on television?

It's a good question.

They all sort of merge into one, because I'm just kind of doing the same interview again and again and again.

Don't ask me about luck.

I did some work on luck, and I've done the same luck interview for 22 years.

That's one of your first books, isn't it?

So I wasn't going to bring that up.

Yeah, luck factor.

It's lovely that people want to talk about it.

It's great.

It's just I've been doing it a lot.

And so I used to do a lot of local radio, where it was like, you know, because you're self-lucky.

You're a friend, you're lucky, you're superstitious.

Well, I'm an ex-guest.

So that's difficult to summon the energy.

I felt bad about bringing up even the paranormal, because I was like, he's probably bored with this.

It's, yeah, I am actually.

Yeah, no, no, no.

That's absolutely fine.

It was back in vogue.

That's why I brought it up.

It has, it comes in waves.

Yeah, early 90s, we caught a wave with it, and then it went away, and now it's back.

Yeah, well, shows like Inside Number Nine.

I've spoken to quite a few guests, actually, who were kids or early teenagers in the 80s, and they would watch things like Hammer House and creepy storylines and like Tales of the Unexpected.

I think generally we're exposed to a lot of things that maybe we shouldn't have been.

Well, I don't know.

They live a lasting memory and all those kind of dead of night films, which is a bit before our time, but kind of incredible.

Actually, I'm now thinking about that question you asked, which is the favorite times.

I would have said both lots of filming with Darren.

I've done two lots of filming with Darren Brown, one his very first show and one later on, Psychics.

We share a very similar sense of humor.

And so it is very difficult to get through an interview with Darren and not end up a giggling mess on the floor.

And that's how both of us have ended up with both of those interviews.

So I think they're very fond memories.

And he's kind of so amazing.

It's absolutely incredible.

Like by far the best British performer to come out in the last hundred years in terms of magic.

And to stand in the wings and to think, okay, I'm going to hold together this three hour show and it's essentially just him and these amazing things that he does.

I sit down in awe of it.

It's incredible.

I'm lucky to do half an hour before the audience walk out the back.

So it's, yeah, amazing.

Go for it.

This is crazy.

I'm intrigued by this.

Do you want to give me a number between one and 22?

Five, oh, that's perfect for you.

What is the television show that scared you the most?

Well, I don't know.

It's a show.

It's similar to television because I think it was shown in school, which was the protect and survive adverts, the little short clips that told you what to do, not if there was a nuclear attack, but when there's a nuclear attack.

Oh God, the nuclear stuff.

Oh yeah.

And I found that, I mean, that was, I don't know what the actual wording was, but when I was a kid, it did feel like you've got an aircraft and it wasn't, you know, if we were to crash, it was simply when we crash, this is what happens.

And I thought that was protected to survive.

I thought, my goodness, you know, the government are putting this out, so obviously there's going to be a nuclear Holocaust and we're going to have to survive it.

And then you looked at the suggestions and it was things like, you know, if you're a school, then hide under your desk.

I was thinking, my school can't even organize a sports day, let alone survive a kind of nuclear strike.

So that actually made me scared.

And then people talk about Children of the Stone or Threads or any of these other shows that were kind of on at the time.

I wasn't scared by those because it seems to me that, you know, when you go on a roller coaster, that's a certain type of fear, but the frame is one of safety.

Yeah, because you can see yourself get off at the other end, right?

That's right.

And you know that you're supposed to go up and down and scream, that watching TV was like that.

I always think, you know, just as you're moving off, if on the roller coaster, you bend down and you picked up a bolt and said to your friend, Is this supposed to come off?

They know what fear is.

Did you do that?

No, I always like to pretend I did, but I never did that.

I always thought that would be a good prank.

But it illustrates the two different types of fear.

And so for me, the kind of protect and survive thing was properly scary.

Everything else, I knew had got this frame around me.

It was just a TV show.

And I'm not very good at transporting myself and sort of suspending the kind of disbelief, as it were, and thinking this thing is actually happening.

I find it very difficult in shows.

I don't know what you're like.

When I'm watching a show, normally I'm thinking, oh, how's the lighting done?

All the scenery changes.

I find it very difficult to watch a show and feel absorbed that this play is actually happening.

