Individually packaged tricks with colour-based difficulty rating

In our youth, and back in the day when he was still wearing the wig (and - be honest - who wasn’t genuinely surprised when he revealed he’d discovered “a way to comb his hair to cover the bald patch” and discarded the rug?), there was nothing we wanted to save up our pocket money for more than to buy another one of Paul Daniels’ TV magic tricks. It was, of course, marketing genius.

Each trick would be numbered (there were over a dozen to collect), rated on difficulty (Blue – easy; Red – fairly easy; Purple – slightly harder; Black – master magician; that sort of thing), and packaged in oddly-shaped plastic and card fold-out tubes (containing props and instructions). Of course, as the tricks became more and more sophisticated, up the dark (and expensive) end of the scale, the props became more and more simple (whereas the instructions became inversely more complicated). One of these contained only a length of rope and a massive booklet depicting the entire cut-and-restore routine.

The more simple tricks included a drinks coaster from which magically appeared a coin, some gold rings on a red velveteen square under which playing cards would vanish, and the crazy cube that we don’t know what was supposed to do. Paul urged us in the accompanying leaflets to develop our own “patter” and learn the art of misdirection although, with an audience comprising only the family pets, it wasn’t strictly necessary. Forget dodgy compendium packages, bloody “mind control”, or hanging around in Perspex boxes, these were real magic, and highly addictive.