This for me is the pick of Super Saturday, I really enjoyed the pilot a few months ago and is thrilled to see it’s become a series, althogh I’m not so sure this is the best timeslot for it. Magicians perform for Penn and Teller and if P and T can’t work out how the trick is done then they get to open their show in Vegas. Tonight we get to see how John Archer and Ben Earle got on with their Vegas trip after fooling the pair in the pilot, and other magicians step up to the mark. Jonathan Ross is our host who may be with or without dodgy facial hair. ITV at 8pm.
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Well, I’ll say something! Initially during the first quarter I thought this was quite slow, but now we’re most of the way through the show I think the pace does suit it actually. (That and Graham was delightfully eccentric).
It’s nice light and fluffy entertainment and I find it enjoyable!
Fun but somewhat ponderous. If this was a BBC show where they get the full 57 minutes, fine. But a commercial 43 minutes or whatever it is these days… there’s too many luxuries taken with the running order for my liking. Three ‘contestants’ in 60 minutes is too low.
And I still think they screw up the reveals. Why don’t P&T write it down on paper, give it to the adjudicator and then there’s a reveal? No-one’s really that surprised the way they do it here.
But it’s not The Magicians, at least.
But it didn’t drag, did it? With all the setup of acts 2 and 3, a fourth might have felt a little crowbarred with P&T’s trick in there as well.
In the Twittersphere, reaction seems almost universally positive – but can it sustain better than ‘so-so’ ratings over a series? The pilot got 4.1m – I wouldn’t expect tonight’s episode to do any better than that.
Given it will be against Dale Winton’s amazing mini lottery machine from next Saturday.
I enjoyed it but I agree that 3 contestants isn’t really enough. However they’ve got 4 next week so I think it must have just been because of the bit from Vegas.
I’m pretty sure in the January show there were five acts. But as Tom says, it didn’t drag.
I think it’s a shame the only tricks that have got through so far are quite small scale, although I thought the guy who won this evening was great.
I think my point is… is this show called “Fool Us” or “Show Us”? This is either a game show or it’s a variety show. It’s a bit weird crow-barring in tricks “just for fun” when they’re not there to fool P&T. You could have easily had five people in the time they had available.
In Penn and Teller we have proper world class magicians, you can’t NOT make them do a trick, a sizable proportion of the audience will be watching for them.
It’s a variety show. With a shoehorned “game” that delivers an anticlimax every time, reveal or no reveal.
Thought: are they “doing a Dragons’ Den” on this, i.e. placing a winner last every week?
I’m certainly going to be watching the colour of JR’s tie each week to see if they’re swapping acts between episodes.
dont appear to be, penn and teller are JR were in the same garb in the next week spoiler.
But, it’s miles better than The Magicians (even though P&T’s set piece had a miserable piece of misdirection at the end of the illusion. Hey, fellas – don’t moan about the performers attempts at hiding misdirection/attention distraction, when yours (switching off the stage lights) was so obvious to hide Teller getting up from the drop box built into the stage..
There is a fault line with the show thought. I remember listening on line to Penn Gillette’s very shortlived radio phone-in show back in 2008. Once of his callers (ironcally from the UK on holiday in New York) phoned up and mentioned the Bob Monkhouse theory of comedy, which was any joke is derived from just 3 original jokes.
He asked whether magic worked along the same lines. To which he said basically yes, althought rather than original jokes, all magic works on 3 or 4 main and repeated methods worked into any trick, and he can spot which one will be employed during the pre-trick patter.
All of which makes me suspicious when he grandly announces on the show that he doesn’t have a clue how that trick was done and you are coming to Las Vegas.
Over the course of the series there are 35 magicians featured (he said so in his vlog) so therefore by averages during the series of 7, I reckon 4-5 will go to Vegas, and we should have a couple of episodes where all of the performers will get found out.
Although there are about 6 or 7 magic ‘effects’ (appearance, disappearance, transposition, etc.) the number of methods for doing any one of these runs into the dozens.
Which backs up my original point. If you know in the preamble what kind of trick the illusionist is going to perform, you can then set your mind to deconstruct it, the reassemble it to how you would do it and then work out how it’s done. Something that Penn and Teller must have done a thousand times over.
So for them to be totally stumped over the act on Saturday night with the magician who is going to Vegas (in a prize which ironically, appears worse than viewers competition – as I bet the winners on the tv show don’t get £5,000 spending money) rings a bit hollow (for the record – I’m no member of the magic circle but even I spotted some Palming, Misdirection, and slight of hand manouvers going on)
But it is still a million times better than The Magicians.
Agree it seems a little thin on content, but on the flipside it’s nice to see the acts get the time their routines require, rather than them being forced to fit it into a two minute routine. The addition of a fourth act next week should help speed things along a bit.
Other than that it must be doing something right to get me to watch a show presented by Jonathan Ross.
In regards to our poker lobby conversation, can’t see the name of a 60+ year magician in the credits for Fool Us.