Stephen Mulhern: ‘I’d choose Doreen from Doncaster over Mariah Carey all day long’

Stephen Mulhern has been kicked out of – and reinstated back into – the Magic Circle more times than he cares to remember. The reason for his suspension is understandable – he revealed how he did a card trick, breaking one of the group’s cardinal rules, on live children’s television. Every time the show is repeated, he finds himself out again.

Yet it was a noble choice: he simply wanted to encourage those watching to be inspired to pick up a pack of cards themselves. “They’ve invited me to come back in,” he says. “I will go back, I think… maybe I think too much about it.”

Still, he doesn’t regret it. “I don’t think that if someone had handed me a book when I was in school and told me to go and learn magic, I would have been able to do it,” he says. “But being able to see someone do it in front of you and make you laugh is different. You’ve got to open the door a little bit.”

Now 44, Mulhern still holds the record as the youngest magician to be invited into the inner sanctum – he was just 17 when the Circle came knocking. Nowadays, he is best known as a game-show host, entertainer and the supportive third wheel to Ant and Dec’s double act.

He is currently on our screens every Saturday night as host of ITV’s Rolling In It, an oversized version of the Roll a Penny arcade game found on most UK piers. Now in its second series, the game teams members of the public with celebrity helpers – this series’ include Martin Kemp, Strictly’s Oti Mabuse and Jason Manford – to answer general knowledge questions and hopefully roll a giant penny into a slot worth a lot of money. Jeopardy comes in the form of “bankrupt” slots, which can lose contestants their banked cash or force them to skip their go.

“I don’t even think you need celebrities on it,” says Mulhern, more honestly than I was expecting. “The format is so strong. You could have siblings or partners and it would work just as well. If we ever run out of celebrities, we’ll be fine.”

The best part, he says, is being able to give people life-changing amounts of money. “Especially when someone is being so real, when someone openly says they need the money,” he adds. “I remember there was a girl in the first series who just wanted to stock the fridge and get a new mattress. It’s people like that who you really root for.”

Mulhern’s greatest strength is the instant rapport he is able to conjure with members of the public. It’s evident on Rolling In It, but more so on another of his ITV shows, In For a Penny, in which, bedecked in a shiny gold blazer, he recruits people off the street to compete in a series of challenges with the promise of winning increasingly attractive prizes.

“If I had a choice of Mariah Carey or Doreen from Doncaster, I’d choose Doreen all day long,” he says. “Without question, you’ll get better entertainment value from a good member of the public with character than any star, no matter how big they are.”

The presenter attributes his ability to make people feel comfortable to his years of performing on stage. “I used to work at Butlins as a Redcoat. People watching you have spent a lot of money and saved up to go on holiday, so you want to entertain them,” he explains.

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The new series of In For a Penny is currently filming across the UK, and Mulhern is still often surprised by how much the people he approaches are willing to go along with.

“Maybe it’s partly because of the pandemic and everybody’s happy now, but we were getting the same response before Covid. People want to have a nice time – life’s tough enough, so if there’s a moment when we can all have a giggle, that’s what we should do.”

His litmus test for some of the more madcap challenges is whether he’d ask his family to do the same thing. “Under no circumstances would I want to embarrass anyone,” he explains. “Would I try to get my mum to roll a sausage roll up my dad’s body? Yes, I would. Would I tell my sister to put her head in a big vat of spaghetti and find meatballs with her mouth? Absolutely.”

Mulhern’s family have always been supporters of their son’s ambitions. While they didn’t have any concrete links to the entertainment industry, he credits his time working on the family stall at London’s Petticoat Lane Market as his first foray into performance.

“The products we were selling needed demonstrating, so it was like learning a script,” he recalls. “I loved music and drama at school but everything else – maths or geography or history – I didn’t like. I decided quite early on that I’d definitely leave at 16.” He soon became the resident magician at toy shop Hamleys, and began sending audition tapes to the TV producers he read about in the Radio Times listings.

His first TV break came when The Disney Channel invited him to perform some tricks and before long he was a presenter for ITV’s children’s channel CITV, where he stayed from 1998 to 2001.

He is one of a generation of TV favourites who rose through the entertainment ranks via children’s TV, alongside Holly Willoughby, Cat Deeley, Ant and Dec, Noel Edmonds and Phillip Schofield to name but a few.

“All those presenters had a chance to learn how to make live TV from early on. You can make mistakes on live TV,” he says. “Now, the only chance to get a presenting break is going on a reality show. I don’t begrudge them, but I find it fascinating that there aren’t many avenues to get these gigs any more.”

Having that foundation still helps Mulhern today and he always keeps a pack of cards in his suit jacket while filming live TV just in case something goes wrong. He has stayed close with Ant and Dec, too, and works with them regularly on their Saturday Night Takeaway. “They’ve been incredibly generous to me. We trust each other so much and I think the audience can see that,” he says of working with the Geordie pair.

There are still some surprises, though: Mulhern doesn’t wear the often-bizarre costumes in rehearsals, so the reaction of his co-stars is entirely spontaneous. “I worried about those gold shorts,” he admits, referring to the headline-grabbing skimpy ensemble he wore for an “Ant vs Dec” segment earlier this year. “Afterwards I worried people thought we might have gone too far. I would never intentionally do that.”

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