Horsham - Britain’s Got Talent winner and the Queen's love of card tricks

As both musician and magician, Richard, who won Britain’s Got Talent in 2016 after securing 2.6 million votes, has performed for members of the Royal Family on numerous occasions.

“I spoke to the Queen quite a few times and she always told me that she loved card tricks. I think she was always a people pleaser so maybe she would have said that anyway but something that was always nice was that whenever she had garden parties at Buckingham Palace with the public invited to come along, I would always get there early if I was performing but she would also always be there early, half an hour before and she would go around the garden just checking that everything was OK and looked nice. She was great in that respect. And she loved magic.

“And Charles, our new king, is a member of the Magic Circle. There is a photograph at the Magic Circle of King Charles when he was maybe in his early 20s and in this photo he’s doing a very famous magic trick called cups and balls. It is a great photo. I think it was taken for his audition night but I don't know anybody who was there at the time.”

Richard’s tour comes just a few weeks after leaving the army after 12 years of service: “I did the TV in 2016 and from then on I was juggling being in the army full time and doing magic shows around my army work, but the reason I decided to carry on in the army was that I'd always wanted to be a soldier and I made the decision that I would carry on for longer. But it was always in the pipeline that I would leave one day to focus on the magic and this seemed the right time, especially now given the past couple of years that we've had with Covid and everything. Now shows are happening, it seems a good time to do just the magic.

“I joined the army in 2010 and I didn't know any magic at that time. I went to work in the United Nations for a while and it was whilst I was doing that that I stumbled into magic because I just wanted to have some kind of entertainment. I did a lot of travelling and I just wanted something to do. The first time I started was in Cyprus but we were travelling around all sorts of different places. I did a couple of little card tricks and when I saw how that boosted morale I realised it was something that could spiral and then whenever I went with the army somewhere, I was asked to do a show for the host country. It was a great way of getting people together and meeting people and just a really good ice breaker. A nd what I realised was that it didn't matter where you came from or what your background was. Everybody could experience magic. Language can have different boundaries and different meanings but people can always experience magic though I did find that I had to be careful in certain places in how I framed the shows, certain places that are terrified of the idea of witchcraft. In some places I had to make sure that I said that anybody could do what I was doing if they had had the right training and that it definitely wasn’t witchcraft!”