I’m posting this now on the off-chance that I’m right. Then I’ll be able to boast about being brilliant at figuring things out. If you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, earlier on Derren Brown “predicted” the lottery result live on TV – and got all six numbers.
Obviously, to rule a few things out, it couldn’t have been a delay or a pre-record as Camelot lottery rules are tight as anything, so the draw was definitely real. The bit about not being able to show the prediction before the results was obviously bullshit – not least because there’s nothing wrong with guessing some numbers, and they can’t worry about disproportionate ticket sales as machines stop selling lottery tickets at half seven in the evening.
The way I think it was done is through clever motion tracking camera trickery – I think the numbers were digitally imposed on the balls. Real time live digital tracking has been around for a few years now – like how the ITV News studio, which is mostly digital greenscreen background moves around with the camera and acts like a “real” backdrop would. This explains why the numbers on the balls looked so real.
Think about it – what is used in TV and film production to track camera movements? Ping-pong balls of course – its why they wear green skin-tight suits covered in ping-pong balls – and ping-pong balls are what the numbers Derren predicted were printed on. How easily tracked.
Rather horrifyingly, from the second the show started I knew it was being filmed at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith – I recognised the pallets just outside (!), and when Derren walked in and it showed the empty audience seating I recognised it from when I went to see Charlie Brooker’s You Have Been Watching being recorded a couple of months ago. A quick look on the Riverside Studios website confirms this. Now why would a TV production rent an entire empty studio?
Renting a studio is phenomenally expensive and thanks to advances in technology such as small cameras and digital production it is much cheaper to do things on location and stuff -massive old-style TV cameras aren’t needed. This is the reason BBC TV Centre is being sold off – studio production simply isn’t needed and isn’t economical (The One Show, for instance, isn’t a “proper” TV studio with lighting rigs and the like – it’s just some converted offices in the BBC Broadcast Centre next door to TVC). So why go to the expense of renting a big TV studio? Especially the biggest one in the Riverside complex… why would the hour long live show afterwards that has a studio audience be relegated to another studio in the Riverside complex?… Why not put them in the biggest studio?
Could it be that Studio 1 at Riverside Studios is the only one equipped to deal with digital motion tracking stuff?
Sure, the camera was shaky and stuff – some might say suspiciously so – but modern digital production techniques can get around this (it wouldn’t surprise me if the shake itself was artificial – steady-cams do exist after all).
The only thing that goes against this “theory” is that it doesn’t fit in with the theme of misdirection that Brown mentioned in the trails for it and stuff.
What do you think? Could I be right? Let me know in the comments.
Update:Peter Price, a man who unlike me actually knows what he is talking about, says that Riverside isn’t equipped for the sort of Free-D technology I speculate about. Though if it did, it would apparently easily put numbers on balls. I’m also well aware that CGI trickery isn’t really in the spirit of what Derren Brown does. But now I’ve speculated this, I may as well stick with it to save face for the time being. So I still think that I’m definitely right.
I went down to Westminster today to see what was going on, and to check if Gordon Brown was still the Prime Minister or not. I bumped into Shadow Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox whilst down there – so seizing the moment I thought I better ask him something. I am now officially a citizen journalist:
I like to think of myself as the anti-Amish. Not only do I love technology and hate Amish people, but I think that rather than steal your soul, only photography or being filmed can truly validate your existence. It’s why I moved to the CCTV capital of the world, and why today, I appeared fairly prominently in the background of a news report.
No, I wasn’t in Austria sticking up for Joseph Fritzl (though I’d still argue that the default reaction to “secret underground dungeon” is “that’s cool” rather than “that’s horrible”), but I went to a protest organised by TV’s Mark Thomas. That’s right, TV’s Mark Thomas. Not the other one.
The cause was noble: it was calling for the government to invade Jersey.
Jersey is known to be harbouring billions of pounds, having spent years avoiding tax inspections, and is thought to have links to a number of rogue corporations and shadowy groups known as hedge-funds. What makes the need for this action even more imminent is that the UK government has in fact sold off various buildings to private companies (who then lease it back) based in Jersey – in practice, this means that HMRC, the tax inspectors who collect tax and track down people who are avoiding and evading tax rent a building from a company who avoid paying tax. You don’t have to be a genius to realise that this is not on and thus support the military action.
Brilliantly, the story made More4 news tonight. Here’s their report, in which if you look closely you can see me in a suit:
Obviously though, what with this being the future and all, it was I, the citizen journalist who beat Channel 4 to the studio. In fact, I did a live broadcast to the internet. Here’s my report, as it was broadcast live:
When I got off the tube earlier today I was surprised to receive a flurry of texts and tweets telling me some exciting news: My appearance on the Weakest Link was being shown again on BBC One! It was recorded in November 2007 and first shown on March 3rd 2008. If you missed it first time around or want to watch it again, it’s going to be on the iPlayer for the next week.
