Derren Brown is to attempt to hypnotise a member of the public into ‘killing’ a celebrity in his new series.

The Assassin will be the first of four programmes that make up The Experiments, his latest series for Channel 4.

Brown said the stunt is inspired by the testimonies given by political assassins who say they were brainwashed by the CIA.

“It’s taking some of those apparent and apocryphal techniques and seeing whether they could actually work in real life, or whether they’re just movie, fiction stuff,” he said in an interview with the website Primetime Unreality TV.

The illusionist will also stage his own fake game show for the series for an experiment that aims to demonstrate the psychology behind ‘mob mentality’.

The subjects arrive thinking they are coming to watch a Brown-fronted gameshow in which they get to make decisions about what happens to somebody.

“They’re always given a positive and a negative option, and the audience are all given masks, so they have no identity,” he said. “The experiment was to see what behaviour this would bring out. It ties in with internet bullying, which is often anonymous, and rioting of course, and football hooliganism, things like that.”

Brown said the show explored similar territory to the infamous Stanford Prison experiment, in which people were put into a prison environment and role-played prisoners and gurds.

He admitted that the series would look into the darker side of human behaviour but promised that one of the experiments was “rather positive and jolly”.

The Objective Productions series starts on C4 on 21 October.

 

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