Pete Firman: Hoodwinker

Pete Firman has come a long way from 2007's Hokum..

Once a fun, unashamedly geeky antithesis to the bland showmanship of suit-wearing mainstream magicians, Firman's schtick is now that of the bland showman complete with the suit and the self satisfied narcissistic jokes and a penchant for mining his participants for cheap laughs through unimaginative insults.  This direction may have worked for the TV producers (as seen on BBC One's The Magicians) but we preferred Fun Geeky Pete. What happened to him? 

Firman's promising opener, a Rocky style video, gives us a glimpse of aforementioned Fun Geeky Pete, the guy who didn't take himself too seriously while catching you off guard with some pretty cool magic tricks. Sadly, he's exchanged the goofy fun for a slick TV-ready hour, and if you're going to go all slick on us, your tricks had better be top quality. Sure, he's a good magician—there's some mindreading, some nice card tricks and a whole lot of other inventive stuff (running out of synonyms for "magic tricks" here)—but it's not really enough when everything else is so run-of-the-mill. 

There are better illusionists out there, but Fun Geeky Pete made it, yknow, fun – mixing the odd great trick with a load of enthusiastic silliness. Consummate professional magicians who take the piss out of their audience are pretty boring, to be honest; his old warmth and humour was much more entertaining.

As a technical magician, add two stars but, as a show, this is disappointingly lacking in heart and humour. When thanking us after a flourishing finale, he seems sincerely happy we came. Why didn't we get this all the way through?