DERREN Brown sips coffee in a quiet Manchester café and recalls the moment he realised just how impressionable the human mind could be.

In his first year at Bristol University Derren attended a hypnosis show by Martin S. Taylor - and was spellbound.

From that point, the young Law student threw his thoughts into studying mind manipulation.

“But then there was a watershed moment for me,” says Derren.

“I was living in student halls at the time, and I became the guy who could hypnotise people. Lots of students would come to me.

“And I’d make gradual tentative suggestions to them; ‘Your arm is getting heavy’, that sort of thing. I’d go at it very slowly. Then I’d say to them ‘If I hypnotise you again I them again I’ll just click my fingers and you’ll be hypnotised.;

“However, one day this guy came to see me and I thought I’d hypnotised him before so all I did was click my fingers and say ‘Go to sleep!’ And he did.

“I was quite taken aback, but I realised the absolute power of suggestion. I realised how powerful hypnotism could be.

Derren, who is set to appear at the King’s Theatre, never did become an international lawyer. Instead, he developed magician skills and became an illusionist, a mentalist, a mind-reader, working for ten years in cafes.

It was inevitable he would come to the attention of a TV producer and in 2000 the result was C4’s Derren Brown: Mind Control. And it blew the nation’s minds.

Derren proceeded to entertain, surprise and shock in equal measures in the following years with increasingly outlandish stunts.

He held a loaded gun to his head; convinced a man with vertigo to emergency-land a plane and looked to clean out casinos. .

Along the way he has debunked the world of spiritualism, and right now his show Miracle sees him reveal how he can become an evangelical healer.

Yet, although his television work and stage shows see him perform for millions, and he’s set to wow Broadway, Derren acknowledges he was an introverted teenager, who struggled to make social connections.

Does this not contrast with the creature who is now a consummate showman?

“Yes, but when I’m up there on stage I’m in control,” he explains, grinning.

“It’s a way of keeping a space around me. I’m confident in doing a show that’s well-rehearsed and at the same time I feel I’m at my best when I’m doing it.”

He pauses for a moment and adds: “If I were asked to talk about ‘X’ I wouldn’t feel I could enjoy that at all. I get asked to do lots of speaking engagements but I don’t take them on because I don’t like not being prepared.”

Derren Brown seems an unlikely showman. He’s polite to a fault, considered and considerate.

How much of his character was pre-formed before he took to the stage?

“I had worked for ten years as a magician I’d started off as a hypnotist but it was very difficult to learn a living from it when you do it in a civilised way, as opposed to the way many stage hypnotists do.

“So I had a decade to find my character. Meantime, I’d written a couple of books for magicians, which is how the TV company came to find me. There were only around four people doing what I was doing at the time.

“I remember Andrew O’Connor ADD saying what he did like was I had no strong ambition. I’ve never been goal orientated or anything like that. It never occurred to me that I should be trying to impress them. I showed them nothing over lunch.

“But at the end of the meal I showed them a trick and Andrew said I didn’t switch into performance mode that everyone else they’d spoken to had. They liked that. What else they saw in me I don’t know.”

“However, I had no sense of TV however. Thankfully, my management came with the TV, and my manager had been a magician. Then the producer came in and we became a team.

“What I didn’t have was a sense of pace. I went from fishing in a small pond, to knowing nothing.

“Thankfully, Objective ( the TV production company) were really supportive and we grew together and that was because there was a real craft behind it.”

But he was offering something different; a real blend of magic and mind manipulation. He studied hypnosis, psychology, magic, manipulation, essentially the human condition, which has been distilled into his act.

Fairly introverted then becomes a performer, almost by default.

“You do magic because you want to impress people. A lot of under confident kids do magic for this reason.

“With hypnosis even more so. It’s a control thing. If you feel intimidated by a laddish set then suddenly you can click your fingers and you find yourself in control.

“This wasn’t all a conscious act on my part but I began to realise it was ticking boxes in terms of my insecurities of the time.

“That desire to perform is an exaggerated way of getting attention is still rooted in this basic insecurity. So that ties the shyness and performance together.

“If I performed regularly it took care of my need for attention so over the years now I’ve gotten over the need.”

He adds, laughing; “And it was really quite a childish thing to do I guess.

“I used to have do conjuring tricks all the time. I couldn’t have a normal conversation with someone without performing. I always used to have some trick on me all the time.

“Now I hate it. I used to love it when people said to me ‘Tell me what I’m thinking.’ Not now.”

• Derren Brown, Miracle, the King’s Theatre, July 4 – 9.