Derren Brown: The Great Art Robbery. Channel 4, 9pm

You’ve got to watch Derren Brown. He’s so good as what he does that when he tells Ivan Massow that he will steal a painting worth £100 000 from a pop-up art exhibition he’s organising, tell him the day when he’s going to do it, the time he’s going to do it -3pm- and gives the art dealer a picture of the person that’s going to steal it for him, then you expect him to be able to do it. He bets Massow a nominal £1 that he will and lets him organise his security measures in any way he likes so that he can win his big bet.  The irony is a programme like this costs I imagine well over £100K to make so its about entertainment or the story of the heist. Derren tells us how he is going to do it—misdirection—and shows us using a card trick. He also tells a story of how the Mona Lisa was stolen. Simple really, the thief hid in the Louvre overnight, took the painting and smashed a window and explained to staff arriving in the morning that he’d been locked in and was trying to get out. The misdirection is in this is essentially what he does here. Look closely and the parts don’t fit together. His selection of dupes that are being trained to perform the robbery are all OAPs. He explains that the number of OAPs in the UK is approaching 10 million and that there are more of them than there are youngsters under sixteen, but they are largely invisible. Misdirection, that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he selects a cohort with at least one twin. The ‘training’ he gives them to steal chips and an old man getting helped across the road whilst trying to steal people’s watches is also misdirection. He keeps getting caught and the watches remain firmly on the supposed victim's wrists. And in the final piece of misdirection the trained groups of OAPs bungle the robbery. They keep wandering into the invisible zone, an optical illusion which is meant to screen the camera that focusses on the painting from view. The perp that the security guard has a photograph of is detained. The picture he is trying to steal is taken from him. That too is scripted, but the ‘actors’ have not been briefed about Derren’s duplicity. When the £100K painting ends up on sale in the front window of an Age Concern shop for the princely sum of £1, Massow , of course is shown buying it and chuckling at how he’d been fooled. The real magic would have been if someone had nipped in before Massow, bought it for a £1 and refused to give it back and told him to goin’ fuck himself. Things like that don’t happen though. That would have been magic.