You’ll like this…

Of course, I wasn’t even meant to be to a loose end on Saturday. The annual Fence Homegame in Anstruther should have been a no-brainer for the weekend, but a complete sellout and seemingly no way to blag passes left me high and dry. Given that it’s the first one I’ve missed in the event’s eight year history, a big sulk combined with a quiet night in seemed like a plan.

Until we saw a piece in the Herald that morning. A tribute to Lafayette, a superstar magician of from the early 1900s – in fact, one who’d perished 100 years ago, to the week. In Edinburgh’s Festival theatre.
It all looks like an interesting diversion. Ok, the magician paying tribute is Paul Daniels – a cheesy TV showman at best, a fairly rabid Tory supporter at worst – but putting that aside, an interesting night out. And I’m a sucker for magic and illusions, and Daniels can be relied upon to deliver. So we order online, getting cheap seats pretty close to the front of the stalls (cheap due to their being a bit to one side, I guess, but not a big problem – since much of the show turns out to involve close-up magic this proves to be a good option).

Following a quick preamble and a slideshow on Lafayette, Daniels announces that he won’t be recreating the trick that Lafayette was performing the night he died. Since that involved a lion and a horse (the magician died going back into the burning building in a vain attempt to rescue his equine partner) that’s understandable, though the theme of the tricks is pretty much vintage. and low-tech. David Copperfield this certainly ain’t.

The show itself isn’t bad. In two parts, the first half is a mix of Daniels pretty much in the persona you know from his TV appearances – doing stand-up comedy and the odd close-up trick, combined with a couple of showpiece illusions – an assistant bursts out of a dolls’ house the set almost peaks too early such is the surprise element of this trick. Some more card trickery and another more involved illusion, where a woman in a standing cabinet is split into 3 (achieved by 3 large bladed sections that slot into where her head, stomach and legs presumably weren’t).

The second half is better in a sense, though the use of doves and rabbits might have animal rights types up in arms, though none of these were harmed in the making of some convincing slight of hand by guest Scott Penrose. His short set, presumably based around the tricks of Lafayette’s time, includes a set of Chinese Linking Rings, a trick which has fascinated me since a friend of my father’s – the late Henderson Lynn, a Glasgow magician – showed me the trick up close. It is baffling (solid brass rings link and pass through each other as if they had gaps cut in them. No, they don’t).
One of the most fun afternoons of my childhood was when Harry (his real name) got me up on stage at a kids’ party and proceeded to draw blood from my arm, and then changed it into coke and squirted it into a glass for me to drink.

I’d not expected to be taking the stage again, but yes, perhaps due to our closeness to the front of the stage, Paul Daniels picked (on) me to come onstage, along with another chap, Andy, “for laughing at him getting picked”.
Our task: to tie Debbie McGee to a chair, so that in a mock seance trance she would be unable to start throwing around a variety of tin cups and plates. To be honest, this trick is the least interesting of the show, or would be if I wasn’t standing on the stage – I say this because there’s not much to it and could be achieved by someone clad in black hiding in the seance cabinet along with the lovely Debbie.)
(Edit: In fact, Paul Daniels has blogged on the show and says: “I forgot to tell them to pick the cabinet up to show no-one was concealed inside it.” That would have changed things somewhat…)

After that, I’m forced into a bet with a fiver that he can’t pick the card I selected (he can of course, it turns up in his sealed wallet). and I’m offstage. That’s actually when the show hots up a little as Andy and another audience member end up sitting on chairs which mysteriously become ‘electrified’. Maybe for the best I missed out on that one.
Anyway, that was my evening and my brush with fame. In all, a fitting tribute to the man who was by that era’s standard, a magical megastar – on a level of Paul Daniels, but as he readily admits, a status achieved without the power of TV.
Happily, the 1911 show wasn’t recreated too accurately – no fire, no-one died. But as would have been the case in 1911, an audience left wondering exactly “how did he do that?” Well, as Mr Daniels would cheesily say, “that’s magic!”