Yeah, I mean, that's very hard to suspend your disbelief, especially because you know the parameters of that, because you've worked in this field.

But that nuclear, obviously, I mean, it's probably hacked to even bring it up, but I think there's a certain generation, and me and you are both in it, that just had such fear around nuclear issues and sort of went away, didn't it, in the 90s, I guess, but with the three-minute warning.

Was it a three-minute or was it five?

I think you only got three.

Three, so it's just a whole idea.

Even if it's five, it doesn't seem particularly generous, does it?

I mean...

I just remember people talking about, what would you do with your three minutes and stuff like that?

What would I do with three minutes?

I don't know, shit myself, I don't know.

What would you do?

There was all that talk, and like you say, it felt imminent because there was so much politically going on.

The guidance was just ridiculous, as I remember.

It was things like put some sticky tape on your windows and stuff like that.

That's right.

I still do it, I mean, just in case.

I just have windows covered in sticky tape, and I always hide under my desk, just in case.

I actually have an old school desk in the next room, so I can't hide under that.

You hide under it and you feel a little bit sad.

So I remember that being absolutely scary.

So I don't know if that was television or not.

I think we've shown it at school, but that's my main kind of memory on that.

That's weird that they would have done it at school as well, because also the public information films come up quite a lot.

Yes, there's a kite and a power line or something.

The train wanted to get me, because I grew up in London for most of my childhood, London and Ireland, and we'd jump across the tube tracks often if we wanted it.

Until those...

Well, I did think twice when I saw those ads.

There was a kid, I think his foot goes on the live row and he just fries like ready brick.

Right, okay.

You had a much more adventurous upbringing than I did.

I was just a huge coward, basically.

I wouldn't jump over a stream, let alone a...

No, my goodness.

No, I'm hugely risk-averse.

I think some things are in the genes.

I used to get the escalators before they had these keep-left signs, these little raised square things, just like ever so often, but you could easily skirt over them.

So I'd get on the tube at the end of the district line.

I'd go into town with my friends, and we'd go to Bank Station on the Northern Line, and we would slide down the middle of the escalators.

And we'd just do that over and over and over until our bums were black, and then we'd go home.

And this was all ended when they put one of those things in and my friend hit it and it flew at Sectors Hospital.

But I found out years later that my mother did the same thing in the 60s.

She did the exact same thing.

She'd go on the tube and just slide down the middle of the escalators.

We'd never talked about it.

We'd never discussed it, but we both had this...

Chances of that.

I was going to say that could radically inform genetics in a way in which we don't fully understand.

That would be, yeah, the gene for sliding down the escalators yet to be discovered.

We never did anything like that, I'll tell you.

I'll tell you what I did do.

I was born in Luton, grew up in Luton, which is just north of London.

And so my brother and I used to go to London on the weekends sometimes.

And one day, this is my biggest regret, by the way.

One day we were in Leicester Square and I think it's Berman and Nathan's was the big costumier place.

I don't know if it's still there, but he used to sell costumes and things.

And we were penniless and there were no ATMs then.

There's no way of kind of getting money out.

So we had a couple of quid and we went in and they were selling off costumes from James Bond and Space 1999, original screen costumes for a pound each.

You're kidding.

No.

They'd be worth the Bond ones.

They are worth thousands now.

You checked on eBay.

Thousands, yes, with tears in my eyes.

So we bought some Space 1999 ones and then sold those many years later.

But now they're worth huge amounts of money.

And what's funny about the Space 1999 ones is that everyone who's got an original costume has all got a story about how they've got it that day.

That was the only sale for all of them.

So yeah, that was a good day out for us.

We weren't stealing anything.

We were just giving a pound for Space 99 and James Bond costumes.

And then years later, wishing we'd bought more.

So I went to a premiere of, well, I don't say premiere.

It was a showing that came with swag, essentially, of Blade Runner in 1982.

It was showing at the Odeon in Hampstead Heath.

And I went there on my own.

And my dad, who's not a very nice man, picked me up from the cinema and they gave out a poster, a badge and a little booklet and a little Blade Runner bag.

And I was like, so happy.

I was like one of the real, I was into Blade Runner at the time, not afterwards, not one of these 90s directors cut Blade Runner.

