People often protest that they’re not mind readers, but Derren Brown is – or at least appears to be. Born in Croydon in 1971, Brown was an imaginative and precocious child who went on to study Law and German at Bristol University. Despite the formidable psychological skills which would have made him a demon lawyer, Brown abandoned the Law on leaving university to take up a career in magic and mentalism: “I saw a hypnotist perform in my first year at university and got very interested in the subject. I performed hypnosis for a couple of years, but I didn’t want to do full-time stage hypnosis as some of it struck me as a little tacky, so I started doing close-up magic.