Most of the TV stuff is not the same thing though. I know people who have had paid work as 'audience' for those. You put a trained actor in normal clothes and people watching on TV will swear blind that they could not have faked their reaction.
Just assume that everyone 'from the audience' who participates in any kind of magic is a shill. No matter if it is on TV, at a party, in a restaurant, or in the street.
Not always. I got invited from the audience when I was a kid for a stage magic show.
The guy was doing a trick where he wrote on a ping pong ball, gave it to me to look at, destroyed it and then made it reappear.
While I was looking at it I marked it with my thumbnail.
When it reappeared he asked me to verify that it was the same, but it didn't have the nail-mark on it, so I told him that it definitely wasn't, and how I knew.
I was 12 and my parents were furious with me about it.
For some reason they never ever took me to a magic show again.
Heh, I could probably talk to a shrink for several days solid about that.
In their view at the time I ruined it for everyone and wasted the money of the entire audience and possibly ruined the career of the poor magician too and if I had any kind of feeling for others I would have played along and just lied. It was socially unacceptable behaviour, apparently. I found the whole thing completely bewildering.
