“Not all is as it seems.” Those were some of the first words viewers heard at the beginning of Paul Daniels Live at Halloween, a television special that aired live on BBC1 on October 31, 1987. For the next hour, viewers in the UK watched magician Paul Daniels as he attempted to summon a ghost, executed some sleight-of-hand, and hammered them with a barrage of jokes.
For the show’s climax, Daniels’s demeanor turned serious. He informed viewers he would be attempting a bold trick: trying to escape from a medieval iron maiden chamber, which impaled the unfortunate soul inside on spikes when fully closed. As the seconds ticked away, Daniels struggled against shackles and a clasp secured around his neck. He began to sweat. And then, seemingly abruptly, the maiden shut.
At first, nothing happened. Then a voice told the crew and handful of spectators to leave in an orderly fashion. Daniels did not emerge from the chamber, leaving over 13 million viewers to wonder whether they had just seen a veteran and well-known magician make a fatal mistake in the most gruesome way imaginable.
Casting a Spell
Daniels isn’t well-known in the United States, where magicians like David Copperfield, David Blaine, and Criss Angel have garnered most of the attention and airtime. But in England, Daniels was a longtime fixture. He was born Newton Daniels in 1938. The performer recalled that a book full of tricks titled How to Entertain at Parties was a formative find in his youth. While operating a grocery store, he set about perfecting his stagecraft, touring and performing live before earning a special on British network ITV in 1978.
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The following year, Daniels moved to the BBC, where his Paul Daniels Magic Show began a 15-year run; some installments garnered upwards of 20 million viewers. Like his magician contemporaries, Daniels employed a family-friendly wit that was one-part entertainment and one-part distraction.
“You’ll like this,” he often told spectators about to see a trick. “Not a lot, but you’ll like it.”
For his 1987 Halloween special, Daniels opted to broadcast from a purportedly “haunted” castle in Guildford, Surrey. The crescendo came with just a few minutes to spare, as Daniels introduced the formidable contraption on stage—a coffin-shaped iron maiden with 110 metal spikes, a purported relic from the depravity-drenched Middle Ages. In fact, iron maidens were little more than a myth that began in the 19th century; no evidence exists they were ever employed.
Historically accurate or not, the device makes for an excellent threat to a magician’s well-being. Daniels explained that Houdini, the greatest of all magicians, would have loved the challenge.
“This can go wrong,” he intoned. “This is not a joke.”
Daniels warning viewers they could turn off the special if they were prone to nervousness, then allowed himself to be chained to the ghoulish trap. After a minute or so of attempted escape, the coffin shut. There was seemingly no way for Daniels to dodge the spikes that had just enveloped him.
The typical denouement of such a trick might be to reappear elsewhere on stage, free and unharmed. But nothing happened, which began to make the television audience nervous. That was followed by an order for the handful of people present to leave the room. At home, viewers saw closing credits, at which point the BBC hastily cut to an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
The broadcaster immediately began getting calls—a lot of calls. Over 1100 people dialed in to inquire whether poor Paul Daniels was skewering the hyper-dramatic world of magic or had accidentally skewered himself.
The Escape Artist
History tends to repeat itself. In 1956, BBC viewers watched as a magician named Protul Chandra Sorcar lowered a gigantic circular saw across the body of his assistant. Unlike the conventional sawing-a-woman-in-half trick, her body was in full view of spectators who watched as the saw seemingly divided her into portions. The show’s host quickly ran into frame to say goodnight, leaving viewers to wonder if something had just gone terribly wrong.
Something had: The show had exceeded its allotted timeslot, denying Sorcar a chance to reveal his severed colleague was still intact. The BBC offered an update later on that evening, easing the nerves of viewers.
It’s unclear whether Sorcar purposely ran out the clock, knowing the ambiguity would lead to lots of publicity for his act. (It did.) But there’s no question that over 30 years later, Paul Daniels had willingly and gleefully fooled his audience.
According to Daniels, giving them a moment of panic came on the order of an unnamed producer, who instructed him to “create an uproar.” Daniels said he was inspired by the commotion surrounding Orson Welles and is infamous 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which fooled some listeners into believing Martians were attacking.
In a newspaper editorial that followed the show, Daniels defended his decision to rile the audience with his apparent demise. He argued he had warned audiences at the top of the show that not everything was as it seemed. He also cautioned nervous viewers to tune out.
But he had also seemed determined to keep the trick believable. He had not even told family members of the ruse, with one observer (and newspaper columnist) claiming he saw Daniels phoning his mother shortly afterward to reassure her. A friend in the audience, future Weakest Link host Anne Robinson, was reportedly so shaken by the segment she stopped speaking to him.
None of this seemed to bother Daniels. “The live transmission of my show on Halloween achieved exactly the result I set out to obtain,” he wrote.
Although critics argued TV viewers had been left hanging, this wasn’t exactly true. After the credits rolled, his assistant emerged to tell viewers he was fine. Roughly 20 minutes later—perhaps after Python—Daniels himself appeared in a pre-recorded spot, assuring viewers he was alive. But, just as listeners had missed Orson Welles announcing his broadcast was mere radio drama, so too did many BBC viewers miss the post-impalement updates.
Critics decried it as a “sick stunt.” Some pointed out the trick was in especially poor taste given the recent death of Michael Lush, a participant in a 1986 BBC program who died during an offscreen rehearsal for a bungee-jumping segment on The Late Late Breakfast Show.
Despite the blowback, the BBC took no punitive action. A spokesperson said they didn’t regard the segment in poor taste. Nor did it seem to harm Daniels any: He released a book, Paul Daniels and the Story of Magic, that same year, and continued producing BBC specials through 1994. (Daniels died in 2016.)
Incredibly, this was not the end of Halloween-related controversy for the BBC. In 1992, they aired Ghostwatch, a taped special investigating reports of a residence haunted by a malevolent ghost known as “Pipes.” The phony paranormal footage was believed to be authentic thanks to the presence of longtime BBC personalities Sarah Greene, Greg Charles, and Michael Parkinson. The show was said to be responsible for inducing labor in one viewer and post-traumatic stress disorder in some children. Perhaps the show would have been better off invoking the Paul Daniels disclaimer: Nothing is as it seems.
“I’m in a no-win situation, really,” Daniels once said of the trick. “If you perform the same style of show week in, week out, you get knocked for never being innovative. Yet here I am taking you into the world of black theatre, and with not that many complaints. After all, the vast majority of the audience … took it for what it was, a Halloween trick or treat.”