In Blaine’s street magic, the ‘streets’ themselves are differentiated only as the familiar
‘everyday’ and the mysterious ‘elsewhere’. In Magician Impossible, Dynamo visits a range of locations, seeking new experiences and spectators, elaborating upon Blaine’s persona of the wandering magician. However, notions of place in Magician Impossible are built around existing British representations of specific localities, and Dynamo’s subjective experience of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’. These strategies are not apparent in Blaine’s street magic specials.14 Through their
association with Dynamo, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ both become imbued with enchantment and the
potential for transformation, although these exciting possibilities are restrained by the momentary nature of the magic effect. Two case studies will be discussed in this section that propose different notions of transformation appearing in connection with real places. The first is the transformed Bradford, in which Magician Impossible seeks to recuperate Bradford’s image
through foregrounding the efforts of individuals to make a difference within their community, thereby imbuing a place which has been represented as possessing an almost excessive ‘realness’
of material and cultural impoverishment with magic and possibility.
Gargi Bhattacharyya argues that provincial cities in Britain such as Bradford are excluded from certain spheres of representation through their lack of visibility in either heavy or heritage
industries. This is explained as a ‘tragedy of small countries’ that are organised around one
principal metropolitan that receives much of the country’s economic and cultural capital, while
‘provincial cities get the bad press of urban living… Some places, it seems, are both too industrial
and not industrial enough’ (Bhattacharyya 163). This does not mean to say that such cities are representational voids; in fact, their marginal status is profoundly significant. For example, Birmingham is described by Bhattacharyya as a ‘spectre’ haunting Britain’s imagination of itself
(162), and a ‘joke nowhere’, characterised by un- or under-employment, lack of culture, and a perceived functional and aesthetic purposelessness (165). In response, Bhattacharyya articulates several more positive ways in which Birmingham imagines itself and is imagined in British culture more broadly, as the defensive underdog (162), a city of dissenters (167), a convivial cosmopolis (169), and a global metropolis (172). Likewise, Bradford occupies a particular place in the British
14 I was born and raised in England. Aside from the strategies employed within Magician Impossible
to communicate a sense of ‘realness’, my sensitivity to this reading is doubtless underscored by my own subjective experience of ‘home’.
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cultural imagination. In a sense, it is imagined as an anti-London, its relative deprivation and lack of integration being the Other of London’s affluence and proclaimed multiculturalism, reinforcing
the North-South opposition in England exacerbated by the recent Brexit vote.
In the UK, Bradford’s association with deprivation, poor race relations, and people living on the margins is perhaps compounded by a persistent representative mode of ‘realness’. This
can be seen both in fictional texts such as the ITV drama series Band of Gold (1995- 1997), which portrayed the lives of sex workers, and factual television such as the BBC’s Eyes of a Child (1999) and Channel 4’s Make Bradford British (2012). Eyes of a Child emotively depicted the issue of child poverty on the Delph Hill estate, on which Dynamo grew up. In this documentary, the camera lingers over vandalised and boarded up buildings, rusting shells of cars, and children with dirty faces plaintively describing the nefarious nocturnal activities of the adults around them. Make Bradford British drew on the reality television model of ‘social experiment’, placing people with
differing political and religious views in constrained living situations, with the lofty aim of helping participants and viewers learn something, but with the promise of conflict never far away. The programme was premised upon the apparent segregation between various ethnic communities in Bradford, and questioned whether the development of individual relationships between
representatives of these communities could be a viable method of integration. Though the ‘social experiment’ of Make Bradford British is far from an unqualified success, the programme ends with a sense of optimism, as the participants discuss the ways in which their points of view have been broadened and the changes they have seen in themselves as a result of the relationships they have formed. Though this latter representation of Bradford ends on a hopeful note, which is absent in the almost post-apocalyptic scenes of Eyes of a Child, in both these cases Bradford is problematised as a city that requires fixing, where the realities of the UK’s social evils are manifest
in especially extreme forms.15
15 Though these abject representations may be dominant and persistent, they are by no means
uncontested. A local newspaper reported on the ‘fury’ directed by residents of the estate at the
makers of Eyes of a Child for portraying the community in such an abject manner, and called for the production team to be made accountable for the harm they had caused (‘Film-maker faces full
fury of estate’). Community leaders responded to Make Bradford British by underlining the ‘unfair’
stereotype of Bradford as de facto segregated, with a representative of the organisation Positive
Bradford commenting, ‘Why isn’t it Make Birmingham British or some other city?... From seeing
the trailers, they’ve done the typical extremist viewpoint. That doesn’t represent real Bradford’
(‘Make Bradford British is “unfair image” of city’). However, a spokesperson for Channel 4 defended their decision to situate the programme in Bradford because ‘it is perceived to have one of the more segregated populations in the UK’ (‘Make Bradford British is “unfair image” of city’).
