The Kid Who Wanted to Teleport
Fred Forks walked onto the Britain’s Got Talent stage and told the judges he had a very special dream when he was ten years old. He wanted to teleport. “Imagine you close your eyes and you end up at a different place in under five seconds,” he said, and the judges nodded along. Then he made it happen, live, with volunteers pulled from the audience and two large wooden boxes.
The setup was methodical. Forks scattered small pieces of paper across the judges’ table, each one labeled with a letter corresponding to a row of audience seats. He asked KSI to confirm the letters were all different, then to shake them in a black bag. A female judge reached in and pulled out one slip. Two rows of the audience stood up and walked onto the stage. The set, which had been a clean performance space, was now crowded with volunteers looking around in confusion. Forks had two large wooden boxes waiting at the front of the stage, and he needed people inside them.
He selected a young woman named Carys. She stepped into one box, removed her glasses, and put on a blindfold. The judges leaned forward. “Time to teleport,” Forks said. “In three, two, one, go.” A flash of light, a puff of smoke, and Carys was gone. She reappeared in the other box, blindfold still on, blinking. The judges stared. One covered her mouth. The audience erupted.
Then he brought on a second volunteer, Kenny. Same blindfold. Same countdown. This time, when the light flashed, Carys and Kenny had swapped boxes, and Kenny had vanished entirely. The audience gasped again. Forks pulled a third volunteer, Olive, and borrowed her left shoe. He touched Carys’s leg, held the shoe in her hands, and ran the countdown one final time. When the light hit, the shoe was on Forks’s foot. Olive’s shoe, on the magician’s foot, in the other box. The judges stood.
“My name is Fred Forks, and my dream is to show that nothing is impossible,” he told the judges. He was sixteen years old.
The Card That Told a Story
Jackson, a close-up magician from Heartland, Wisconsin, took a different approach. He walked up to Simon Cowell with a deck of playing cards and asked him to name one card out loud. “Four of diamonds,” Simon said. Jackson reached into his hat and pulled out the four of diamonds. “Before I walked on stage, I knew you were gonna pick the four of diamonds,” he said. Simon looked at the card in his hand. “Stop it,” he muttered, and the audience laughed.
Then Jackson handed Simon a marker. “Think of a word that inspires you,” he said. Simon wrote “Myself” on the back of the four of diamonds. Jackson gave the rest of the deck to Simon to shuffle. What followed was a story told through cards: a boy in a small Wisconsin town, his father Steve showing him magic at age five, watching Matt Franco win America’s Got Talent season nine at ten, and being pulled on stage by Franco himself at thirteen. “The king of magic pulled me on stage at that show, and I got to experience real magic up close with my hero,” Jackson said. The judges were quiet.
He played a melody on a piano using the card values as notes. Ace, three, five, eight, ten, queen, ten. The notes mapped to keys on a labeled piano, and the song that came out was “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Then he turned the cards over one by one. The letters on the backs spelled out the title. Golden confetti fell. The judges were on their feet. Simon hit the golden buzzer.
Sound You Can See
The next act blended music and magic in a way the judges had not seen before. A sixteen-year-old performer told Simon he believed there was magic in music. “Music isn’t just in here,” he said, tapping his chest. “It’s everywhere.” He asked Simon to hold his hand flat, palm up, and made a visible ripple of light travel across his skin. “If we could see sound passing through a solid object, I think it would look something like this,” he explained. Simon held his hand still and watched the light move.
He handed an egg shaker to a judge. “My first instrument was the mighty egg shaker,” he said. She shook it. He made it vanish from her hand. He played a harmonica and pulled two chocolate bars from his mouth. He made a phone levitate above the judges’ table, hovering in mid-air while the audience reached for their phones. He turned a clear liquid orange in a glass, and the judges leaned in to watch the color change. Simon, who had been leaning back in his chair, leaned forward. “You’re sixteen years old, and you’re a bright light,” he said.
Sticks Through the Box
Young and Strange called themselves grand illusionists, not close-up magicians. “But on a less than grand budget,” one of them added, and Simon laughed. They set up on the judges’ table itself, which Simon noted was smaller than he’d imagined. They asked the judges to shift closer to create space. Simon, wearing a red wristband, accidentally pressed the golden emergency stop button before the act even started. “Oh, you just gave yourself a red light,” one of the duo said. Simon laughed and kept the band on.
One of them climbed a ladder and entered a cardboard box. The other began stabbing wooden sticks through the sides, the top, the bottom. Stick after stick, filling the box from every angle. The judges watched. The audience held its breath. Then the sticks came out, one by one, and the person inside was unharmed. No cuts. No bruises. Just a box that should not have held a human being and a dozen wooden rods. The judges gasped in unison.
A group of dancers closed the night with a synchronized card routine that turned into a light show, and a judge hit the golden buzzer to send them straight through. But the magic acts carried the evening. Three different approaches to the same question: what can you make an audience believe with their own eyes?
Forks made a woman disappear. Jackson made a song out of playing cards. The sixteen-year-old made sound visible. Young and Strange made a box hold a person and a dozen sticks. All of it happened on one stage, in front of four judges, with no second takes. The full auditions are worth watching for the reactions alone, but the tricks hold up on their own. If you want to see a teleportation, a card story, and a box full of sticks in one sitting, this is the night to press play.