Though the history of magic is also the history of those who want to debunk it, that is not Brown's aim, exactly: He is not setting out to expose or humiliate.

But at a troubled time in which the uneasy and the unfulfilled often seek extrasensory explanations for life's mysteries, Brown is a committed rationalist. In one program, he traveled to the United States and persuaded professional psychics and spiritualists that he was a bona fide practitioner of their arts, presenting himself at one point, for instance, as a man who learned to read minds after being struck by lightning.

That he always fooled them made him a little bit wistful. "I would love to be proved wrong," he said. "I would love to see a ghost. I would love for somebody to sit down and give me a psychic reading that I just can't explain."

Brown has little time for a social life these days; he split up with his last serious girlfriend several years ago. But he does not, as he says with a laugh, "use my powers for evil" he stretches the word out into "eeeee-VILL" by, for instance, transforming his powers of suggestion into powers of seduction. On the other hand, in his poorer days Brown was not above occasionally talking his way out of a restaurant check by convincing the waiter that he had already paid. Recently, he said, he used his talents to defuse a situation in which an aggressive youth approached him on the street, yelling, "What are you looking at?" (Brown responded with a rapid series of diversionary non sequiturs, he said; the man burst into tears.)

Now, back to the interviewer's hidden drawing. It is supposed to be a dress but looks more like a triangle decorated with circles and lines. Afraid that she would give it away, the interviewer has scrupulously avoided talking about dresses or indeed women's clothing of any kind.

Brown explains that some people are almost laughably simple to read, while others are more suggestible easy to influence into thinking or doing things. A third group, to which I am sure I belong, is neither.

Instructing me to concentrate, he pulls out a blank sheet of paper and begins sketching, chatting all the while. He tells me he "sees" a conical shape with spots on it some sort of decorated lamp with a blob on top. And knock me down if he does not produce a near- exact replica of my drawing, the only differences being that his has more dots than mine, and his stripes are horizontal, not vertical.

It is now clear why the actor, director and keen amateur magician Stephen Fry, snookered by a fiendish card trick, said, "I just want to burn him at the stake and watch his witch's heart bubble."

By way of appeasement, Brown explains a bit that I am sitting near a rug with geometric patterns that might have unconsciously inspired me, for instance. But he leaves me pleasantly unsatisfied.

Clearly, none of my obfuscatory skills worked on him. But maybe I should not feel too bad.

"Journalists tend to be very easy to do this with," he said.