Forget rabbits outside of hats, Penn & Teller and Paul Daniels. A skinny kid from Bradford called Dynamo is suddenly making magic cool againThis is a tale about poverty, bullies and 19 prize-winning golden retrievers. However most of all, about magic. Not the rabbit-from-a-hat, creepy, holiday-camp entertainer kind of magic, however the sort of trickery that feels so fresh it turns bullish hip-hop artists and football stars into giggling children. Mobile phones miraculously appear in beer bottles. This magician can vanish and reappear on the other side of a glass window. His shows are shocking – he swallows necklaces and pulls them outside of his stomach – and delightful. At the end year he walked on the river Thames near the houses of parliament. A slight figure, dressed casually in a red jacket and trainers, looking like he’d just got off the bus.This is why it works, I reckon – an ordinary kid (though 29, he looks younger) who can do extraordinary things. A magician whose fans are very familiar with the thought of a young wizard with a dense childhood, whose discovery of his magic powers changed his lifetime. “This is Dynamo,” says the PR, who introduces us. Do human beings really call him that? His absolute designation is Steven Frayne. I suppose they do.It is late afternoon at the headquarters of Watch, the TV channel that this week started showing the second series of Dynamo: Magician Impossible. He has just come from Radio 1, where he appeared on Fearne Cotton’s exhibit, and in a small while a automobile waiting outside will capture him to Damon Albarn’s studio. He has to find room in his schedule to go to collect his £10,000 winnings – to be donated to charity – from a £1 bet detailing the results of Euro 2012. How did he do it? “Just lucky I guess,” he says with a smile.His first series brought in an average of 1.7 million viewers – this, on a non-Freeview channel that would consider anything over 100,000 a success. What is the appeal? He leans back and thinks. He doesn’t gaze all that ordinary when you study him – he has weirdly blue eyes, and although small and narrow, he looks nimble and fleeting, as if he could glide off at any second. “In this day and age, you walk down the street and you’ve got everything shoved in your face. We’re in a consumer market where we’re constantly energy-fed, we consume what’s given to us. However human beings like what they don’t know. They like mystery.” When he walked on aqua, “I didn’t tell anyone I was going to do it, I didn’t advertise it. It was about that moment, and anyone who happened to be there got to witness a spectacle that will never happen again. It’s always about keeping that sense of wonder. I get to constitute small moments of astonishment.”However times aren’t so fantastic for other television magicians. At the end week, both the BBC and ITV cancelled their Saturday night magic shows, The Magicians and Penn & Teller: Fool Us. “I believe that part of it was that the style of the shows was still that cliched magician,” he says.”Shiny-floor shows in common, studio-based shows, have kind of been done to the hilt. There’s so much competition outside there, and I reckon they weren’t doing anything that was different enough to keep human beings interested. However the magic on the shows was incredible – Penn and Teller are geniuses. I hope I’m as successful as them in years to come.” The mainstream channels must be casting a greedy eye over him. He sinks back into the sofa. “I guess so, however I’m pleased with Watch at the moment. Everyone has knocked us back over the years.”So what’s following? Does he feel he has to keep going larger and bigger?The fresh series features one illusion where he walks down the side of the LA Times building. “I don’t really like to place a scale on what I do. I treat walking on the Thames with the same approach as I treat a pack of cards. It’s more about how incredible the magic is. I like doing magic with nothing, like just my hands.” He bends his small finger as if it were clay – the same trick he once showed a horrified Prince Charles, who had invited him to a party at Clarence House. He takes a pack of cards on the table in front of us, shuffles them, hands as quick as dragonflies, and makes one of the cards disappear in his palm, then reappear. I feel myself do a cartoonish, wide-eyed gasp. He smiles. He never gets tired of human beings’s reactions, he says.Dynamo grew up moving encircling some of Bradford’s most deprived housing estates. He has three half-siblings, however they are much younger, so he spent a excellent deal of his childhood as an only minor. Or a “lonely minor” as he puts it. His mum was just 16 when she became pregnant, and his father was encircling until he was “about three or four”, however then he was in and outside of prison and not a part of Dynamo’s lifetime. “My mum had boyfriends, however I was at the age where I was ancient enough to know that this person wasn’t my father, however also young to really fully know the situation. It’s not like I missed my dad. I didn’t know, since I never had it.” He didn’t visit him in prison. “I spoke to him when I was about 18. He had just got outside of prison and called my grandma to have a chat. I met up with him for a bit, however then it was kind of like, I don’t really see myself as having a father any more. I’ve