What he does here to the guy and the audience is a combination of different tricks as usual
That girl he did the "glued hands" trick on was an obvious plant. Watch her behavior immediately after the trick was over. She acted totally unlike a person who'd just been singled out by a magician in the middle of a live show.
BUT, he compares this process to the guy who killed Robert Kennedy in a way that makes it seem like he actually endorses the idea that the killer of Robert Kennedy could've been "programmed" to do it. That's where I think he crosses the line this time, have you even seen the episode?
Yeah I watched it. He's talking BS about the Robert Kennedy assassination to bolster the credibility of his act. Sure it's irresponsible, but what do you expect?
Derren Brown is an "edgy" TV entertainer. He's kind of known for treading the line of controversy in the way he presents his tricks. Remember the one where he played Russian roulette with a gun loaded by a member of the audience? Or the one where he stopped random people on the street, asked them for directions, and then supposedly talked them into giving him their wallets, keys, mobile phones, and wristwatches? Do you think those tricks were real? Of course not. They were staged magic tricks that relied on paid actors, audience plants and stooges. It totally does not surprise me that Derren Brown would stoop to exploiting a 40-year-old political assassination for some TV ratings.
There has never been any compelling evidence to believe it's even possible to hypnotize and "program" somebody against their will to commit an assassination.
Of course "brainwashing" is possible in some cases, in the form of a general, forced ideological realignment. But that is a much different thing from basic hypnosis. Real "brainwashing" techniques are violent and abusive, involving long periods of physical and psychological torture. It exploits the Stockholm Syndrome by meting out intermittent cycles of punishment and reward with no predictable pattern, until the captive's mental state breaks down to the point of total physical and emotional dependence on the captor. At that point the captive becomes highly vulnerable to suggestion. That kind of brainwashing does not work on everybody, and it still does not involve "programming" a person to autonomously carry out a task against his own will without any knowledge or memory.
Derren Brown, however, is not going to torture, starve and thirst some poor audience member half to death for the purposes of a TV show. And I certainly think that if it even were possible to "program" a person to become an assassin, it would be highly irresponsible for a TV entertainer to do that for a live performance. What if something went wrong? What if the guy somehow managed to obtain a real gun on his own? What if he decided to use a different method of murder, or to kill somebody else? The whole thing is obviously a complete hoax, a magic trick.
As for the actual Robert Kennedy assassination, Sirhan Sirhan (himself a native Palestinian) admitted he was strongly opposed to Kennedy's pro-Israel political stance, so he had a more than adequate motive for a political assassination. I think he probably adopted the "preprogrammed zombie assassin" defense because of the popularity of the movie
The Manchurian Candidate, and the rumors of US prisoners of war being brainwashed in Korea from a few years prior. It's not unheard of for criminals in high-profile jury trials to invoke pop-culture psychology memes in their defense.
