Ed Sumner
15 Years Experience
Staffordshire, UK
Male, 28
I perform close up magic and stand up magic. I also run a children's magic company called Ready Steady Magic. You can find out more about me on YouTube! =P
As a professional magician and Member of the Magic Circle, I work hard to create incredible events.
Feel free to ask me whatever you wish and let me reveal the secrets of what I do (but not those secrets!)
Well, I will presume we are talking about the “got talent” shows as I don’t know any other TV talent shows with magicians on. I know that in America, they have had some great magicians on, and they even had David Copperfield do a guest spot, so that’s great. Magic on TV is always good for business. Charlie Caper won “Sweden’s Got Talent” and I have a friend who performed on “South Africa’s Got Talent”, so it can work, if the magicians are good to start with. However, the problem I think is that there aren’t a lot of magicians, so when one of the bad magicians (and I hope everyone knows what I mean), appears on a show, there is a tendency to see all magicians like that. No-one sees a bad singer, and then hates all music, but you can see a bad magician, and hate all magic. With TV the situation is amplified because the audience is a lot larger. In my shows, I expect people to make their mind up after they’ve seen me perform. Unfortunately, some people don’t always give you the chance. It’s their loss, I tell myself. Going off topic slightly, I performed to a family once and the daughter said, ‘I don’t like magic, I saw a magician once and he scared me.’ I showed a few tricks to her brother, and eventually she joined in too. At the end, she wanted me to stay and perform a trick just for her. Prejudice ain’t nice.
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I haven’t performed any routines with animals. I do perform children’s magic as well as magic for adults, but I wouldn’t want to use a rabbit as a regular part of my show, as rabbits don’t like being transported in the car, so it can be quite stressful for them, especially if you have two or three shows to do in a day. I love animals though and would love to do a routine with rabbits (or some other animals) in the future, but I think it would just be for a promotional event, for example a large show with a lot of people to impress. A TV show would be good, because it’s filmed too, so then it would definitely be worth it. As for the secret to magic with animals - give your animals the best care you can, and make sure that your audiences know that you care for them. I’ve seen one dove magician and he grabs the birds and snatches them and throws them about, and it’s not a pretty thing to watch.
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That’s a difficult question to answer because I know a lot of the methods now, that even if I don’t know exactly how it works, I could figure out how it may work, or even how I would do it. Also, some magic fools me in the moment, but then I can go back and work it out later, so I guess that doesn’t fit your criteria either. If I think back to when I first started magic and the first time I saw a professional close up magician. That had me up all night thinking about how it was done and that felt like real magic. I think that to create a moment of real magic, the effect has to have meaning to it. There is a trick David Blaine did where he picked a drinks can from a bin and restored it. That makes sense, ‘Im thirsty, I want a drink, I’ll restore this one.’ It’s closer to what a real magician might do, rather than a card trick for example. In reality, magicians use props such as cards and coins to discuss a theme and to entertain, and some people say that magicians just create the illusion of the impossible. For me, I don’t want people to experience an illusion, I want them to believe they have seen something impossible, both in terms of what they physically see, but also logically as discussed above. Having said all of that, I’ve heard stories of people seeing real magic in India or China and maybe it’s the environment, that they don’t expect some old guy with a beard all the way down to the floor and sitting in the street to be able to do magic, or maybe just maybe it’s something else?
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Generally, magic words are used by children’s magicians. It’s a great way to show the moment the magic happens and to involve the children in the show. Abracadabra is very well known and has a lot of history attached to it, with it previously being used as an incantation to cure illnesses. Check wikipedia for more information. I’m not sure on the others, but Hocus Pocus was the name of an early magician.
In my children’s magic show, I use the words Ready Steady Magic, as my show is the Ready Steady Magic Show. This way the children get to remember who am I and what show they’ve seen. You can see more about my children’s magic at http://www.readysteadymagic.co.uk
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Casting Director
What do you look for when auditioning candidates for reality TV?
Help Desk Technician
Does it get aggravating answering people's dumb questions all day long?
Stand-Up Comedian
How do you fend off hecklers?
Well that is a great question too. Stealing other magicians’ tricks and routines is a big problem in magic. The main problem is that when I create something, I’ve put part of my personality into the routine. I believe that art is a way that we connect with people, a way to reach out to others and say, ‘This is me, I was here!’ Just ripping someone off is lazy, but more than that it shows in their performances. It doesn’t seem believable. Magic has to be unbelievable, but you have to be able to believe that it’s unbelievable. Confusing, right? Of course some magicians release their routines to other magicians. That’s fine, but when I use commercially available routines, I still change the scripting to fit my own style and what I want to say. In short, no-one in the world performs the magic I do. If you want to see the magic of Ed Sumner, you need to hire Ed Sumner. There is little that can be done to stop someone from stealing your words, your jokes or your script. Ideas can’t be copyrighted, and they just had the same idea as you, yeh right!? All they have to do is watch you perform it once, and write it down. Like I said though, it shouldn’t be much use to them, and thinking up something for themselves would serve them much better. To overcome this, magicians should keep their secrets more secret. Magicians freely share effects with each other, but maybe we shouldn’t share information so easily. Maybe when another magicians asks for a method, we should just say, ‘No I’m not showing you.’ That’s difficult, because it seems rude. Also we have an accepting stance towards it. In stand up comedy, stealing a joke is a huge faux pas, but in magic we just seem to ignore it. Finally some illusions can be patented, which in theory protect people from making and selling them, but there are still people who will try to rip them off. These people don’t care about the art of magic. They just care about themselves. For me the best way for me to preserve my own magic is to keep it only for my non-magician audiences. There are some things I share with magician friends, some things which I plan to release to other magicians too. However my A grade material is exclusively for the eyes (and ears) of the people who pay me.
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An interesting question, often asked by beginner magicians. There are some companies that will employ you for short periods of time from a few weeks to a few months, but usually these still require you to be self-employed, i.e. you have a regular contract with them but you invoice them for your time. Mostly they are bars or holiday resorts and they are pretty poorly paid. I work for a bar once or twice a year for a few weeks as it’s money that I can rely on and it’s good fun. I try to go on a quiet week as I can earn more from my private bookings. The second part to this answer is about children’s magicians. There are some franchise companies that will allow you to buy their franchise and use their branding.
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Where to start? There are a lot of magicians that I could name and shame for various reasons, ripping off members of the public, exposing secrets, ripping people off with shoddy magic products, stealing ideas, accusing respected magicians of stealing, unethical marketing techniques, using banned techniques to boost their search engine rankings, etc... I won’t name any here, except to say that there is a website called weekly magic failure that has a lot of them on. The main one people usually name though is the Masked Magician. Most people pretty much agree he’s a jerk. Personally, I agree with Sumner’s Law (I made it up) which states that 90% of magic is crap (maybe more).
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