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Magician Impossible takes a rather different strategy than the television texts mentioned
above, facilitated by the editorial choice to eschew the mode of ‘realness’ that characterises Eyes of a Child and Make Bradford British, and instead associating Bradford with enchantment and transformation through the figure of Dynamo. This choice perhaps stems from a similar impulse as that identified by Corner in When the Dog Bites, discussed in the introduction to this thesis, to find an alternative to documentary realism in portraying marginalised places. The ‘homecoming’
episode of Magician Impossible(‘Bradford’) contests the established media narrative of Bradford as a ‘problem’ city. It acknowledges the city’s social and economic issues, but nevertheless
portrays the place as populated by citizens determined to forge a better path for themselves. Like
Dynamo’s family life prior to his celebrity life, the city is partly seen through grainy home video.
The rain-flecked lens of the camera, as it surveys the Delph Hill housing estate, mimics the experience of gazing out of the window on a rainy day, communicating boredom and dreams of a different life elsewhere. Yet this is placed alongside images of activity and community. Footage of Dynamo performing card tricks to crowds is cut with shots of Bradford’s inhabitants dancing and
playing in the fountain of the town centre on a sunny day. In following segments, the relative deprivation of the town is emphasised through voiceover, but the narrative quickly becomes more positive as viewers are introduced to a local children’s charity and a centre for children excluded
from school, with Dynamo performing at each venue. It is implied that the sense of wonder and possibility that his magic creates potentially allows spectators gathered there to imagine life differently. Representing the city of Bradford as a place populated by a lively community that looks after each other, struggling to lift itself out of poverty and away from its bad reputation through social enterprise, mirrors Dynamo’s ascendancy away from the Delph Hill estate and
towards stardom. As with the ‘New York’ episode, these transformative community place-making practices are presented as a strategy of enchantment that already exists, and which are expressed through the astonishing effects of the magician.
Dynamo’s persona is thus aligned with his‘home’ community, as both seek to actively better themselves. His personal narrative is presented as a parallel narrative to Bradford’s transformation rather than one that is necessarily interrelated, as Dynamo’s personal obstacles
This point about Bradford’s ‘perceived’ segregation and the ‘typical extremist viewpoint’ moves
the ground of contention from material reality, the contestable point that Make Bradford British was representative of real life experiences lived by real people, to a perceived reality, that people outside the city generally believe Bradford to be segregated, a claim that is harder to refute.
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are not discussed in terms of broader economic or social circumstances, but individualised misfortunes of bullying and poor health. The narrative of transformation around Bradford suggests it is redeemed by the actions of individuals, charities, and NGOs working to improve the lives of those around them, whose examples are sources of inspiration and hope. Yet the issue of how Bradford became so deprived in the first place, of the wider social problems that may not be solved through the efforts of its citizens, is elided. Magician Impossible’s recuperation of
Bradford’s reputation cites the notion that a better future depends upon the choices of individuals
to transform themselves and their community, which also implies that a failure to transform oneself is due to a failure to exercise this choice effectively. The cultural discourse called upon to legitimate this narrative is one of ‘self-actualization’, the notion that by ceaselessly hustling to earn economic and social capital as Dynamo does, people are able to overcome their personal circumstances and achieve their dreams. This seems to be a self-evident, ‘common sense’
proposition in a social context that insists that individual attitudes determine success to a greater extent than material realities of people’s birth and background.
