MAGICAL THINKING – AN EVENIG WITH MARK MASON. CHAIRED BY SAVILIAN PATRICK KIDD.

Mark Mason doesn’t want to be just another magician doing tricks to fool you. Instead, he loves the way magic can develop your thinking. So he does the tricks for you – then helps you to work out how he did them. Cards, coins, iPhones, wallets: all these and more are used to amaze you – and then you amaze yourself by (with Mark’s hints) solving the mystery of how the tricks are done.

The aim is not just to teach you some incredible magic you can use to baffle your friends (although of course that’s part of it). The real point of the session is to get your brain working in a different way. By showing you how a magician’s mind works, Mark reveals the mental techniques that will let you solve pretty well any trick you’ll see in the future. What’s more, the techniques can be applied to problems you’ll encounter at work and in life more generally.       

Mark draws a cross on a card – and it’s the card you then pick from the pack. He makes a coin disappear from one hand and then reappear in the other. He makes one elastic band pass through another as you watch them. At the beginning of the session you will have no idea how such seemingly impossible feats are happening. By the end, not only will you be able to do them yourself – you’ll also see the world from a slightly different angle.

Mark Mason has, over the years, researched the BBC radio coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral, sold Christmas cards in Harrods, busked outside Eric Clapton gigs at the Albert Hall and (for one of his non-fiction books) walked the entire London Underground system overground. His journalism has appeared in publications from the Spectator to Four Four Two, and he is the Times Diary’s ‘pet trivia hound’. A fan of magic since childhood, his fascination these days is with what tricks reveal about our thinking.

‘How have you done that then?’ Jonathan Agnew

‘That is great.’ Michael Vaughan

‘Jesus!’ Phil Tufnell

BBC Test Match Special team

Patrick Kidd has been a journalist for 25 years with various national newspapers and magazines, principally The Times for whom he wrote the Diary column and political sketch. An anthology of the latter was published as The Weak Are A Long Time in Politics.