You must be a mind-reader!

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Can I try something with you?" asks mind-reader Derren Brown as soon as I turn up to interview him. He asks me to think of the name of someone I knew in my childhood. I follow his instructions, concentrate on the surname, remember not to move my lips and wait. Derren does not play any mind games.

He asks no questions in search of clues. He gazes intently into my eyes and, within a minute or so, he has told me the name. The same name.

However cynical you are about this stuff - and many believe it's a load of rot - it's impossible not to be impressed by Brown's brilliant and baffling shtick at first hand.

His TV specials set in and around London, of which the third will be shown on New Year's Day, are equally breathtaking. And, according to most female viewers of my acquaintance, London's answer to David Blaine is not only very cool but also a breathtakingly sexy guy with his posh (but not too posh) voice, sardonic wit, sculpted goatee and elegant black outfits (frock coats, fancy cuff links) that give him the air of an Edwardian toff.

Viewers have so far seen Brown, 30, guess a modern-day toff 's PIN number (at the first attempt), beat a bunch of Millwall fans at scissorspaper-stone every single time, and tell a Borough market worker every detail of his wedding day without asking a single question about it.

Nor does he limit himself to easy targets. He fells a martial arts expert with a blow delivered into thin air, leaving the baffled victim writhing on the floor. He beats professional poker players at their own game by successfully predicting the cards in every hand.

In the new show he convinces a trio of lap dancers from Tottenham Court Road's Spearmint Rhino club that he has touched them without laying a finger on their scantily-clad bodies. He somehow gets a bookie at the Walthamstow dogs to pay out on a succession of losing tickets. Most convincingly of all, he outwits a chess master - a man who has written his own book on the psychology of chess - at a game of Mastermind. Inevitably, it takes Brown just one turn to place all four coloured pins in the right holes. To say the chess master is baffled is an understatement.

So how does he do it? It's the first question everyone asks Brown (the second usually relates to the "pulling power" of his skills). And, of course, it's the one answer he never gives. He will claim, however, that he is not a mind-reader. "I think mind-reading is a lazy explanation," he says. "I explore things through perfectly tangible psychological methods."

What he means is that he is not reading his victims' minds so much as their tiny subconscious behavioural patterns. On the one hand he is delivering subliminal cues and at the same time picking up their almost imperceptible responses. The really irritating thing is that, however hard you try, whatever you do seems to play straight into his hands.

Take, for example, the old coin-inone-fist game. He knows if you're going to put it in the same one every time or if you're going to swop over every time. He will even talk you through your own thought processes before exposing you - and he is never wrong.

Brown traces his interest in psychological techniques to childhood, although it was not until he went to university that he started trying them out himself. "I was a revolting liar and a very charming child," he says. "I was an only child until I was nine and I lived in a little world of my own. I was always a highly imaginative kid but I wasn't a budding magician or anything. Like most young boys, I loved the whole idea of superpowers and psychic abilities and maybe that triggered off an imaginative process."

After leaving Whitgift School in Croydon ("a posh grammar school"), inspiration struck when Brown saw a hypnotist called Martin Taylor at the age of 18. "I just thought that was the coolest thing - and I've got to do it," he recalls. "I thought: how cool would it be when someone asks you what you do for a living and you can say I'm a mind-reader or a hypnotist!"

It was only later at Bristol University, where he studied law and German that Brown started to take magic seriously. "I was supposed to be a lawyer but this is much more fun," he says. "I really started doing this at university, hypnotising people and doing close-up magic."

After graduating, he concentrated on developing his skills at psychological magic, paying the bills by combining performing in cafes and bars with a sideline in portraiture. "I've never had a proper job. I started off as a hypnotist but I didn't want to perform it professionally, even though I had a real interest in it. It can be a tacky way to earn a living. Then I did some magic for a while but, rather than doing sleight-of-hand things, I became more interested in psychological techniques and veered more and more into that area."

He is adamant that there is no hypnosis in what he does now (it often looks as if there is, with his ability to make people suddenly lose their memory or feel no pain before snapping them out of it) "though there's a lot of suggestion. I get people into playing a certain mental game with me that allows me to create a particular effect for them. They give certain things away and become responsive to things I say. There's a lot of intuition involved but I don't want people to believe that what I do is psychic because it isn't."

Far from searching for "receptive" subjects, Brown relishes taking on the sceptics. "It's nice to do it with someone who's a hardened cynic and pop that little bubble. At the same time, if it's with someone who believes any old rubbish, it's nice to explain exactly where it's coming from. I like to explain enough for people to know I am not patronising or insulting them. But there are a few things I can't even begin to explain. It's not about how good you are, but whether people go 'F***!' at the end."

Unlike Blaine, with his circle of celebrity pals such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Brown does not have a showbiz life and lives in Bristol with his parrot, Figaro. The nearest he gets to celebrities is his own portraits of icons. But he has yet to persuade one to sit for him in person.

It should not take long. It's only two years since he was discovered by Kevin Lygo at Channel 4 and his show next week is certain to win him more fans - but not as many as a spectacular stunt which he has up his sleeve for 2002, followed by his first theatrical tour.

Derren v Brown: Mind Control 3 is on Channel 4 on New Year's Day,

 

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