What was your first reaction when you were approached to do
a TV show?
I was told ‘we’re looking for someone to front a C4 show’. I didn’t really
understand what that meant, but I went to meet them and showed them a
few things from my repertoire. Never having wanted to be on TV, it seemed
like a fun idea but wasn’t anything that I had been trying to secure. I
remember telling people that it might happen. So I guess I was a bit excited
by it. It was more of a ‘why not’ than an ‘at last’. I was very happy doing the
gigs I was doing.
Are you ever shocked or amazed by anything when working on
your shows?
When I use hypnosis I’m often fascinated by the responses. I tend to be
sceptical that anything special happens when people are hypnotised, and
I certainly believe that nothing can be achieved that can’t be achieved
outside of that state, but clearly it taps into something. When Chris, our guy
from The Assassin who went on to shoot Stephen Fry, happily laid in an ice
bath because I told him under hypnosis that it was perfectly comfortable
it surprised both me and the other clinical hypnotists who were arranging
the experiment. We had been happy for it not to work on the show so were
genuinely intrigued as to whether it would. The fact that a few words from
me and Chris’ belief would make that work still astonishes me, even though
I’ve been doing it for years. The question is whether or not he would have
been able to do it without hypnosis but with some other form of motivation
in place. There’s no way of knowing now, but it would seem you would be
hard pushed to do what he did just to prove a point or because you were
expecting some reward.
You’ve mentioned before that you used to be an evangelical
Christian, but are now an atheist. What brought about this
change?
A few factors. I was aware of a lot of hostility from fellow student Christians
towards me and the hypnosis. I could tell that was m