Criss Angel: Mindfreak

By FIONA RAE

It was probably Penn and Teller, with their irreverent, grungy magic tricks and their naughty revealing of the secrets, who consigned pompous twits like David Copperfield to the past and set off a whole new wave of magicians.

The most famous would be so-called street magician David Blaine, who throws in extreme stunts like being surrounded by ice for 24 hours or standing on a pole for a day. Always in Times Square, of course.

The latest of the brat pack is Criss Angel, the Marilyn Manson of magicians, who combines a performance art-type show, street magic and extreme stunts into one alterno-magic package.

Criss Angel: Mindfreak (TV3, 7.30pm) is really not the kind of show the Queen would be attending on her birthday. Angel, a leather-adorned goth with six-pack abs, roams New York delighting and amazing crowds by producing huge cockroaches from coffee cups, making cigarettes disappear or performing a variety of card tricks.

Doesn't sound that flash when you write it down, does it? He's very good, but it's funny how there are only so many illusions, no matter what new clothes they're dressed up in.

The centrepiece of the programme is Angel's homage to Houdini, the escapologist who was famously lowered into New York's East River in 1912 in a crate wrapped in chains. He was out in less than one minute.

This being 2003, Angel decides he's going to go underwater for an extreme 24 hours. In Times Square, of course.

It's a pretty awful prospect, especially when his team don't think to put a filtration system in the water and it starts to murk up. And then, due to the number of camera lights, the water starts to heat up.

The programme comes with plenty of don't-do-this-at-home warnings but, really, they needn't have bothered. After all, who really wants to be suspended by ropes from the piercings on their back? Thankfully, given the show's early time, this sequence is mercifully short and should give your children only short nightmares.

Angel prattles on about magic and imagining and the mind and sits like a lovelorn member of Jane's Addiction on Houdini's grave, but amongst all this goth silliness he does say something interesting.

Magic has traditionally been presented like a puzzle, he says, and he doesn't really care how something works.

"I care about touching people emotionally. I believe if you can connect to people on that level, they don't really care how something works, they care about the way they feel when they watch it."

Certainly the people and crowds he entertains out on the street are having a great time. The funniest is the shirtless guy Angel does a popcorn-kernel-up-the-nose trick for, the sweetest is a disabled child.

He seems less arrogant than Blaine (who inspired a cutting episode of South Park and is now busy selling books) and it's an amusing thought that a guy who looks like Alice Cooper's bastard love child just wants to make people happy.