I was looking at it again.

This is great.

I wasn't a Star Wars guy.

For some reason, I really linked to Blade Runner.

And then my dad saw it all and said something along the lines of, oh, you're too old for that stuff now.

Just like childish stuff, a rubbish film anyway.

And he just threw it in the bin.

Yeah, threw it in the bin.

And I never saw it again.

And I'm sure that stuff would be worth a fortune.

And it's not the image that you now see on the posters.

The original is slightly different poster.

Just a small one, like the same size.

So your dad taught you to steal and then threw your stuff in the bin.

He was notorious for that.

I used to love the band Madness.

He came in, threw all my cassettes away, told me it was childish music, stuff like that.

I don't do that to my kids, so there we are.

No, no, no, no.

Presumably they're not into Madness.

Weirdly, no, my daughter is.

She loves our house.

They're pretty good with music.

I've got two twins who are six and my son, he always asked to hear, Don't Let Me Down by The Beatles, that was good.

My daughter is always walking in asking for Divine Comedy Songs on Alexa.

Very good.

I know nothing about music.

I do not have a music collection.

I've never listened to music.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it's really, really bad.

And everyone pulls faces when I say it, but it plays almost no role in my life.

I've heard about people like you.

Yeah, I've heard about people like you.

I've heard of one other person.

This is interesting because to me, music was everything as a child and it sort of slowly dissipates now.

My favorite artist could bring out an album or take me three months to get around to listen to it.

But music was so huge in that period I grew up in and it's hard to avoid it.

I guess you went in...

I managed.

Well, the magic, of course, was my deep passion and the paranormal.

So I was always got my head in books, reading about that stuff and not sliding down escalators.

I make that quite clear.

And listen to ballads.

And yes, so I went to see Queen and Nebworth, which is quite good.

And then a couple of years ago, I saw Elton John and they're the only two concerts I've ever been to.

And do you know their music before that?

Or do you not really?

Yeah, because that was very popular.

Just as I heard of that.

But nothing else, nothing else at all.

And you never pretended as a teenager to sort of stick a poster on the wall and pretend you like something you didn't?

No, no, because that would imply that I had friends or cared about them, neither which were true.

What's the funniest thing you ever saw on TV?

Oh my goodness.

I didn't watch Top of the Pops or anything like that, as you might gather from my previous chat, but I watched a lot of comedy.

So, and it was always on in our house.

So it's kind of a working class house where TV was always on.

And my parents, thank goodness, love comedy.

So More Common Wives was on, Step Tone Son, Dad's Army, Rise and Fall Original Parent.

Yeah, I love that.

Which I love, oh my goodness.

Have you rewatched it as an adult?

Yeah, yeah.

And I still think it's funny.

Yeah, it's brilliant.

It's brilliant.

It's just, Len Roster, genius.

And so all of those things were on, I found them all very, very funny.

I don't think there's a moment that I would point to and go, that was it.

That's the funniest thing I ever saw.

But the house was always kind of full of comedy and full of laughter.

And all of those shows are kind of genius.

And you can still watch them.

I mean, what's interesting about More Common Wives is they kind of haven't aged.

There's nothing there that you would go, oh my goodness, you really can't say that today, compared to, you know, everything else is where, where, pretty much, anything else from that era, you kind of go, hmm, not quite so funny now.

But More Common Wives, for the most part, I mean, so there may be a couple of them, very, very little of their material has aged.

Yeah, so all of that stuff, I loved, I loved as a kid.

Yeah, even the really bad sets of Some Mothers Do Haven and stuff like that.

I think the comedy in that is still great.

It's still very physical, very funny.

There's no harm in it.

I don't think it's even got any racism in it from what I was watching.

It's all on the character, isn't it?

It's a Mr.

Bean style character.

I quite like it.

It's something about that era that you say, I don't think it's even got racism in it.

Because it's just assumed, it's the 70s.

It's just assumed that it's from the 70s.

Of course, it would be massively unacceptable and racist.

But No, Some Mothers Do Haven was another one.

Yeah, where Michael Crawford was doing his own stunts.

Just phenomenal.

And also, psychologically, when I was a kid, you'd watch this thing on a Saturday night, a Doctor Who or whatever, and then you go to school and talk about it because you'd all been seeing the same thing.

