Eleven years later he surpassed himself with a blindfold drive around Piccadilly in mid-afternoon traffic, with a petrified former world champion driver, Graham Hill, sitting in the passenger seat. In 1955 – to mark the golden jubilee of the Magic Circle – Berglas drove blindfolded around Euston. An audience member’s passport was made to vanish and then reappear inside a sealed box suspended on a wire in the middle of Regent Street in central London. To drum up further publicity for his radio, stage and screen appearances, Berglas devised a series of stunts. A subsequent television programme, Meet David Berglas (1954), was watched by 19 million people.

But it was radio, to which his sonorous voice was ideally suited, that allowed him to reach audiences on a truly grand scale, conducting what he described as “nationwide psychological experiments” that involved predicting the actions of listeners in their own homes. Declaring himself the “International Man of Mystery”, at one time he was performing six shows a week at London’s Windmill Theatre. David Berglas, who has died aged 97, was one of the first magicians to appear on British television by the mid-1950s he had become a household name, and had fostered a reputation for pulling off spectacular stunts.īerglas had cut his teeth in variety shows, where he shared the bill with the likes of Morecambe and Wise, Harry Worth and Alma Cogan.

Casino royale 1954 tv