Still failed to drink any alcohol so far this year, but I’m doing well on the telly-watching.  I slumped on the sofa for a couple of hours this evening watching the film Wanted on DVD and then 90 minutes of actual, live, TV which was Penn & Teller.Wanted, by the way is total nonsense, but very enjoyable nonsense.  I have watched it before and love its style and the directorial trickery that reminds me of David Fincher or Robert Rodriguez.  Something reminded me of it the other day and I just felt the urge to see it again.

The Penn and Teller thing was great though but, as I remarked relating to the BBC 1 show last weekend, you really can’t go wrong with decent magic.   The idea was for magicians to try and fool Penn & Teller; to do a trick that they couldn’t explain, which is a bit of a challenge.

I can see the point of it.  I love seeing how magic tricks are done, but I do like to be amazed first.

I’m not sure that Penn & Teller were really amazed, although I’m sure they were impressed with the skills on show.  The two acts that ‘fooled’ them only did so on a technicality in my opinion.

I think that P&T would have been truly chuffed to see a trick that they couldn’t work out and therefore couldn’t replicate.   In both cases they thought they could see a way it could be done, but the magicians actually did it a different way, and I’m not sure that is the point, even though it was all very entertaining.

Obviously I don’t have a clue about any of them.  The chap with envelopes didn’t force envelopes on anybody so all 5 must have contained dummy notes and when he was left with jut one he did a switch somehow, but that is as far as I can work it out.  The bloke with the shrinking box… probably had his legs straight out inside the table and possibly also had at least one false arm sticking up.  I think the distinctive socks were part of the misdirection.

All very good though, and the final Penn & Teller trick was a great twist on a familar trick.

What I didn’t like was all those adverts.  It is so long since I watched anything where I couldn’t fast-forward through them.  “But they finance the programmes” I can hear everybody yell, but it wasn’t the endless DFS ads that did my head in, it was the trainers for dancing on ice.

I think I can safely predict I won’t be watching that.