David Merlini

With a name like Merlini it was inevitable that my protégé from Budapest would be a magician. From the moment I saw his act I knew he could become a world superstar. What I never imagined was that he would one day place his life in my hands.

David Merlini held 500 celebrities, journalists and television executives spellbound at the Majestic Hotel in Cannes on the first day of MIPCOM, the $500m media fair, with a death-defying attempt to shatter the world record for surviving underwater without breathing.

David Blaine held the title, after he spent more than 17 minutes submerged in a glass globe on Oprah Winfrey’s show earlier this year. But Merlini was confident he could seize that record, after spending more than a year in training.

“I have held my breath for well over 20 minutes in my bathtub,” he assured me. “And I already hold the record for the longest underwater escape — you’ve seen the video.”

He’s right, and it’s the most terrifying 10 minutes and 17 seconds ever filmed. Merlini was chained and handcuffed in a glass cabinet like an up-ended coffin in Hollywood, for a feat that was a direct homage to his hero, Harry Houdini. Unlike Houdini, he did not slip his shackles in a few swift movements, but wrestled with them constantly.

“When you’re fighting to get out of chains,” David told me, “You use up a lot of blood oxygen. This time, I’m going to be perfectly still. The secret is not to hold your breath — it is to breathe out, at timed intervals, just a bubble or two at a time.”

Merlini has accomplished feats of escape and endurance that have never been copied. He has been chained inside a steel box that was welded shut and thrown into the Danube by the world’s strongest man, Laszlo Fekete. He has been suspended from a helicopter by a burning rope, strait-jacketed in a refrigerator at minus 38F, buried in concrete up to his neck and dumped once again into the Danube, and frozen with 300 gallons of liquid nitrogen.

But this time, I was afraid for him. As I ended my introduction and he was lowered into the tank in Cannes, I could not help remembering how I had imagined this scene before. At the climax of my novel Ella, the twisted guru who is controlling the heroine has himself submerged in a tank of water and drowned on live TV, convinced that Ella will bring him back to life in a televised miracle.

My tension must have been visible to the crowd. “You looked like a headless chicken on the stage,” my brother-in-law Shipi told me later, laughing. But my emotion was genuine and I couldn’t hide it: if anything went wrong, I might see my friend die before my eyes.

Uri beyond the panic (All photos are taken by Irene Hell)

As the clock ticked, the atmosphere in the Majestic was nerve-shredding. Merlini seemed barely to blink as he swayed inside the tank, a tiny bubble escaping his lips every twenty seconds or so.

A roar went up as the countdown passed the record mark, and still Merlini showed no sign that he was ready to emerge. I could feel the blood pumping in my head. Nothing would induce him to quit — every second he was extending his grip on the record, making it more and more impossible for anyone ever to surpass him.

After 20 minutes and 30 seconds I saw his eyes roll up in his head as he started to slump to the side. If he wasn’t already unconscious, he was slipping into a blackout, and at any moment his body’s reflexes would force him to gulp for air.

There was no time to prise off the lid. In those few precious seconds, Merlini could drown. Security guards were standing on either side of the tank with sharp tools clutched in their fists, and I gave the order: “Get him out of there! Smash the glass!”

A ton of water exploded across the stage — and it was stained an ominous pink. As Merlini stumbled out of the wreckage, I saw he was badly cut across one side, on his arm and leg.

Merlini just survived his bloody new world record

Paramedics at the scene bandaged his wounds and we rushed him to the city hospital by ambulance. There was a grim surprise for us there — the accident and emergency department was packed with people, some of them nursing serious injuries from car accidents and fights.

Uri and Merlini. “Protégé” sometimes it means – nursing.

I asked Merlini how he was feeling, and he grinned: “I feel no pain,” he said. “I never do, not until the next day. It’s part of my secret — I can endure suffering that would kill a normal man, because I can shut off the pain.”

I made certain that he wasn’t bleeding, then told Shipi to stand guard on Merlini’s place in the A&E queue. “We’re going to a party,” I said.

And we did — the star-studded affair hosted by ProSieben’s CEO Guillaume de Posch. The point of MIPCOM, after all, was to introduce Merlini to the world’s TV bosses, and they weren’t going to come and visit him in hospital.

When we returned to A&E three hours later, a very bored Shipi had almost reached the front of the queue. “You missed a great party,” I told him. That’ll teach him to call me a headless chicken...

Update: Merlini needed 15 stitches, and had lost about a litre of blood. He shrugged it off: “It’s all part of the game... the game of life!”

