Magician’s ‘revenge’ on schoolboy bullies
The star, 31, real name Steven Frayne, grew up on Bradford’s tough Delph Hill estate, and as a thin child was targeted by bullies.
Dynamo told Radio Times magazine that his gruelling school experience made him who he is today.
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Hide AdThe illusionist came to magic when his great-grandfather taught him tricks he had picked up in the Royal Navy in the Second World War.
He said: “If I hadn’t been stuck in wheelie bins and shoved down hills, I would never have got into magic.
“I would never have asked my grandpa for help and he would never have shown me what he did.”
“He used to perform stuff for me but he’d never tell me how he did it... It took a long time to get it out of him. And at the time they were just things to scare bullies off.
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Hide Ad“So, I’m kind of thanking the bullies in a way. The best form of revenge is success, isn’t it? Sometimes I get tweets off people who claim to have been my friends at school.
“But they weren’t – they were the ones pushing me down the steps and doing stupid stuff to me.
“But it’s gonna happen, innit? With success, it’s not you that’s changed, it’s people around you that have changed.”
He said he was calling time on his TV ratings hit Dynamo: Magician Impossible to “keep the mystique”.