Well that was exciting. I’ll post more as soon as I’ve put something decent together. If you’re in the UK and you missed it you can watch it on the BBC iPlayer for the next week:
Just in case you haven’t spotted all of the not-so-subtle hints, or the post below, or are genuinely stupid, here’s one last reminder that I’m on the Weakest Link Tonight (that’s Monday 3rd).
That’s on BBC One, at 5.15pm. Just after Newsround. I’ll probably post more about it after the event. Unless I come across badly.
You might have spotted all of the subtle hints I’ve been placing over the past few months. I mean, if you’re an obsessive compulsive who’s obsession is me. But now I can finally tell you: I’m going to be on the Weakest Link. Yes, the TV game show.
Its going to be broadcast on Monday March 3rd at 5.15pm on BBC One. Tune in and watch me make a fool of myself! (It’ll presumably also be on the iPlayer for the week following.)
I’ll hopefully put some of the “best bits” (assuming there are some) on YouTube afterwards, complete with directors commentary.
I noticed something peculiar earlier – Facebook network pages have lots of statistics about the people in the network – percentage male and female, a breakdown of political leanings, that sort of the thing, but there is one obvious statistical breakdown they’ve missed though, which strikes me as odd considering they collect the data in a regimented, easily counted way: religion.
I find it slightly perplexing that at a glance I can discover that 8% of my university colleagues define themselves as liberal, and 3% of them are married, but not find out which strand of bullshit most of them believe. I’m actually tempted to play the “political correctness gone mad” card.
So given that I love facebook, pie charts and slagging off religion, I took it upon myself to generate the statistics myself. As I am a man of science, I don’t want to create the impression that this pie-chart is at all accurate, fair, or representative. There’s the usual caveats of this is only made up of the 1126 people who are less feckless than the 5359 other people at my university who have neglected to enter a religion in the religion box on their profile.
This basically means that the people (women) who have it listed that they’re “spiritual” because they occasionally buy scented candles don’t count. Likewise entries like “none” and misspellings haven’t been counted because I’m not willing to count this manually. The benefit of this though is that the people who do count have clearly at least thought about their religious position enough to fill it in with something coherent, so they can probably explain their beliefs (but probably not justify them in the case of the theists… zing).
Can I name this pie-chart “Muhammed”? Will that piss anyone off?
As you’d expect, the big religions – Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have the largest market share of the theists, with 38%, 14%, and 18% respectively. Excellently though, it appears that there are lots of Atheists and Agnostics (and Pastafarians) – about 29% of people are going to be predisposed towards acting rationally in all situations. This probably isn’t surprising unless like me, you spend your free time on YouTube getting annoyed at creationist videos, though.
What I find slightly surprising is that considering there’s five Jews, which is a sort of proper religion, there’s 5 “Wiccan” people. Or to give them their proper name “attention seekers who used to be goths when they were teenagers”. Similarly, there’s four “pagan” people, which is slightly bewildering, as they can’t even use the theist, cough, “reasoning”, cough, that loads of people believe what they believe, “so it must be true”.
So there you have it – a breakdown of the religions at my university, as derived from some unreliable statistics.
I’ve invented a new game. Its called “How many people on Facebook share a name with someone I don’t like?”. I’ve been trying to think of a snappier title, but the best I can come up with has to be read in a Scottish accent: “Guess who many?“.
It turns out that there’s loads of unfortunate people in the world. Here’s a top-13 list of some unlucky people cursed with sharing a name with some truly dreadful people:
Nick Griffin – 274
David Cameron – 252
James Blunt – 171
David Mellor – 47
Jeffrey Archer – 37
Maxine Carr – 12
Richard Blackwood – 12
Richard Littlejohn – 8
Ian Huntley – 5
Vernon Kay – 3
Lowri Turner – 2
Madeleine McCann – 1
Adolf Hitler – 0
There are 171 James Blunts in the world. I especially feel sorry for the ugly ones, who have the joke set up for them by their namesake. At least no one named their kids Adolf Hitler, I guess.
I feel sorry for the Madeleine McCann on there – every day she must glance at the Daily Express front page on the way to work, only to learn that she’s either alive, dead, or whether or not her parents killed her, depending on the editorial slant the paper are taking that day. And every time her location is questioned, it must sound like some sort of sick joke, rather than a genuine enquiry. I hope she’s not planning any trips to Portugal otherwise we could be in for a year of the press saying “Maddy has been found” and then speculation on how she’s managed to age by 20 years.
And the poor other Richard Littlejohns – if they Google for their own name, as people (er, I) sometimes do, they might inadvertently think that I hate them.
Well that was exciting. I’ll post more as soon as I’ve put something decent together. If you’re in the UK and you missed it you can watch it on the BBC iPlayer for the next week: