By promising to hang upside down for 60 hours, only to end up taking breaks for a third of that time because it hurt when he peed, David Blaine lost a lot of fans. And rightly so – it’s one thing to pretend to pull your own heart out of your chest, but not letting blood collect in his brain for long enough to kill him? Boo you, sir. Boo to you.

Anyway, one of the biggest fans that David Blaine lost with his stunt seems to be David Blaine himself. Speaking on Regis And Kelly, David Blaine told the world that he’s disappointed with the stunt, especially the ending. As are we, David. We wanted the stunt to end with your head exploding, and you knew that.

When you’re David Blaine and live in the crack between reality and fantasy in a box made of shards of the limits of human endurance, you have to be prepared for things not to go your way sometimes. Well, OK, maybe a little more than sometimes.

Looking back, most of David Blaine’s stunts end in disappointment – the profound artistic statement of his 40-day starvation in London was somewhat tarnished by the crowds of drunken city boys throwing hamburgers and getting their arses out. And who can forget the bitterly disappointing end to his Drowned Alive stunt when, strapped into shackles and weighed down by lead, David Blaine resolutely refused to drown?

However, nothing has been quite as disappointing as David Blaine’s Dive Of Death stunt this week. It was never a great idea to begin with – although David Blaine risked blindness and an exploded head by hanging upside down for 60 hours, easily making it one of his most dangerous stunts ever, as far as spectacle went it was just a bloke swinging by his ankles, which is obviously quite rubbish.

Worse still, David Blaine didn’t even stay upside down for 60 hours. Because of the extreme health risks – and also because he didn’t want to end up covered in piss – David Blaine took 20 minutes off each hour to stand up and have a bit of a rest.

But worst of all was the ending. Throughout the stunt David Blaine had been promising the most spectacular ending of anything he’d done yet, but when push came to shove he just sort of halfheartedly disappeared. And that’s what hurts David Blaine the most – so much so that he went on TV to apologise about it.

Speaking on Live With Regis And Kelly, David explained that he was supposed to jump out of his harness and then get pulled into the air and away over New York by a giant bunch of helium balloons. But that didn’t happen because it was quite windy:

“I wasn’t going to let everybody down, so I just jumped, and somehow the guys with the balloons made it work, and they pulled me slowly up and I went over into the park and they pulled me down. I know that it didn’t work right when all my friends called up and said, `Wait, what happened? I’m confused.’”

Actually, that original ending does sound sort of cool. But David Blaine hates to let his fans down – when his Drowned Alive stunt ended in failure, he went on Oprah later to finish it the way he’d always intended – so maybe Blaine will revisit his balloon stunt again before long.

Lets hope so – it’ll give us time to stockpile blowdarts first.

That’s nothing surprising, really – had he wanted the stunt to have more accurate name David Blaine would have titled it The Brief Upside Down Swing Of Uncomfortable Urination or, better, The Mostly Standing Up Of Non-Death – but it’s finished now, so we may as well humour David a bit.

The Dive Of Death part came right at the end of David Blaine’s stunt where, after 60 hours of hanging upside down, Blaine was sort of gently lowered down to the ground on a harness and then pulled up again until he vanished. Nobody really knows why this happened, but they’re generally agreed that it was better than watching him cry like a big girl as soon as it finished, which tends to be his traditional show-stopper.

It’s always a little bit disappointing when David Blaine survives his stunts, isn’t it? We’re not saying that because we dislike David Blaine – although, you know – but because everyone spends so long beforehand detailing all the gory ways that David Blaine could end his life that we can’t help feeling a little short-changed when he doesn’t.

Take the Dive Of Death which ended last night, for example. Some doctors said that at the very least David Blaine could go blind from all the blood sloshing around behind his eyeballs, and there was even the promise of an exploded head or two as well if we stuck around for long enough.

Did any of that happen? No. Was there any real danger that anything even approaching that would happen? Thanks to the way that David Blaine took one in every three minutes off to stand up and have a wee, no. So what was the Dive Of Death’s big finale? E! Online reports:

When it came time to “dive,” he sort of fluttered down to Earth before the hoister of his harness whisked him away. Mystifyingly into the ether, he’d have us believe.

You see the implication in that? David Blaine doesn’t belong among us. He belongs in space with the stars, because the stars don’t laugh at David Blaine for complaining that it hurts when he pees.

Actually, in all the controversy about David’s standing-up breaks, we think the magnitude of what he achieved with the Dive Of Death stunt has been lost a little.

Yes, David Blaine may have stood up every now and again, but that was only to stop him dying. In the end, you can’t take the accomplishment away from David Blaine – even with the breaks, he still hung upside down without food or sleep for 40 hours. For no reason whatsoever. Even though nobody asked him to. He wasn’t even doing it for charity or anything. No, you can’t take that away from him.

Anyway, as it happens we actually enjoyed the ending to David Blaine’s upside down stunt. Would you rather see a man anticlimactically vanish into thin air, or would you rather see a weeping bloke get helped into an ambulance, because that’s how all his previous stunts have ended.

The ‘vanish into space’ thing is much more dignified – at least unless you stuck around for long enough afterwards to watch David Blaine get lowered down normally and helped into an ambulance while he sobbed, that is. Which we assume is what happened. Why break the habit of a lifetime?

At least we presume it is. And David Blaine probably presumes the same thing, too, because it’s not like he’d know what being upside down for 60 hours is actually like or anything. You see, it’s emerged that David Blaine actually gives himself two 10-minute breaks every hour where he can drop to the ground and have a bit of a rest. Why? Because – and this is true – David Blaine finds weeing upside down slightly uncomfortable.

Still, never one to bow to his detractors, David Blaine will end his stunt tonight and immediately begin training for his next stunning feat of endurance. We hear it involves him spending 45 minutes in a luxury hotel suite being fed peeled grapes by a cluster of top supermodels while Angelina Jolie occasionally dabs single beads of sweat from his brow with a tuft of unicorn fur. Truly, that man is a machine.

David Blaine’s Dive Of Death stunt comes to an end in New York tonight, and it’s a stunt that he’s bound to look back on fondly. Because David Blaine put his body through torture for months on end ahead of that task. He risked blindness for his art. His head could have exploded at any point.

But most impressive of all, David Blaine only took 20 minutes off each hour. Just 20 minutes to drop to the floor, have a drink, go to the toilet, chat with fans, let a team of medical experts check him over. Why, over the course of his 60-hour stunt, that means that David Blaine was only not doing his advertised stunt for 20 hours. Just 20 hours!

That’s not even enough time to watch an entire season of 24. Well, unless you’re skipping the adverts, in which case you could easily watch an entire season of 24 and still have plenty of time left for half a round of golf. Honestly, someone should give David Blaine a medal for his incredible 66% productivity.

Despite this, some people have twigged that David Blaine’s upside down stunt is only two-thirds upside down, and they’ve started to get a bit narked off with him, calling him a cheater and generally belittling his accomplishments.

But David Blaine isn’t having any of it. He knows that urinating upside down into a catheter might make his kidneys a bit sore and, really, have you tried swallowing water upside down? It can be slightly difficult sometimes. That’s why David Blaine was forced to defend his part-time stunt to the New York Daily News:

“I’m not going to pee all over myself to satisfy those people,” he said as he dangled like a bat Tuesday night. “It’s pretty hard-core, worse than I thought.”

Quite right, David Blaine shouldn’t have pee over himself to satisfy his fans. Can’t a man just hang upside down by himself as part of a large internationally-hyped attention-seeking stunt any more? Who do they think they are, buying the products to fund the companies who pay for advertising on his TV specials? The gawking consumerist bastards.

In fact, we’re just slightly disappointed that David Blaine didn’t think of this ‘breaking the rules of his own stunts whenever he gets a bit uncomfortable’ scheme before. That way he could have hopped out of his giant water tank every time his fingers got a bit wrinkly, or lowered his box above London to the ground for a slap-up meal every time KFC had an offer on, or – rather than stand encased in ice for 63 hours – David Blaine could have just sat in a lovely big armchair next to an open fire drinking mulled wine indoors for 32 seconds.

Or something.

And it seems to be a case of so far so dull because despite what all those elaborately-named doctors seemed to think yesterday, David Blaine hasn’t gone blind yet. Nor has blood started seeping from his tear ducts. He hasn’t even coughed up a single internal organ yet. David Blaine is rubbish. We want our money back.

Or maybe we should wait a while, because David Blaine has revealed that being upside down makes him think that his “head’s about to explode.” Yeah, well that’s nothing. We once ate three bunches of grapes in one go and it made us feel like our bum was going to explode, but you don’t hear us banging on about it, do you?

David Blaine has always risked injury for his art. When he stood in that cave of ice, David Blaine risked dying of hypothermia. When David Blaine submerged himself in water for several days he risked water suffocation and muscle atrophy. And when David Blaine sat in a box over London he risked having his eye taken out with a gay sausage.

But all of that pales into comparison with what David Blaine’s up to at the moment. While hanging upside down above an ice rink for 60 hours doesn’t sound particularly taxing, the health risks to David Blaine are incredible. By spending so long upside down, any number of the following horrible injuries could happen to him before the end of the stunt:

*Pins & needles

*Inverted testicle

*The 60-hour gravity wedgie

*Bad hair

*Splay

*Tongue loll

*Spinal wibble

*Big pores

Worst of all, though, is blindness. Before the stunt, doctors told David Blaine that being the wrong way up might cause his optic nerves to scab up or something, and that his sight would never recover. But while he’s been submitting himself to regular upside down medical exams for this matter, there’s a chance that David Blaine has overlooked one tiny condition that the stunt could provoke – Exploding Head Disease. Digital Spy reports:

Speaking from his inverted position, Blaine said he was “doing all right” but that he had experienced an enormous push of blood which made his head feel like it was “about to explode”.

That’s more like it. Perhaps more people would have paid attention to David Blaine’s little stunt from the start if they knew that he was going to get all Scanners on us a couple of hours in.

We’re all for this head explosion malarkey, you know. True, it’ll make a horrible mess of Central Park, countless people will be left experiencing a hideously traumatic event that they’ll never recover from, and David Blaine himself might suffer a side effect or two, but look on the bright side – if David Blaine’s head does explode, then at least he won’t have anything to cry out of like a great big pansy when the stunt’s over for once. It’s completely worth it.

Nobody seems to know exactly why David Blaine has decided to hang upside down above Central Park for 60 hours in a row without food or sleep. It’s probably best to presume that it’s just another one of those attention-seeking stunts he does from time to time because his mother didn’t hug him very often. However, with this stunt David Blaine runs the risk of doing some very serious damage to himself.

Apparently some kind of medical genius has decided that being upside down for 60 hours might make the blood go to David Blaine’s head, which could harm his eyesight. Bad news for David Blaine, but good news for those of us who want the stunt to end with David Blaine’s eyeballs popping out of his head, sending jets of blood spraying around in all directions over a crowd of screaming onlookers.

And, face it, deep down that’s all of us.

We never really know where to stand on the whole David Blaine thing. On one hand his stunts are a perfect example of spectacle as public art, but on the other hand he’s a smug wanker and we constantly pray that he fails at everything he ever does. It’s a fine line to walk.

In recent years, David Blaine has pushed his body to its very limit by going wrinkly then almost drowning while trapped in what appeared to be a giant transparent anal bead and then sort of spinning around a bit. But it seems as though those stunts were just David Blaine’s warm-up for his new adventure, which started this morning. For now, readers, David Blaine is going to hang upside down for 60 hours.

Actually, that sounds rubbish, doesn’t it? We think the problem is this – David Blaine really ruined the endurance aspect of his shtick when he sat in a box above London for 40 days. 40 days seems quite a long time. If someone stayed in bed for 40 days it’d be quietly impressive. So when David Blaine announces that he’s only going to div around upside down for 60 poxy hours, it seems like a cop-out. We want David Blaine to hang upside down for three months until his head becomes the size of a big red life-raft and his legs and genitals have withered away to string. 60 hours is rubbish.

Except it’s not. Apparently if David Blaine hangs around upside down for the full 60 hours, he’ll probably go blind. And, oddly enough, not because he plans to spend those 60 hours constantly masturbating over passers by like like sort of horrific upside down flying tramp. Monsters And Critics reports:

Dr Massimo Napolitano, chief of vascular surgery at the Hackensack University Medical Center, New Jersey, told the Bergen Record newspaper that hanging upside down for a long time increases blood pressure in the head, especially in the eyes. This can cause blindness. “My biggest concern for him is possible clotting in the veins of his eyes, causing blindness,” said Dr Napolitano.

Now let’s be honest for a moment. The possibility of David Blaine going blind is definitely good for business. If a bunch of doctors with impressively foreign-sounding names all lined up to say that hanging upside down for two and a bit days would increase the bloodflow to David Blaine’s brain and make him super clever for the rest of his life, nobody would really care about the stunt. But if David Blaine went blind from hanging upside down for 60 hours, that’d really make him famous.

Not that we hope he does, of course. If David Blaine went blind, it’d be a real tragedy – how would he be able to blow kisses at himself into a mirror for days at a time if he can’t see? e imagine he probably does that a lot.

We only mention this because the poor lad seems compelled to try and impress us all the time with a range of increasingly attention-seeking adventures. Yes, OK David, you can stand on top of a pole for a few hours at time – what do you want, a medal?

And just like a door to door salesman, David Blaine’s been back again with another spectacular stunt – this time involving gallons of water, Oprah Winfrey and a silver wetsuit.

Most magicians make their living by ballsing up card tricks at birthday parties and consequently making small children cry, or misjudging the drop of a burning torch and melting the skin off their hands.

But David Blaine is not your average magician. Instead of making balloon animals and poking swords through ropey-looking women, he mainly does long overdrawn stunts that bore the hell out of everyone. Previously David Blaine has stood in some ice and sat in a box and sort of spun around for a while. Truly he is a god among men.

So after dipping off the radar for a while, Blaine returned with a feat that many have almost died trying to do. Yes, the age-old hold your breath underwater game. You know, like he tried a few years ago right before he started convulsing and getting divers to rescue him and stuff.

Many of us have attempted to hold our breath underwater in the immature phase of life, by competing with each other to see who can bring themselves closer to death without actually meeting the grim reaper. Whilst most people reach a worthy 30 seconds, smarty pants David Blaine wanted to be the outright winner of said challenge so he’s had another go at it.

Of course the feat wasn’t done in public. It was done on Oprah Winfrey’s show – aka TV for the dumb. Obviously short of an X Factor reject or a zany Tom Cruise to interview, Oprah needed something to fill up her airtime. So for 17 minutes and four seconds, she let David Blaine float around in a huge tank as she pranced about and shrieked. Or something like that. According to BBC News:

Magician David Blaine has set a world record by holding his breath for 17 minutes and four seconds on Oprah Winfrey’s US TV show in Chicago. “I feel great”, he said, as he was pulled out of the water. “I actually started to doubt I was going to make it because I’d never done it with such a high heart rate,” he added. Winfrey asked him what he was thinking about during his time in the water, to which he replied: “You.”

Blaine told everyone’s favourite billionaire chatshow host that it was a “lifelong dream” to potentially kill himself in front of millions of Americans. And later thousands of Brits when we get the repeats in November. Whatever his strange ambitions, David Blaine is now recognised as the bloke who can hold his breath for quite a while in the Guinness book of records.

Next up, David Blaine doesn’t go to sleep for a while. Perhaps his mother didn’t hug him enough as a child.

Read more:

Blaine Sets Breathtaking Record - BBC

Which is why, for his next big trick, David Blaine has decided to stay awake for 13 days.

Trouble is, though, Keith Richards doesn't want David Blaine to do that. Keith Richards, speaking from experience, says that there are unknown dangers involved with staying awake for days, like falling face-first into a JVC speaker and smashing up your nose after nine days. Similarly, Keith Richards has warned David Blaine against climbing up tiny coconut trees that most children would be able to scale safely without falling and snorting the ashes of dead relatives.

Maybe it's because Shine A Light's being released soon, but it's impossible to get rid of Keith Richards at the moment. He's sort of become the Alan Hansen of celebrity news – a battle-scarred veteran full of 'in my day' stories and ready advice for the young.

Not so long ago Keith Richards was telling everyone that Amy Winehouse will be dead soon because drugs are dangerous these days, and now he's doing the same thing to David Blaine. Seriously, we'd give Keith a fortnight before he becomes a regular GMTV pundit, discussing teenage cosmetic surgery with Lorraine Kelly.

Anyway, back to David Blaine. David Blaine has carved out a niche for himself as a kind of slow-motion Jackass member who, instead of getting gored by a bull, gets his kicks from almost drowning himself and almost starving himself and spinning around until he almost pukes over the course of a couple of weeks for fun and profit. And David Blaine's next stunt involves two weeks of sleep deprivation.

Most people who have attempted to stay awake for days know that the biggest threat of failure occurs when ITV Nightscreen comes on and teases you with its rubbishness until you realise that you may as well just go to bed, but Keith Richards has more pressing concerns for David Blaine – what if Blaine gets to nine days and then falls headfirst into a JVC speaker? Huh? The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Richards claims he managed to stay awake for nine days back in the 1970s, thanks to a cocktail of narcotics, but the feat ended badly. He reveals, "On the ninth day I was putting a tape into a tape deck. In 0.3 of a second I fell asleep and crashed headfirst into a JVC speaker, smashing my nose apart. I just lay there and let it bleed. It was a chemical thing."

David Blaine's people are thought to have heeded Keith Richards' warning – for his stunt David Blaine won't be a) surrounded by confusingly outmoded 1970s technology or b) be completely off his mash on as many hard drugs as he can fit into his mouth. Problem solved.

Of course, even without a tape deck to break his nose on, the threat of damage to David Blaine is pretty huge. By denying the body its right to sleep, there's a genuine chance that David Blaine will start to go mad during his stunt. Without exaggeration, the lack of sleep could destroy the rest of his life. 

But then again, if that means that we won't have to put up with David Blaine doing any more big attention-seeking stunts then we're OK with it. He can stay awake for a couple of months if that's the case.

Read more:

Richards' Sleep Stunt Warning For Blaine – SFC 

The stunt itself? He's planning on going a whole 12 days without sleep, thereby setting a world record and possibly impressing someone somewhere in the world who doesn't really have much else to concentrate on.

Announcing his latest idiot-odyssey at the premiere of I Am Legend, Blaine waffled on about how he had been undergoing a strenuous training regime in order to a) cope with the ordeal, and b) presumably stop his tired little grey brain cells from popping like champagne bubbles via the helping hand of 50 push-ups every morning.

Blaine babbled:

"I'm going for the world record. I need to be in good shape for this. And yes. I am worried that this will cause some serious damage. That's why I'm working out so hard."

Further details have yet to be revealed. Obviously the location is going to be an important factor – standing in a room where non-stop recordings of car alarms are blasted out 24 hours a day would surely aid the snoozeless process along nicely, while being strapped to a chair and made to watch repeat viewings of Spider-Man 3 would send even an insomniac caffeine addict to slumberland.

The great irony is, of course, that while Blaine is subjecting himself to a lack of sleep, the rest of the world will be so bored with his attention-grabbing nonsense that everyone will probably suffer a sudden attack of narcolepsy, collapse where they're standing, wake up a fortnight later and have to take Blaine's word for it that he actually went through with the stunt.

Man. He could wing this one easily.

Read More:

Blaine Fears New Stunt Will Damage Brain – Breakingnews