Pete Firman: Jiggery Pokery

Where once a hand quicker than the eye was all a magician needed to wow a crowd, the modern conjurer requires a sharp tongue and speedy wit in an age when rabbits in hats and sawn-in-half assistants have become passé.

Middlesbrough lad Pete Firman is the dry-witted, good-looking young face of 21st-century British magic-comedy. But he’s rather locked himself into a box with Jiggery Pokery—a show that starts, appropriately enough, with him locked in a box—by striving to breathe amusing new life into some well-worn tricks of the trade, with only limited success.

No amount of ribald humour can disguise the tedious predictability of magic. Of course the guillotine was never going to chop the man’s head off, and the marked fiver was always going to be in the box. Is that the woman in the front row’s card? It is! Who’d have thought it?

Firman’s actually at his funniest when things go wrong. He's forced to slickly ad-lib his way out of spilling the deck on the floor during a failed fancy card shuffle—“I’ll just leave those there a minute”—and forges comedy gold when he snatches his patented psychic device (a hand whisk) from dawdling assistant Tom to nurse a lady in the crowd through a mind-reading routine gone awry.

Some of Firman’s tricks have a timeless elegance to them – the table dance for instance, a classic levitation piece dug out of an old magic book. But strip away the shiny fitted suit and the roughish one-liners, and aren’t we just left with Paul bloody Daniels?