In the Channel 9 car park in Melbourne, with a crane looming overhead, Arthur Coghlan lowered his slender frame into a 44-gallon steel barrel.
With superhuman powers of contortion, he wedged himself far enough in for the lid to be locked from the outside.
He would have just 90 seconds to escape before the barrel was dropped from a height of 30 metres.
It was August 6, 1979, and the millions of Australians watching at home had no idea how close Arthur came to death.
Arthur had turned to escapology to raise his profile as a magician and being booked for Channel 9’s top rating Don Lane Show was the break he needed.
“He decided he had to do something really big if he was going to go on the biggest variety show in Australia,” his daughter Helen Coghlan recalls.
And so, Arthur dreamed up the most daring, most dangerous escape his magical mind could think of.
“I thought it had to be dangerous for people to watch it,” Arthur says. “I don’t think anybody wants to see anybody die, but I mean, they don’t want to miss it if somebody does.”
In the 70s, safety wasn’t what it is now. Arthur’s assurances it would all be fine were enough to satisfy the program’s executive producer, Peter Faiman. He just wanted a good show.
“I was assured it was impressive, it would look spectacular, and it was a legitimate escape, and he was a legitimate escapologist,” Faiman says. “No escapologist is going to put their life on the line to be on a variety show.”
Earlier, independent engineers had checked over the barrel with a fine-tooth comb to ensure there was no deception and the escape was the real deal. They brought their own locks which they fastened to the steel rod that threaded through the barrel from one end to the other.
“To me, there is no physical way he can do it,” one of the engineers told the audience.
At the family home on the Gold Coast, Arthur’s wife Val paced nervously in the kitchen, as Helen and her two older siblings sat glued to the television.
“I never ever went to see any of Arthur’s escapes,” Val says. “I would rather be at home, and they let me know it was successful.”
She took a deep breath as Don Lane announced the barrel would be hoisted to a height of 100 feet (about 30 metres) by a crane, and then “dropped automatically out of that big box and it will crash to the concrete surface below”. Lane then quipped: “We have hopes Arthur will be out of it before it crashes to the bottom.”
As the box rose into the air, Arthur had 90 seconds to get out. There were no contingencies. Failure was certain death.
“I knew exactly what I had to do,” Arthur recalls. “But unfortunately, it didn’t work and that’s when I started to panic because I was stuck.”
Fast forward more than 40 years and Arthur is still making magic happen and is enjoying a career renaissance, albeit with feet firmly on the ground. He’s working behind the scenes as his daughter Helen takes centre stage in front of a global television audience.
Four-time ‘foolers’ boggle minds of best magicians
At 89, Arthur is basking in the success Helen is having on the US television show Penn and Teller Fool Us.
Penn Jillette and Teller are American world-renown magicians, entertainers, and scientific sceptics who have performed together since the late 1970s. Their program features magicians from around the world trying their hand at fooling two of the best in the business.
Arthur has designed and built the tricks that Helen performs on Fool Us. Not only is she a crowd favourite, but she has now fooled Penn and Teller a record four times — one of only two magicians in the world to do so.
It would seem Penn and Teller have met their match with Helen and Arthur.
“They are two of the finest minds in magic,” Penn says. “He can build the stuff and design it, and then Helen executes it beautifully.”
From hairdresser dreams to Houdini escapes
Helen started as a magician’s assistant in her teens.
“I actually wanted to be a hairdresser,” Helen says. “And I couldn’t get a hairdressing apprenticeship anywhere.”
She thought she’d give the magic a try until something better came along, “but nothing better ever did”.
Helen became a regular in her dad’s popular shows at the Gold Coast’s Magic Castle, later Magic Mountain, graduating from assistant to magician. As a trailblazer in the blokey world of magic, Helen relished a challenge and the chance to show up the boys.
“I remember some of Dad’s male magician friends were saying that escapology was a male domain and that women couldn’t do escapes,” Helen says. “And to me, it was like, ‘excuse me?'”
Arthur wasn’t keen on Helen taking risks, “but she was determined, so from that point all I can do is help her,” he recalls.
