Comments on: Derren Brown – The Gameshow: Tonight at 9pm Ch4

By: Kim

Kim — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 11:13:31 +0000

Why were there so many “p” words? Just a curious diversion? Panty liners and peas?

By: Graham Lowell

Graham Lowell — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:16:39 +0000

I thought the show made the point it set out to, about how easy it is for people to lost their morality in a mob, very well. I see David Aaronovtich referred to it in a Times Opinion column.
But what I found really frightening was how good Derren Brown is as a gameshow host. If he ever loses all sense of morality himself we may have the next Michael Barrymore…

By: BlokeyMan

BlokeyMan — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 21:33:34 +0000

Great show – Milgrim and Zimbardo spring to mind. If I were in the audience, I’d have been voting for positive choices just to be a smartarse. I’m not sure but i think I saw a couple of grins at the end – audience members who weren’t taken in?

It was mentioned that it was “convenient” that Chis had deleted his internet history – this isn’t as suspicious as you may think. Some browsers have high default privacy settings (e.g. Firefox), so if you use them “out of the box” then you’ll have no internet history. When I set up computers for friends, that’s how I set them up.

I’m not saying he wasn’t an actor, just that his browser settings aren’t evidence or an indication of him hiding anything. Just to amplify the point – I see other commenters have already raised this issue.

By: Tanya

Tanya — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 10:18:40 +0000

Actually LAUGHING OUT LOUD as he got chased down a street???? That, ladies & gentleman, is mob mentality at it’s ‘finest’. It doesn’t matter if Derren told them things about Chris to, how you say, sway their opinion, they are all individuals & should KNOW the difference between right & wrong. That, I think, was the whole point of the program. Being part of a crowd, however much you deny it, DOES change your perspective of right & wrong, because you will always have that one person saying “it’s only a laugh!!” As someone said earlier, an extreme example of this is the KKK. I’m sure we have all been part of the mob mentality at one part of our lives, whether through peer pressure or not, & all of us will have had varying levels of extremist behaviour.

By: Tanya

Tanya — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 10:11:23 +0000

I am a massive fan of Derren Brown & thought this show was absolutely awesome. If you think about it, you can really relate to it.. it’s like a mix of peer presser & the mob mentality he was talking about. The first options start quite ‘soft’, i.e. no harm coming to him, just a bit of a laugh right? People who think “oh, I don’t like this, I want something nice to happen to him” can often be swayed by someone saying “but no harm will come to him, it’s just a bit of a laugh!” so they pick the nasty option. Then, as the nasty option’s get increasingly worse, they have lost their identity & are in full swing of the mob mentality. Shouting for someone to smash up their posessions & the like, & then the final option, wanting him to get kidnapped & took to a disused warehouse???

By: Chrisdore

Chrisdore — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:20:51 +0000

It doesn’t matter if it was actors or not! The friend from work didn’t seem real and it’s possible that Chris was acting but why would they need to put actors in there? There’s nothing he would do differently if he was an actor. And of course they’d create the good outcomes and film it all even if they didn’t use it it’s channel 4 think of how many pilots are made that never get shown.

The point of this isn’t to get the audience to vote or give someone a good or a crap night, the point is to educate viewers on mob mentality and the outcomes. And I’m sure it worked.

By: Liam

Liam — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:41:18 +0000

In the bar when the barman is berrating Kris for not paying his bill, he is really quite adament he is in the right and is taking no excuses whatsoever. Cut bck to Derren who talks for 30 seconds then bck to the bar for the Michelle Bass stunt.The barman is away. What happened there then?After all the fuss he made did he just turn round and say “ill let you off this time” ….. In the short space of time from the camera leaving the barman asking for the money and going back to them for the Michelle thing, Kris and his friends are talking away normally as if nothing happened.If this had been real either the barman would still be there or Kris would be sitting complaining about it to his friends and trying to get the attention of the waiter he paid…why didnt he ask to speak to who he paid?

By: Berber Anna

Berber Anna — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:24:30 +0000

Katie: Two possible options, probably connected.

A) When Kris’s colleague made the call, the options were ‘tell him he’s fired’ and ‘tell him you’re giving him a TV’. The TV could be the one connected to that option.

B) There was a bat placed conveniently near the television (probably by the co-conspiring girlfriend). When the producer picked that up, he moved towards the television, setting the crowd up to think of smashing it. If nobody in the audience responded (although I believe they probably did), all you’d need was for one of the studio workers to cry out ‘smash it’ and see who picked it up — those masks would restrict people’s view enough for them not to notice it wasn’t one of them who said it.

By: Berber Anna

Berber Anna — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:15:29 +0000

Hannah: I don’t know who you should ask about the legalities and ethics of these things, but do keep in mind that ‘prank shows’ like MTV’s Boiling Points and Disaster Date essentially do the same thing — they put people in very uncomfortable situations to see how they’ll react (and pay them money if they keep their cool). And those shows don’t even have the redeeming value of being an experiment about crowd psychology, they just do it because apparently, some people like to watch others be miserable.

By: Shamita

Shamita — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:21:38 +0000

Even if the actors were among the audience, shouldn’t people use their own concious to vote but not follow others? This show was to prove how easily we stop thinking for ourselves but when we are in a certain group we just follow the majority mostly.

I agree that it wasn’t quite fair – because it was a game show, so they think it’s harmless and just because of tv it can’t be bad for a long distance. However you can’t deny that they wanted bad things to happen to him.

Plus, Chris was a negative character. He cheated and was a lad, plus not honest (Internet History) – that helped the audience to voted bad. Would they still vote bad if that would be a hardworking, kind and nice women instead of Chris?