We were fools to have believed that Derren Brown was actually going to tell us how his lottery prediction trick worked, but that didn’t stop 4.4 million of us from tuning in to Channel 4 of Friday night, twice as many as saw the trick itself on Wednesday.
Unfortunately, the idea that it all came from the average guess of a group of 24 people just doesn’t cut it for us, or anyone else for that matter. A quick straw poll of the maths geniuses and computer whizzes in the Singles365.com technical department reveals that very little of Friday’s explanation stacks up.
To be fair to Mr Brown though, if you had a trick like that up your sleeve you wouldn’t tell anyone how you did it either, would you?
And so, we return to the theories involving split-screens, miniature printers mounted inside the balls and, our own favourite, the idea that thousands of highly trained ants were gathered on the balls and arranged themselves into the shapes of the numbers when instructed by their trainer.
Honestly, who comes up with this stuff?
If you missed either the trick or the “explanation” show, both are available on the 4oD website.