However, it is a narrative that reflects the dominant values of the show’s social context
of contemporary economic liberalism. For Biressi and Nunn, the spread of this political system
‘depended, in part, on the dissemination of certain values as well as practices’, such as ‘self- improvement, individual responsibility and personal investment, as exemplified in the practice of home-ownership and the privatisation of national industries’, and placing the home and family at the heart of policy-making (Class and Contemporary British Culture 8). The narratives of Magician Impossible are consistent with these values and practices, affirming the capacity of the individual to exercise their agency and invest in themselves to achieve their dreams, and in the episode this is extended to the entire community of Bradford. Though the text presents an uplifting and hopeful attempt to change the discourse around Bradford, the mechanisms for actual social change are perhaps overdetermined by the idea of transformation in a context of economic (neo)liberalism. The enchantments of this particular context are further depicted through
Magician Impossible’s portrayals of ‘abroad’ as well as ‘home’, as can be seen in an episode set in Ibiza, where the possibilities of finding fulfilment and transformation through holiday-making are
subsumed into Dynamo’s ‘my world’.
As suggested in analysis of the ‘New York’ episode in section 4.1, tourism and travel for leisure are the primary ways in which Dynamo’s journeys to places other than Britain are understood. Like the notions of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, tourism itself is a concept that presupposes
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its opposite- the everyday practices of ‘home’ and work’ are crucial in understanding the tourist experience (Urry and Larsen 4; 15). John Urry and Jonas Larsen argue that, though there can be
no universal tourist gaze, all gazes are ‘constructed through signs, and tourism involves the collection of signs’ (5), so that television itself opens up possibilities for ‘imaginative travel’ (23). This can be seen, for example, in the ‘gastrodiplomacy’ of food travelogues presented by celebrity chefs, which serve the purpose of ‘promoting the nation… by representing food in the national context’ (Buscemi 46). Magician Impossible narratively justifies its various shooting locations
through existing tourist practices, staging a ‘lads’holiday’ in the ‘Ibiza’ episode, a location that may be aspirational but nevertheless accessible for Dynamo’s audience. In referring to structures and practices that may feel real to its audience, this episode` further blends the fictions and
realities of Dynamo’s magic.
Ibiza itself is a location that commonly appears in the British imagination as a signifier for a particularly excessive hedonism centred around partying, music, sex, and drugs. The ‘peak’
(Wilson 49) of British rave culture that evolved in Ibiza during the summer of 1988, influenced musically by the disco, house, and techno scenes in New York, Chicago, and Detroit, gave way to
a more exclusive ‘clubculture’ that was ‘governed less by peace, love, and togetherness, and more by a subcultural class system’ where ‘it matters what you wear, how you dance, and how you talk’
(Wilson 51). Thus, the nominal freedom offered by Ibiza to throw off the burdens of everyday life is circumscribed by various pressures to conform which, for some, may not provide a radical escape from those experienced at home. As sociologist Daniel Briggs observes in an ethnographic study of British holiday-makers in Ibiza, the decline of work- and community-based identities means that participating in beauty, leisure, and tourism industries is ‘the main practice of being
these days’ for many people, particularly working-class populations in the UK (30). This type of holiday-making is an attempt to ‘construct something real from the unreal and false experience
of consumer capitalism’ (38). The ‘lads’holiday’ has connotations of homosocial bonding during a wild time away from home, in sun-drenched southern European locations such Zante, Magaluf, and Malia. However, Briggs observes that these places ‘are generally constructed [by tourists] in
hindsight as crap; they are places where immature people go. Ibiza, they have heard is about style
and money so should be their next destination or at least one to work towards in the future’ (81).
