This afternoon, the Talent Management team have been asking ourselves what we would do if we knew the world was ending? Why? Because this Friday Derren Brown: Apocalypse begins! Fresh from his BAFTA and RTS-winning series last year, the scarily-brilliant illusionist returns with his most ambitious series ever.

Having recently tweeted: “Currently editing what I think might be the best TV show I’ve ever made…” it’s fair to say we’re pretty excited and love the idea of taking a complete slacker and giving him a second chance at discovering the value of life! Read on as the man himself talks candidly about this life-changing series …

The first two shows of your new series are titled Apocalypse. Explain a bit about them.

The show is about taking somebody who basically takes his life for granted, and suffers from that lazy sense of entitlement that many of us do, one way or another, and giving him a second chance at discovering the value of what he has. So what we do is end the world for him. It’s over two episodes, which I’ve never done before. The first part is getting him to believe that this is going to happen, that the world is going to end, or at least has a chance of ending. It was based on a seed of truth, because there was a meteor shower around August, so we just used the idea that this shower was masking a much bigger potential collision.

So you’ve drip-fed him the idea of a potentially cataclysmic meteor collision. What next?

The end of the world happens. And he wakes seemingly two weeks later in an abandoned military hospital, in a post-apocalyptic world, and goes through a meticulously-crafted horror movie plot. The point of the plot, aside from being exciting to watch, is that it takes him through various lessons that are going to be useful for him, in terms of teaching him things that he needs to know. Are his family still alive? Is he going to get back to them?

Where did this idea come from?

It’s rooted in Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher. The Stoics were all about living tranquilly, avoiding negative sensations, and engaging in life. One of Seneca’s things was the value of mentally rehearsing losing everything that you value, so that you learn to value it more. He would say ‘Every time you kiss your daughter goodnight, remind yourself that she might not be there in the morning’. I know that sounds morbid, but it actually allows you to never have that feeling of regret, of things you never said, or taking people for granted, and also, if anything bad ever does happen, you are maybe somehow mentally rehearsed for it. So it was taking that idea and doing it for real – taking everything away, so that he would value what he had.

How do you ensure that someone doesn’t come out of an experience like this with PTSD?

There are various layers to that. He has no conscious memory of what’s happened but at a deep, unconscious level, he does know. It creates a sort of safety net around the experience. It draws it short of any mortal fear, because something in him that he won’t be able to put his finger on, knows that actually, this is all right. It’s a subtle thing, because he can’t be walking around thinking “Oh, this is all fine.” Another layer is that the selection process is very rigorous and people are chosen very carefully. We have independent psychologists who interview them. They don’t let them know what’s going to happen, but they make sure that these people are going to be absolutely fine. And throughout we have our psychologist and medical team watching the whole process.

How long does the experience last for him?

It’s over a weekend. The build-up is a couple of months. Then the end of the world happens on a Friday, and on Monday morning he wakes up in his own bed, and it’s all over. It’s a really intense weekend.

After the two-part show Apocalypse, there’s a show called Fearless (w/t). What’s that about?

The thing with that is, we’re still filming it, and we’re still putting it all together, so there’s many different ways it can go at the moment. It is hugely shrouded in secrecy, so it’s difficult for me to say any more than that. But that’s the area that we’re in.

The last programme is Gods and Monsters, which is a psychological look at religious belief.

Yeah. We’re still filming that at the moment, so there might be a few shifts that I’m unaware of. But it’s a talk that I’ll be giving in front of an audience, incorporating lots of experiments. And yes, it’s looking at a psychological take on religion and the experience of God and the supernatural. It’ll be peppered with experimental stuff, it’s not just another atheist talking about why he doesn’t believe in God.

You tweeted recently “Currently editing what I think might be the best TV show I’ve ever made…”

Yeah, that was about Apocalypse. We’re still editing it, so you never quite know what the finished product is going to be like. But in terms of the experience of making it, it feels like the strongest thing I’ve done. That doesn’t necessarily translate into other people thinking that. But I’m very excited about it.