It's not like someone had downloaded all of the episodes and then seen everything right through to the end.

And so there was this feeling of, I wonder what's going to happen next week, and we can all talk about this shared experience we just had on Saturday or whenever it was.

And that's been lost a little bit with the downloading and streaming stuff.

And so I think event television has called us as kind of getting us back to that, but it's not quite the same as, you know, you didn't know what was going to happen next week, and it gave you something to talk about with your friends on the Monday.

And you had a whole week to wait as well.

Right.

That's right.

Yes.

And everyone would be trying to guess and so on.

So I do think that these things, you know, the structure of them, the way that they're created really had a big impact, certainly in our childhood in terms of the way we interacted with our families and each other and so on.

I agree.

And there's a lot of food linked to television for me.

Like I can, you say Doctor Who, I think Heinz Tomato Soup.

There's certain meals that just go with the show.

You know, you can almost pinpoint when they're on.

Yes, yeah.

Spaghetti Hoops.

I have a nice little place in my heart for Spaghetti Hoops or Birds Eye Potato Waffles.

Yes.

That's a good jingle.

How have you got a favourite jingle?

That's a new question.

You don't like music, so you probably don't like jingles.

No, I don't.

I remember at Spaghetti Hoops is you try to get as many on your fork as possible.

I remember trying to do that.

It's not a jingle.

My favourite theme tune is the Banana Splits.

Yes, I know that one.

How's it go again?

La la la, la la la la.

La la la, la la la la.

Exactly.

Yes, one banana, two banana.

But in the 90s, they started showing it in the Big Breakfast.

I remember just seeing it again and going, whoa, I remember this.

What is this, like weird memory?

I felt like I almost had to go and have a therapy or be hypnotized to see what had happened, because it was like, this is lived through a memory.

What is this?

It didn't feel good.

It was great.

It was such a great idea to take in these sort of different animations and so on, and just like.

I remember the rather surreal Banana Splits, and it became a whole morning television, and they were leading you through this kind of mad kind of morning.

So, yeah, I thought it was very smart.

I remember the Banana Splits.

I think that was...

Someone maybe they didn't tell me.

Maybe I thought this, but it was supposed to be a television version of Saturday morning pictures.

You know Saturday morning pictures where you go to the cinema?

When you were a kid, you used to be able to go to the cinema and watch one kind of kids' film, usually like, I don't know, Sinbad or something.

But you'd have about three or four cartoons before.

And it was always cheap and it was always at 10 o'clock in the morning.

And it's where a lot of people had first dates.

I wear it once.

Did it go well?

It did not go well.

I was trying to go out with her friend.

Talking about all these changes in television makes me think of this question for you, which I think is a good one.

What do you think will be the top television show on TV in 2050?

Will there be TV in 2050?

I think AI, that's coming along, isn't it?

That's quite popular.

I think AI will look at your browsing history and write a show with you in it and take images of you and you'll be watching yourself on TV in your own soap opera.

Oh really?

I'm not saying I believe any of that, I'm just making that up.

But I could imagine it.

People like stuff that's about themselves and I could imagine the idea of being in your own TV show and watching yourself in there might appeal to people.

I couldn't think of anything worse.

Well, yeah, but I think they said that about soap operas and game shows and all that stuff and it turns out to be popular.

So maybe something like that, AI, I could imagine 2050 or 25 years from now, that's going to be producing scripts, surely.

So that's my guess.

I won't be watching any of it.

No, it's going to be dreadful.

It's not going to be made for us.

But there is, I've had two interactions with AI in the last week, which have been very positive.

One of them is selling something on eBay and is saying, would you like AI to write your listing?

Yeah, let's see what happens.

Boom.

Oh, wow.

Lovely stuff.

Perfect.

They'll do show notes for podcasts.

Your audio that we're recording right now, I can press a button on this and it can clean it all up.

Make it funny.

You know, I can't make it funny, but it can clean up the audio and do amazing things.

I don't do all of it.

I still like to do it all by hand.

That's my prediction.

Something like that.

Something like that.

It's interesting.

Bespoke, personal, narcissistic television.

Yes, that's right.

Lovely.

Yes.

I like it.

