If you haven't come across Derren Brown before then Inside your Mind is a great introduction to the considerable skills of the only living Jedi Master. His show, Mind Control debuted on Channel 4 in the wake of a resurgence of interest in magic spearheaded by David Blaine. But what Derren Brown does hardly falls into the category of sleight-of-hand--his "magic" is firmly grounded in the workings of the mind and psychology. The result is a fascinatingly mysterious, but definitely not psychic, phenomenon.

Derren Brown uses his skills on selected participants who answered an advertisement. Under the guise of attending a 'motivational seminar', Derren recruits a number of participants, and can he persuade any of his group of responsible, middle-management businessmen and women to steal £100,000 in an armed robbery?

The Gathering was a live stage show performed in a secret location (hidden from the audience). The audience was hand picked by Brown and included psychologists, college students, celebrities, psychics, taxi drivers, and magicians.

Derren Brown attempts to extract secret confessions from the audience, playing unforgettable mind games and revealing the wonder of Svengali – an automaton allegedly created in the image of its owner's dead son. Was it used in early Victorian magic shows, or is it another of Brown's eerie games?

Derren Brown doesn’t have a good word to say about Pastor Benny Hinn. Brown made a TV series a few years back, Miracles for Sale, about evangelical faith healers such as Hinn, calling them shysters. He criticises them again in his show. But alongside the moral disgust sat a showman’s grudging respect, for in his new show Miracle, Brown stages his own laying on of hands – another startling night of Derren-do in which the nation’s favourite mentalist apparently cures a woman’s rheumatoid arthritis, eases a man’s aching wisdom tooth and restores a bespectacled punter’s 20:20 vision. He’s not crediting God, of course, but that scarcely makes the experience feel any less exalted.
Elsewhere in the first half, there are routines ranging from the low-level perplexing (guessing which sweeties audience members are guzzling) to the wickedly playful – as when Brown repeatedly pilfers a 50p piece from his volunteer’s hand, despite openly declaring how he’s about to do so. How pliable we are, you might conclude. But also, how powerful our minds, in ways few of us fully understand. That’s what Brown invites us to take from a show in which he tells instructive tales and quotes Epictetus in favour of knowing ourselves and living in the moment. “Life is like a piece of music,” he tells us, “and you’re supposed to be dancing.” After Miracle, my mind at least was doing the jitterbug all the way home.

The second of Derren Brown's live stage shows that toured the UK following its success in the West End.

Each stand-alone episode asks and answers a single question featuring the usual inventive and jaw dropping Derren Brown mixture of stunts, suggestion and thought-provoking entertainment combined with tried and tested psychological experiments, to illustrate how easily our behaviour can be manipulated.

Illusionist Derren Brown concocts a psychological experiment in which he tries to manipulate an ordinary person into taking a bullet for a stranger