Keith Barry interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2004

Keith Barry is sitting in a cell in Wicklow Gaol, contemplating his future.  He may not have a future, he solemnly announces, because what he is about to do may end in his death.  The cell that he is sitting in is the same cell that was home to the last man who was hanged in Ireland.  The atmosphere is tense, dramatic, utterly gripping television.  In a few moments, Keith Barry will walk outside to rousing cheers, to where an enormous gallows has been erected. Whereupon, surrounded by sinister, sweaty black-hooded strongmen, Keith will have a noose tightened around his neck.  The live audience who are present will be asked to select which noose goes around his neck, out of a selection of six.  One of the nooses, we are told, is fake, but the other ones are real.  If the audience select the wrong one, Keith will drop through the trap-door and his neck will break in two.  His life, he reminds us, hangs in the balance. The scene is of a bloodthirsty and excitable mob, reminiscent of the French revolution.
This is life or death television, the most compelling kind.  There is an audible intake of breath as the moment finally arrives, accompanied by drum rolls.  I know what happens.  You’ll have to wait and see what happens, when the episode is aired.  If indeed it can be aired.  Television hasn’t been this exciting since JR Ewing was shot and that was a long time ago.  RTE have finally found something totally thrilling to titillate the viewers and it most certainly isn’t ‘Fairy City’.
          There was a time when magicians were people a bit like clowns, people that performed completely harmless party tricks to amuse the kids.  The kind of thing you watched on television only when you absolutely couldn’t find anything else to watch and it was that or do your tax returns.  But a new breed of hip, cool television magicians is emerging and suddenly the prospect of a career in magic is as glamorous as a career in pop music used to be, before the days of boy bands and ‘Pop Idol.’           It doesn’t take genius to re-hash Frank Sinatra songs,  but how many people do you know who can drive blind-folded, catch bullets in their teeth and play Russian Roulette with dynamite?
          Keith Barry, who hails from Waterford, -who is still in his late twenties and looks like a member of Westlife- is a man who can do all of those things.  And he’s a man who can command respect from children of all ages as well as from grown-ups, with his remarkable tricks, as well as looking like a  pop star. The girls who do his publicity assure me that they are delighted to be working with such a cute guy, but his producers say he is happily ensconced in a relationship with his childhood sweetheart from Waterford.  Sorry, girls.
 Today, at the launch of Science Week, Keith is bamboozling everyone from Micheal Martin, the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment to Leo Enright, chairman of the Discover Science programme.  I am sitting as close to the front row as possible, eyes trained on Keith’s every move.  Directly opposite me are a class of eagle-eyed primary school kids and none of us avert our gaze even for a second, as we attempt to figure out how he does what he does. The aim of Science Week is to ‘awaken in children a natural curiosity about the world around them,’ we are informed.  But not by ramming science down their necks, the minister says.  Simply by allowing them an opportunity to try and figure out how Keith Barry got the playing card out of the deck and onto the ceiling.
As an attempt to get children interested in science as a subject, this initiative is a spectacular success.  Because not only is Keith Barry a science graduate,-he worked for a time as a cosmetic scientist, which means that he invented cosmetics- he’s also declared himself willing to reveal the secrets behind a few of his tricks.  And that is something he would not normally do, because there is a strict magician’s code, which forbids it.
          Before anything is revealed, we must try and guess.  A child is invited onto the stage, to set fire to a napkin, which Keith is holding.  When the flames are extinguished, the napkin is spotless.
          ‘How did I do that?’  Keith asks.  ‘Does anybody know?”
          There is silence.  Nobody has the faintest idea.
          ‘Okay,’ he says.  ‘I’ll show you.’
          And he pulls off the top half of his thumb, to reveal a hidden piece of napkin, the piece that was set on fire.  The thumb is a cleverly designed prosthetic that we didn’t spot.
          I am completely determined, when I am called up to the stage, that I will not be fooled.  I am alert, I am clever and I will catch him out, if anyone will.  I am asked to stand on the stage with my sleeve rolled up.  Another volunteer is standing a few feet away from me.  Keith is in front of me, to my left and far enough away that he couldn’t touch me.  I am asked to close my eyes. 
‘If you feel something, say so,’ he says.  I feel somebody prodding my back, quite hard.  I say so.
‘How many times were you prodded?’ he asks me.
‘Three times,’ I say.  Then I feel cloth brushing on my arm and again I say so.  The audience are laughing, but I can’t see them because my eyes are closed.  When I open them, Keith explains that he wasn’t touching me at all, that he prodded the other volunteer and then brushed his arm, but I distinctly felt somebody touch me.  I ask the audience if anybody did touch me and they assure me that no, nobody could have.  I have been bamboozled, just like the rest of them.