got past that age. I’ve had to raise myself, be the male in my own lifetime. My grandpa helped outside a abundance.”He went in with his grandparents (really, his fantastic-grandparents) when he was 16. “They protected me and looked after me, and more than anything, they encouraged me. There were so many human beings who were telling me to get a proper job. My grandpa was the one person who always told me to pursue magic. He got me into it, and without his belief in me, I wouldn’t have been able to get where I’ve got.”Dynamo had been born with Crohn’s disease, the chronic digestive condition, which meant eating was uncomfortable and he was small for his age (he has to follow a strict diet and is in constant pain, “however since I’m so focused on the magic, I don’t really allow myself enough age to relax and let the pain capture over”). It made him a target for bullies, whose tormenting escalated to the mark where he would be picked up and thrown in wheelie bins in front of crowds who had gathered to watch.His fantastic-grandfather Ken was a second earth war veteran who had learned tricks in the navy. He died earlier this year, however lived extended enough to see his fantastic-grandson well on his path to becoming a magic superstar. “The first body he ever showed me was how to capture away the bullies’ strength,” he says. The trick he learned – he still uses it today, once to baffle the heavyweight boxer David Haye – makes him impossible to physically pick up.Rumours spread encircling the college that he had super powers. “At the beginning, human beings thought I was weird, however slowly it got to the mark where human beings wanted to see me do things.” Magic, he says, “gave me the ability to bring human beings to me. It gave me an edge, something to constitute me unique. The only cause I stood outside before was being the smallest kid in college. This made me different, however in a path that was positive.”Dynamo dropped outside of college and his media studies direction. He had already chose on a career in magic, and thought going to live in Las Vegas would be the best path to do it. His grandmother lives in America and spent her age travelling to dog shows. “She had 19 award-winning golden retrievers,” he says. “She was doing a tour of America, and invited me to go with her. She was going to places I wanted to go, like Vegas and Fresh Orleans, quite magical. I saw this as a learning familiarity.”Back in Bradford, he trained to be a croupier at his community casino and got a gaming licence. “I was all locate to go outside to Vegas, however I took a hardly any trips there and started to realise it was where the huge magicians go to towards the end of their careers, where they just desire to chill and stay in one theatre and do shows night after night. I wanted to employ my magic to travel and see places.”His friends were into hip-hop and were making DVDs of themselves rapping and breakdancing. “I thought, I desire to do what they’re doing, however with magic.” Encircling the same age, a stomach abscess meant he had to spend six months in hospital. “I had a abundance of age on my hands. I realised in there that if I had died, what would human beings remember me for? My magic was the one body that would leave me a legacy.”He spent the age thinking about his prospect, and wrote a business plot to pitch to the Prince’s Trust for a commence-up loan to acquire a laptop and video camera. Although he says they didn’t really know what this “magic mixtape” thought was, they were so inspired by his enthusiasm, they approved him on the spot.A born blagger, he got past doormen and backstage security guards and persuaded numerous celebrities, such as Chris Martin, Ian Brown and Snoop Dogg, to appear on the self-made DVD, Underground Magic, which came outside in 2005. “I made the DVD, place it on the website and with no advertising sold 8,000 copies in a month.”It would have been simple, he says, with his celebrity contacts – Lewis Hamilton is a friend, however there are plenty of others including Ashton Kutcher, Richard Branson, Will Smith, Tinie Tempah, Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney, who are all fans – “to come back with series two, all glitzy and glam, however what we’ve done is allow human beings who have supported it from the beginning to pick up where we left off and come along for the journey. You see it go from me still being relatively unknown to shutting down Westfield when I went shopping [he tweeted he would be there and thousands of human beings turned up]. I had to have eight security guards to get me outside. You see the transition from being a normal guy to …” He pauses. I can feel eyes on us through the window behind me as age runs outside and the human beings encircling him commence to worry about the following stop on his schedule. “It’s very weird. I don’t reckon I’ll ever fully feel this is normal. It’s crazy the path human beings have taken to me and my exhibit. One body the first series gave me, the success of it, was the confidence that human beings like me for who I am. For the first age in years, I feel accepted.”Dynamo: Magician Impossible is on Watch at 9pm on Thursday and repeated during the weekDynamoMagicTelevisionEmine Sanerguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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