Magic. Amazing. Perfect.
Not just the English magician Dynamo (Steven Frayne) visiting South Africa but the absolutely perfect press presentation and Q&A session Discovery Networks Central Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEEMEA) held today at Nu Metro's Il Grande theatre at Montecasino.
This is how broadcasters, content creators, producers, TV executives and those involved in making and being on television should engage, interact and talk to TV critics and writers and journalists covering television. Spot-on, on message, clear, high-quality, direct communication.
Discovery Networks CEEMEA gets absolute full marks for a pitch perfect press presentation this afternoon with one of the factual entertainment programmer's TV talent visiting the country.
The way in which the excited announcement during the incredible well-done presentation was done (that Dynamo will actually be staying in South Africa a few days to film a special South African episode for the Discovery Channel for 2013) is what PR and marketing people who aspire to be in the TV biz, should see and learn from. Those who want to represent broadcasters, TV talent, programmers and producers can get it right and their message across if they simply follow the golden standard and stay on-form in the correct way.
On a specially erected stage in front of TV critics and journalists, and making full use of the cinema theatre wall to display full backdrop brand imaging, information and viewership statistics (perfectly and beautifully done), Dynamo and Lee Hobbs, the channel director for Discovery Networks CEEMEA's emerging business region had their press junket.
The dynamic and interactive press session was reminiscent of the way in which the American TV biz trot out and talk about their shows.
All TV critics sat with smiles. Print and online journalists asked questions and Lee Hobbs actually made the press feel comfortable to keep asking questions as he deftly steered the presentation through the Q&A session, the big announcement, and more questions afterwards. It was textbook perfect.
Here's some of the press Q & A with Dynamo from this afternoon's session; questions are from all different journalists representing various media:
My grandpa introduced me to magic. He wasn't a magician per se, but he could do like skills based things. Like remember where you put a coin on your elbow with your hand back and lift up your hand and catch it? Yeah? He could do skills like that, bar tricks around the pool table.
I was actually bullied. Boys would stuff me in a bin and roll me down a hill. And my grandpa found out one day. And to help me stop it, he helped me and taught me how to do stuff. Then when I started doing what he taught me, around school there started a kind of urban myth that I was some kind of demon child. So it started out of being something I started doing to stop being picked on. And my grandpa helped me.
Wat was the first magic you ever saw and what is the most difficult thing you've done?
My grandpa, to this day I'm still not sure how he did it. He took two matchboxes. A green match box, and a red matchbox. And inside the green matchbox was green matches, and inside the red matchbox was red matches.
He told me to switch the matches and put the green in the red box and the red in the green box. Then he just snapped his fingers over them, and when I opened them, the right colours were back in their boxes. That was my first. The feeling I got from that is what inspired me to want to do magic, to perform it and the reaction from people like you watching.
The most death-defying thing is in Los Angeles [South African viewers will see it when the second series of Dynamo: Magician Impossible starts on Discovery Channel from 21 November at 20:30] where I walked down the side of a building. I have a fear of heights. There's a lot of others but I don't want to ruin the surprises for anyone.
How do you describe magic, what is magic for you?
That feeling that you get when you witness something which you can't explain. It takes you back to a childlike state. When you're a baby, everything is amazing. You don't know how anything really works. None of your dreams have been shattered by people telling you that you can't do this; you can't do that. You believe that anything is possible as a child. It's that feeling, that belief in yourself.
I think it's out now! It's called Dynamo: Nothing is Impossible. It's the journey I took right from making the second series. It doesn't necessarily reveal how I do what I do. But there's a lot of personal stories along the way. What my life is like. There is secrets in there, but you will have to read between the lines to find them.
Has something you've tried not worked out? Do you get nervous?
I don't really get too nervous. When I meet a group of people I will start out with some of the things I'm comfortable with and see how they're reacting, and depending on that I'll try something more risque. I've never worried about things not working out. In my head, I might know that I have an end goal. But if it's not quite working out, I'll do something else and improvise. It will still be amazing, it might just not be what I had in mind when I started.