And it will be on which channel?

Definitely.

All of them.

All of them.

That's always going to be wall to wall yourself.

That sounds awful.

I will look forward to not watching that.

Gunn to your head, Richard.

Is there a reality TV show that you would go on?

I wouldn't be very good on any of them.

The only one, and I don't even know what it was called, such as my love of it.

I think on Five, there was a circus based one.

Yeah, exactly.

That's the right response.

Yeah, I think there was a circus based one where celebrities tried to do circus acts.

Really?

And it was called something like the Circus.

Cirque du Celebrité was a TV show on Sky in 2006 where celebrities took part in circus acts.

And I did, when I was very young, did some circus training.

So I would at least, I did flying trapeze for a few weeks.

I never let go of the bar.

That was stage two.

I just hung on.

I learned, I learned.

I'm still up there.

That's right.

So I'm doing the minute.

I learned many things.

One of the most interesting things about flying trapeze is obvious when you think about it, which you do when you're doing it, which is that you want to let go of the bar, assuming there's a net under you, when you're closest to the net, i.e.

you're at the bottom of the swing.

That's a really bad idea because you're either traveling forwards or backwards.

Yes, you're going to keep going.

Yes, the only time you let go of the bar is when you're at the top of the swing, and then you'll drop straight down.

Right.

So it's a controlled drop.

And so it's that difference between what you want to do and what the safe thing is to do.

Yes.

I always thought it was quite useful.

The other thing is we never had any injuries because it was so obviously dangerous.

However, the next people in, the next group in were clown school, and they were always injuring themselves by pushing themselves over and chipping elbows and things like that.

Bunch of clowns, exactly.

So again, that was that thing about, when something is genuinely dangerous, everyone's very, very careful.

But actually the really dangerous stuff is the thing where you're not paying attention or you do whatever, and clown school.

So those are my two main memories.

The third one was not being very good at it.

I don't know if you've ever tried flying trapeze, but even just hanging off the bar is really, really painful.

And you have to be very careful because you jump off the little bar you're on and you swing out.

But when you swing back, you must tuck your legs up.

Otherwise, you just hit the bar, you just jumped off.

It's extremely painful.

So you learn that one quite quickly.

So I thought, you know, rather than doing magic, I'd join the circus.

And then realized I was absolutely appalling at it.

So didn't.

That's imagining.

Yeah.

It's much safer and easier.

It's getting people to choose cards.

You could have had a very different life.

I'm going to ask you one more question.

This could be a good one for you, I think.

What invention from television would you bring into real life?

I am a massive fan of The Twilight Zone.

Me too.

I have watched, I think all, now I'm going to get the number wrong, 140 something, 150 something episodes.

And was involved in the stage show and so on.

And I happened to do some magic for it.

In one episode, there is a stopwatch.

And when you press the stopwatch, time freezes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And assuming we're allowed to spoil the episode for people.

Yeah.

The guy uses it to rob a bank.

Yes.

So he clicks it, everyone freezes, which allows him to rob a bank.

But then the genius twist of The Twilight Zone, they always have these wonderful twists, is he then drops the watch and it smashes, which now he's trapped in a world where everything is frozen in time for the rest of time.

But I always thought that if you had a little stopwatch, you could press and just freeze everything and then think about it or do whatever, in your case, steal.

No, I wouldn't steal.

I'd think about stealing in the middle of it.

And then you'd be back into it.

I was rather envious of that.

I thought that was great.

But you're fond of the Twilight Zone as well, then?

I do like it, but if I had that watch, my immediate thought just then was I would pause it at the instant me and my wife ever row.

I'd just pause it and really think about what I'm about to say before I say it.

Right.

Have a little breather to start it up again, so I don't say the wrong thing.

Yes, well, in many conversations I'd be doing that in.

It wouldn't just be rowls.

I think every conversation I've had my entire life, I go, why did I say that?

But yes, no, it would be good.

It would be good.

Did you watch the Jordan Peele seasons?

No.

He made recently the new ones.

They're pretty good.

I heard they were pretty good, but I deliberately didn't, because I've got so many fond memories of the original.

I sort of didn't want that kind of muddied, but I have heard they're very good.

So that'd be one thing.

And the other thing would be Mr.

Ben, big fan of Mr.

Ben.

Do you remember Mr.

Ben on TV?

Vaguely, I can see him.

Yeah, he goes and changes suits or something.

That's right.

Yeah, he goes to a fancy dress shop.

And whatever outfit he puts on, he then has an adventure.

If he puts on like a, I don't know, chain mail, he then has a sort of medieval knight's adventure.

So the costume that he puts on in the fancy dress shop sort of elicits an adventure where that costume fits.

And I would quite like that.

I would quite enjoy being able to put on a costume and walk out and have a little adventure in that costume.

What costume would you be sort of hoping for first?

It's a good question, isn't it?

I think I'd be dressed in a bear suit.

Are you going on tour with Going on a Bear Hunt?

Yeah, that would be the obvious one.

Or I would just sort of walk out and it would be a major UN press conference about a very important decision and I'd be dressed in a bear suit because the technology has just gone slightly wrong.

And you pause your watch.

Pause your watch.

I can't get it to work because I've got my big paws on.

That's true, yeah.

Banging that away.

So I think either of those two, a stopwatch of time or a Mr.

Ben fancy dress shop.

I like the stopwatch.

Does that mean Otis?

Does that mean you're not so keen on the Mr.

Ben?

I don't get that one because that's a bit like putting on costumes like an actor and putting on a mask.

So I get it, I get it.

I get why you'd like it.

Yeah, but you then walk out and it actually happens in the real world.

So if you put on a space suit, you'd open your door and you'd be in space.

Yeah, totally.

That's how Mr.

V worked.

I do not like that, no.

That's the worst one for you.

No, it's floating around in space.

We're already doing that already, aren't we?

You know the one that reminds me, it makes me think what Twitter is to me, is do you know that episode of Twilight Zone where that guy, is it a guy or a woman who can hear everyone's thoughts?

Oh, my goodness.

60s is probably a bloke.

Yeah, probably.

Something happens and he can hear everyone's thoughts as they walk past him and it drives him mad.

Yes.

And that's social media to me.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of people shouting at one another on telling me their thoughts about things they haven't thought about very much.

No, of course not.

You're such an intelligent man.

Well, Professor Richard Wiseman, thank you for coming on Television Times.

I'm very thrilled to have had you on and have chat.

I really enjoyed it.

It's good fun.

Thank you very much.

You got anything you want to plug or direct people to?

Obviously your podcast.

Podcast would be good, yeah.

I have a new book coming out in May, which is on teaching kids magic tricks in order to improve their confidence and social skills and so on.

And so that's exciting.

And that's it.

That's all I have to mention.

That sounds great.

I'll be getting that from my son.

He's got magic upstairs.

Oh, very good.

Well, thank you for coming on.

I really appreciate it.

It was brilliant talking to you and it was really lovely to meet you.

Lovely to see you.

That was Professor Richard Wiseman talking to me about television and all kinds of other stuff.

I really enjoyed that chat.

It went really well, and I don't know Richard, I'd never met him.

I've read his books, so I sort of had his voice in my head, sort of, and I've known things about him and watched him on telly, but wow.

It was a great chat, and he was very giving, and as I said, very funny, I thought.

And now to today's outro track.

Beep, beep.

Okay, today's song is called Made in England.

It's from an album I made called We Argue in Silence.

With my future wife in Arizona and various other places.

And the song is called Made in England, and it's about kind of the decaying of Britain, as from a sort of 2009, 2010 standpoint.

You can sort of see it eroding things, sort of going wrong, which probably led to Brexit.

And of course it's much worse now, depending on your political beliefs, but you know, hard to deny.

And at that time, I was sort of thinking of moving to Canada and not living here anymore.

So yeah, here it is, Made in England.

We have to face once more the long struggle, the cruel sacrifice, and not be don't inaudited by feelings of...

That was Made in England, written by my good self, with lots of help from my future wife.

And yeah, there's a video of that, I think, still knocking around on YouTube under The Man from 2269.

I think that's the handle that we used at the time.

Anyway, that was it for this week.

I hope you enjoyed Richard Wiseman.

That was a great episode.

And please come back for another episode, which will be out very, very soon.

Thank you very much.

Goodbye for now.