Street entertainer gains world’s first magic degree

He doesn't play Quidditch, speak Parseltongue or ride a Thunderbolt broomstick, but Owen Lean has the world's first BA based on magic.Not since Noel Purcell sang "Grafton Street is a wonderland with magic in the air" have Dubliners been so enchanted. Indeed, Mr Lean's lecturers at Trinity College were so impressed with the 23-year-old's street magic show that he took his final exam on his pitch in Dublin's shopping district."My lecturers were wonderfully wild and eccentric people who were perfectly happy to let me write about street performance as an art form, as well as writing a 7,000-word dissertation on the relevance of close-up magic in modern day society", Mr Lean, a theatre studies student, said.

His interest in the dark arts began when he bought a trick deck of cards. Before long he was scouring the dusty underpass beneath London's Charing Cross station looking for a magic shop straight out of Harry Potter's Diagon Alley. "I kept going back and buying books, teaching myself to do more and more," he said. - independent