Derren Brown: Pushed to the Edge

[God of Mr. Hanky]

If its possible to predictably manipulate people to the point they would willingly push someone off a roof then Derren is doing a huge public service by revealing that.
The ramifications are obvious and terrifying.

Possible doesn't mean likely. It is of course possible and quite likely that you can predictably get someone to push another off a roof, or to torture another to death through electric shocks (as Milgrim showed us a long time ago), but Brown broke all credibility constraints in "Pushed to the Edge". That it works is beside the point - that it would be done this way in the real world, outside that of TV-land and movie special-effects is where the issue lies, which makes what he did to those people who were involved pointless. It's the unrealistic elaborations which Brown resorted to, in the name of entertainment, which cheapened what he did, reducing it to nothing above entertainment.