Through its wealthy and high-class image, Ibiza is reputed to be ‘the holiday pinnacle’ (Briggs 82),
possessing a perceived exclusivity even though both Ibiza and the lesser destinations are uniformly structured around the pleasures of normative deviance expressed through excessive
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consumption. In the night-time economy that Briggs describes, the only barrier to accessing
spaces that describe themselves as ‘exclusive’ is a supply of ready cash, compared to the complex
social and economic matrix that precludes social mobility at home in Britain. This arguably
produces a ‘dualism of the self’, where over the course of the holiday ‘a gradual self-
deconstruction’ takes place as the pleasures of holiday-making are embraced, an ‘identity reversal’ that ‘reinforces the perceived “shitness” of “normal” life but also, at the same time, exaggerates the false happiness of the “good life”’ (Briggs 189).
For Briggs, though, while these spaces of leisure are perceived as connected with freedoms only available on holiday, they are formulated through fantasies of finding fulfilment
through consumption, so that the ‘abroad’ has as much to do with excessive consumption, as does the ‘home’. Briggs is clear that in performing holiday activities such as drinking, casual sex,
taking drugs, and shopping, tourists are ‘playing out an extension’ of regular leisure activities
performed at home (3). Equally apparent for Briggs is that the perceived division between home life and holiday life is real as far as the tourists are concerned, even if these two categories are functionally indistinct. Ibiza is not just a tourist destination, but a rampantly commercialised, homogenously British-oriented tourist destination where tourists have temporary licence to behave as though they possess the wealth and social status of a celebrity, in an environment that
feels exotic and different but not too threateningly foreign. Ibiza’s designation as a tourist
destination may reflect the logic of street magic itself, offering a transformative, temporary fantasy of escape, that ordinary life can become enchanted by partaking in an extraordinary event. Like magic, Ibiza as a concept needs to be believed in, to have some level of affective
investment as ‘real’, to be sustained. In Briggs’ analysis, holiday-making is perceived to be a recuperative activity for people to find the stability and fulfilment abroad that they may be lacking at home, and it is this narrative that underpins the attractions of the magic effects in Magician Impossible.
The idea of the ‘lads’holiday’ is implicitly present in the television text. The people who
accompany Dynamo to Ibiza are introduced as his driver, security guard, and dance teacher, so all have a professional relationship with him, but are also personal friends with whom he can spend a few days of leisure. This is underscored at the top of the episode when Dynamo films himself and his posse in a car with a handheld camera, asking them, ‘So where we going?’ The others protest they don’t know, they were just told to come and pick him up. The next shot situates the group on the island, with postcard-perfect motifs of sun, sand, and tanned women in bikinis, so
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that Ibiza appears as the premise for a spontaneous group trip as well as a shooting location. The labour of filming to produce content for the show is masked as footage produced in the ‘home mode’, to borrow Moran’s term, and thus also masks the labour of the production crew, who by contrast are not addressed, acknowledged, or incorporated into this staging.
For the lads’ holiday in Magician Impossible is evidently a staging, participating in fantasies of Ibiza by promoting the idea that leisure should be characterised by playfulness and consumption. It thereby correlates to, and sustains, the reality of holiday making that Briggs describes. The pretext of the holiday is emphasised by the frequent use of a ‘snapshot’ effect- that is, still images with a sepia filter accompanied by the sound of a shutter release- from footage of a trick that has just been performed, or a memorable image that has just been captured. Ibiza is thus constituted by the pervasive media logic that it is possible to consign experiences to memory even as they are being experienced. The limitations of Urry and Larsen’s concept of television tourism are evident in the imperative to represent the less seedy, more socially acceptable pleasures of Ibiza, the sunshine, beaches, music, and dancing, for the benefit of the viewers who are not sharing the holiday space and its permissive mentality of excess. Drinking and drug use is inferred just once, in a scene where Dynamo prankishly films the rest of the group