In 1987, Helen became the first woman in the world to perform Houdini’s Water Torture Escape, a terrifying, underwater stunt invented by the great Harry Houdini and first performed by him in 1913.
Undeterred by Arthur’s brush with death on live television, Helen repeated the water torture escape live on the Derryn Hinch show in 1994, by now a mother of a one-year-old daughter, Maddie.
Her preparation had included holding her breath for increasing periods of time in the bath, singing Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in her head to distract her from the urge to breathe.
“I was so nervous, and at the time I’m thinking, what the hell am I doing? Why did I have to prove this to these guys?” she says.
Helen can laugh about it now, but it still makes for dramatic viewing.
“My ankles were locked into a set of stocks. I was lifted upside down and then lowered into a tank of water and the stocks were locked onto the tank,” Helen explains.
Arthur never doubted his daughter, but concedes it required nerves of steel.
“Once your head’s under you get past the point of no return,” he says
Helen made it out in under two minutes. “I remember sitting on top of the tank and I had enough time to make sure my hair looked okay!” she says.
A magical career renaissance
Soon after the Hinch appearance, Arthur and Helen stepped away from magic for some time. Helen had two growing children and began working as a marriage celebrant. They both felt like they’d lost some of their sparkle after years of back-to-back shows.
“I’d be in the wings waiting to be introduced and think ‘I really don’t want to go on’,” remembers Arthur.
But they never gave up the charity shows, raising thousands of dollars for various causes over the years.
About three years ago, Arthur urged Helen to audition for a US magic show hosted by the famous Penn and Teller.
“I knew who they were, but I’d never heard of the show before. I just did it to get him off my back!” she remembers.
Before long Helen and the extended Coghlan family were flying to Las Vegas, the magic capital of the world. It didn’t feel real.
“We knew nothing about her,” Penn explains. “She pulled out these props that were deceptively simple. And then she did just a trick with a stick and some milk that we were unable to figure out. It was pretty wonderful. We were thrilled to be fooled by her and she had such a charming presence.”
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Energised by this success, Arthur’s mind is now whirring with ideas. He spends every spare moment either thinking of magic or making magic in his workshop, affectionately called “A Hundred-Acre Wood” after the fictional world in Winnie the Pooh.
It’s a ramshackle and eccentric collection of tools, machinery, memorabilia and magic contraptions old and new, where visitors might find themselves shuffled into a straitjacket or locked into a guillotine with a blade dangling overhead.
Helen and Arthur agree that they’ve rediscovered their love of magic, but the days of danger are well and truly gone. “We’ve done all that,” Arthur says. “I think people appreciate the skill in doing it safely.”
In a corner of Arthur’s shed are two barrels, mementos from more daring days.
One is from his 1977 escape from Sydney Harbour on ABC’s A Big Country. The barrel, with Arthur locked in it, was winched from a boat down into the cool winter waters. He held his breath as the water flooded in and emerged within two minutes, tired but triumphant.
“It was freezing cold, and I always remember the wetsuit had a hole in it and the cold water was leaking in,” Arthur laughs.
The other barrel is from the Don Lane Show. That time he nearly died in 1979. So how did Arthur live to tell the tale?
“I can’t explain what went wrong, because that would give the secret away,” he says.
But he can reveal that additional rope added by a crew member at the last minute gave him the crucial extra time he needed by delaying the moment the barrel dropped to the ground by a few seconds. Without that, it could have been very different story.
“I actually went too far. I did a lot of stupid things and I’m just lucky to have survived it all and still be here to talk about it,” he says.
And for those still wanting answers, Arthur wrote a book that has all of his secrets in a sealed section at the back, including the mystery of the barrel.
One person who won’t be reading that is Peter Faiman, who was the executive producer of the Don Lane Show.
“The interesting thing is that I don’t want to know, I love the fact that I am so baffled by it. I love the fact that I cannot work out how it could possibly be done,” he says.
Watch Australian Story’s Great Escape, 8:00pm (AEDT), on ABCTV, iview and Youtube.
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