The Happy-Clappy Years

Derren Brown is a magician and mentalist, and long before any of that, he spoke in tongues. This episode returns to Book Six of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations to trace what Brown had to give up to get there: an evangelical childhood, a university full of demon-exorcising hecklers, and a psychic friend whose logic turned out to be his own. Brown reads Marcus's insistence that everything you need already lies within reach as a direct answer to the religion he left behind. Then he tests that answer against Viktor Frankl's account of the camps, and finds a gap in Marcus that even he can't quite close.