After the fork bending, which certainly looks real, there comes a trick with a pen which jumps off the table without being touched.  Keith explains that he has hollowed out the pen and filled it with mercury so that the mercury moving causes the pen to move.  When he explains it, it seems simple enough.  But how does he bend the forks? And who touched my back?  These things, he wont explain.  But he tells me that he doesn’t believe in magic, that even Uri Geller is fooling us all.  And he doesn’t believe in mind reading or psychics or clairvoyants.  I am disappointed, and we argue about this for some time.  I give him examples of psychics getting it right and he tells me that I didn’t pay attention to all the times they got it wrong.  He is open to the possibility that people can be psychic, he says, but he is yet to see evidence that it is true.
After the show, one boy tells me that I must have been a stooge.  I say no, I am a journalist, but the kid doesn’t believe me.  A little girl called Sarah has made such wonderful facial expressions during the fork bending that she is invited to stay and be photographed with Keith.  Clearly she believes the fork bending is for real.  But real or not, some of the tricks, such as the dynamite one, seem dangerous.  It occurs to me that some of the kids might try to replicate these things at home.
‘When Paul Daniels was in his heyday, he got a sword and sliced Debbie’s stomach open and it was realistic, you could see blood.  But kids didn’t pick up swords and start slicing each other open.  They’re not that stupid!’ he says.   ‘I did a trick last year where I was blind-folded and tore off at seventy miles an hour in a car.  But nobody went out and put bags over their heads and tried to drive cars.’
Insurance is, as you can imagine, a huge problem when you are doing dangerous stunts on television.
‘The same insurance company would insure me to do that but they wouldn’t insure me to give a car to two car thieves, who both had clean driver’s licences.’
The car stunt may never be shown, because the car involved, a Porsche, is worth nearly two hundred thousand euros and two professional car thieves were to be given the opportunity to steal it.
Does it cost an absolute fortune to do this kind of thing?  I ask.
‘Oh yeah.  I don’t know the actual figures, but by the time you pay for a production crew’s safety, get a set built, and the insurance, you are talking about a lot of money.’
The production company have to have a lot of faith in Keith, in order to back the show.  But he’s earned their trust the hard way and he’s worked his way up from the very lowest of gigs to prime time television.
‘I’ve done it all.  I started off doing magic at kid’s parties, when I was fifteen.  Then I did restaurant gigs in Waterford, in between tables.’
I try to imagine Russian Roulette with dynamite in between courses, and fail.
‘Then I did the boats from Rosslare to France,’
‘Presumably not anything too dangerous?’
‘No it was kid’s tricks.  Making sweets appear!  I really had to graft, my whole way up.  Four years ago, I got a contract with Championship Sports to promote their stores using magic.  I made it snow on Grafton street…’
‘How?’
‘I just opened my hands and made it snow!  And I ended it up on the Late Late Show because of it.  I was asked to close their season by making it snow.  So that was my jump into full time work.’
He pitched shows to RTE and kept getting rejected.  Until one of the commissioning editors left RTE and joined Midas Productions, whereupon he pitched Keith to RTE on behalf of Midas and was successful.  And they say it’s not who you know that counts!
‘The first series went out last year and was successful enough to be repeated.  The new series has just started with the dynamite episode,’ he says.
So is Keith Barry the Irish David Blaine?
‘Not really.  I just want to do my own thing.  But he has made it more hip, he’s done a lot for magic.’
‘People think he’s really cool,’  I agree.
‘Well, he’s lost a bit of that now, with the box stunt.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he said publicly that he wants to be more famous than Houdini.  It’s his ego.  And when you are starving yourself for no reason except ego, and there are starving people in the world, that’s when people get pissed off.’
   ‘But what made David Blaine interesting is that he films what’s important which is people’s reactions which is something that never was done before.  It was always rent an audience in a studio.’
What’s different about Keith, what really makes him appealing is the Irish context.  Pouncing on unsuspecting punters at the races in Tramore, doing card tricks and producing a live snake for a hen party in Grafton street, making an engagement ring disappear and reappear inside the belly of a dead fish at the English Market in Cork.  Real people and real reactions.  Really good reactions, in fact.  And what’s different is also the stunts.
‘I have never done any of David Blaine’s stunts and he’s never done any of mine.  They are all things that came out of my own head.  At night, when I’m asleep, ideas come to me and I wake up and write them down!”
          The years spent studying science at Galway University, Keith reckons, are paying off now because not only does he have the crazy ideas, he also has the know-how to pull them off.  After our interview, I watch tapes of the stunts and try to figure out how he did them.  The dynamite one, I am almost certain I have mastered, so I ring the production company to ask if they know how it works.  They don’t.  I will have to ask him, they say.  But there’s no point in asking him, because he won’t tell me.  In a way, I am glad.  Because there is very little on television these days that inspires the brain to action in quite the same way as ‘Close Encounters With Keith Barry’.  And we all need mystery in our lives and magic.  Sometimes we don’t want things to be too easily explained.
‘Close Encounters With Keith Barry’ is on RTE One, Sunday evenings at eight thirty.  A national tour will begin in January.