Crystal chess, Iraqis, Nat and Dan

As we watched our children growing up, Hanna and I tried to teach them to stay young at heart. It’s wonderful to see our kids become adults, but we wanted them to retain that childlike spark that helps us take joy in life.

Our daughter Nat is a young woman now, with an exciting new life on another continent — like her brother Dan she was born in the US, and she’s taking advantage of the fact that she doesn’t need a visa or a work permit to have a career in the States, working in the movie industry.

She flew back to Britain for a summer visit, and I was delighted to see that childlike spark is burning as brightly as ever in her. It’s always there, in her infectious sense of humour and her liveliness.

Living in California, she misses her big brother badly... misses teasing him, in fact. When she visited his apartment overlooking Hyde Park, she insisted on trying on his barrister’s wig and robes, and trying out a few dance steps.

Dan laughed, but he knew the joke was on big brother... just as it always was when they were growing up. For a moment, it was like looking at our children aged eight and ten again. Which seems as if it was just a week or two ago, instead of a decade and a half.

Another lesson which Hanna and I worked hard to teach our children was one that many parents assume their kids know instinctively: How to get your own way.

In fact, there’s a right way and a wrong way of getting what you want. The right way is one of the most valuable skills you can learn. The wrong way is destructive, dangerous and, in the end, will only bring misery.

We all know people who can bulldoze straight through other people’s objections and feelings. “Get out of my way,” they shout, “or you’ll get hurt!” Very often, they do get exactly what they want — but they also make an enemy of the whole world. Bullies don’t prosper for long. Sooner or later they meet people who are even more aggressive than they are.

Sadly, there are also many people who look in horror at the bullies and think, “I’d hate to be like that. If that’s what it takes to get your own way in life, then I’ll settle for being a nice person who has to miss out.”

This passive attitude attracts bullies like jam attracts wasps. If you act as though it’s your lot in life to be forever trampled and cheated, there will always be a queue of aggressive people ready to walk all over you.

Bullies don’t respect what anyone else wants. Passive people don’t respect their own needs. To be happy, you must avoid both those mistakes.

Be assertive. Respect your own needs, and be mindful of what other people want too. Being assertive means you state your feelings clearly. You say, “I am going to get what I want — tell me what you want too, and let’s co-operate so we can both get our own way.”

It’s all about self-respect and respect for others. When you learn that, you’re on track for a happy life.

That’s such a simple lesson, though it needs to be repeated many times before a child can fully understand it. I can’t think why schools don’t teach children how to be assertive. Self-respect, plus respect for others: it should be everyone’s first lesson!

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Out of the blue, I received a tempting invitation from an Amsterdam jeweller and sculptor named David CJ de Jong. He’d watched me being interviewed for the launch of Staya Erusa, the Dutch movie which explores paranormal phenomena by delving into my life story, and I had talked about the incredible power of crystals.

David was fascinated — he had just finished creating a chess set cut from rock crystal. The pieces were huge, lustrous, and intensely detailed, each one a unique artwork. Every game with that set would feel like a brush with magic, David promised me.

I did like the idea. Rock crystal energises me — I always carry a piece or two with me. to replenish my mind’s batteries. There’s plenty of scientific evidence to show that crystals do act as energy amplifiers — that’s why there’s a fragment in every quartz watch.

Would my calculations become sharper when I played chess with a crystal set? Would I see deeper into the game, building combinations and sensing strategic weaknesses? Would I be a match for Garry Kasparov, with a quartz king under my fingers?

Then David revealed the price to me: 750,000 Euros.

Regretfully, I turned the offer down. “For that money,” I told him, “I think I’d rather have a house on one of Amsterdam’s historic canals.”

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As Iraq won football’s Asian Cup with a 1-0 win over Saudi Arabia, I couldn’t help celebrating too. The conflicts which have torn that country apart for years, leaving many hundreds of thousands of innocents dead or maimed, has given the world a warped view of the country, as if it’s a place where only bad things happen. It’s great that the nation has something to cheer about, and give the rest of us a chance to see its people happy.

My work with charities in Israel brings me into contact with many Arab children. I know that they could easily be brothers and sisters to the kids who have been blown apart by bombs and missiles from all sides in the war. Bombs don’t care who they kill.

On an impulse, Hanna, Shipi and I walked to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, where the celebrations were centred. We were welcomed by everyone. It was fantastic to meet people, like the girl in this photo, who had seen me on Arabic TV, in Iraq.

We ended up with many new friends at a Lebanese restaurant, where I ate till I felt like bursting. Football fans sing “Who ate all the pies” at porky players...in my case, it was more like, “Who ate all the pittas?”