So, irritating-voiced trickster David Blaine is to spend a few weeks in a glass cage suspended above the Thames, is he?

I think I may be missing something, but in what way is this magic? Likewise, the standing on a pillar thing. And the trapped in ice thing. And the buried for a bit thing. Feats of endurance, yes. Magic? Er, no.

Now, when David Blaine first got exposure over here (of the media kind, that is - though he may well suffer the other kind if this cold snap persists while he’s hanging over the river) I thought he was quite good. Good - OK, perhaps “different” or “refreshing” rather than “good” - in that his deadpan delivery added to the cleverness and simplicity of his “street magic” tricks.

Of course, we now know that they were achieved through sleight of hand and camera angle trickery and careful preparation (even I could bring a fly back to life; appear to levitate; twist my arm around impossibly and hurl cards into locked cars) but there was something sort of refreshingly simple about the delivery and the urgency of the tricks, especially after David Copperfield’s notorious excesses (him, not him. Or, indeed, him.) and the pure cheese of our dear Mr Daniels (”Say Yes Paul”)

Except that it became rapidly obvious that Blaine was a complete loon.

And now he’s forging a career out of talking …. kinda …. slowly …. staring hard at people who interview him (such as Eamonn Holmes on GMTV) and subjecting himself to a series of tests of endurance which require him to survive in oddly isolated conditions without food for a while.

Well, sorry to be a tough audience, but that’s not actually magic, is it? It’s not actually illusion either, particularly, unless you admit that there’s some trickery involved and that he’s not in fact spending the entire time hanging above the river/in an ice-cube/up a pole/underground, in which case it’s a classic diversion trick instead. But any way you look at it, it’s just not particularly exciting. Or, indeed, entertaining.

Let’s look at this another way. Egotistical rich loony does something uncomfortable to show that he can. In what way does this differ from the ballooning experiences of Richard Branson, except that one has been called magic, and the other exploration?