Google+ A Tangled Rope: Britain's Leading Illusionist

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Britain's Leading Illusionist


Spellcheck Ratlicker is – without a doubt – Modern Britain's leading illusionist. For years he has left audiences spellbound at the incredible illusions he performs in his live stage shows. Where, each night, capacity audiences are made to believe in the illusion of his talents.

Five years ago, Ratlicker amazed sell-out audiences up and down the land when he made thousands of paying audience members believe they were getting value for their money at his shows. Up to and including the 'special' souvenir show programmes. These cost £15 each for three pages of adverts, a two-paragraph biography cut-and-pasted from his website and an out of focus photograph of Ratlicker himself deluding a pair of homing pigeons into thinking he was a top-flight entertainer.

Ratlicker began on the club circuit where he would perform the traditional sawing a woman in half illusion. Often leaving a hastily restitched together lady, feeling somewhat bewildered and light-headed from blood-loss, a trail of blood and several other clues as he fled the scene only moments before the police arrived. Soon, however, he was running low on women that desperate to appear in show business. He then had to resort to sawing politicians in half, which while not quite so spectacular did mean the police no longer wished him to help with their enquiries. Especially as none of the halves of the women ever made claims of inappropriate sexual impropriety against him, even after Ratlicker sawed them in half.

After that, with the limited number of replacement glamorous assistants, or even politicians, available to him in such a situation, Ratlicker had to change his act. Particularly when he was booked to perform on cruise ships. There, he performed a daredevil stunt by diving naked into a tank of ravenous sharks and surviving there unmolested.

However, it was discovered that he was cheating by smearing his body with the cruise ship chef's special sauce. A substance that even ravenous sharks would not contemplate, no matter how desperately hungry they became.

These days, his act is mainly him sitting in a clear perspex box for as long as the audiences can tolerate, or until he gets a TV contract. Which, considering the state of current TV cannot be that long.

So we can look forward to seeing much more of Spellcheck Ratlicker on our TVs, unless we are lucky enough to have made other arrangements for those particular evenings.




[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

No comments: