I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening performing at a benefit gig at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmonds. It was all to help raise funds for the theatre and had been organised by Al Murray. The rather impressive line-up was him, Stewart Lee, Chris Addison, Andy Zaltzman, Derren Brown and me. It was a real pleasure to watch everyone else and I heartily recommend you try and catch any or all of the above. It was nice to have magical mystical Derren Brown on amongst the stand-ups. I have always liked his TV shows and throughly enjoyed taking date 47 to his live show. It made me believe he was an evil necromancer capable of glancing into our very souls, but who luckily chose to use his powers instead to guess which hand a coin was in and learn the phone book instead.
Me, Stew, Al and Derren all travelled up in a people carrier together. Before we picked up Derren we had been making much comedy capital out of how we mustn't look into his eyes or he would make us all his zombie slaves, but he turned out to be a fairly quiet and polite man, who took our occasional jokes in good humour.
I had wanted to ask him whether he ever used his magical powers to make people fall in love with him or more pertinently in bed with him and whether he could teach me how just to do that bit, but I didn't want to appear gauche. Luckily Stewart Lee was thinking along similar, though less crude lines and managed to think of a way of phrasing it which wouldn't make him look like a pervert who should be arrested. He asked Derren if he was seeing anyone at the moment and when it was revealed that he wasn't, Stew followed up with the enquiry as to whether Derren's powers might make potential lovers suspicious of him. He posited that they might worry that he'd just tricked them into loving him and be suspicious of his motives. Derren remained relatively silent on the matter, but it felt like maybe Stew had hit on a pertinent truth. You'd think being magic would be all laughs, but now I saw a glimpse into the sad world that superpowers can create for someone. I said that on the positive side he would be able to go out with someone and then when it had gone wrong or he'd got bored he could just magic them to forget the relationship had ever happened. Stew pooh-poohed this until me and Al revealed to him that he had actually had a six month long relationship with Derren last year, that only he didn't know about. Derren added, "I've already had sex with you three times during this journey."
We all laughed.
But in a slightly nervous way. Because for all we knew he'd had sex with us all.
