Brenna Cooper
The early noughties were a completely wild time.
Prior to the rise of social media and smartphones, people had to be a lot more creative in finding ways to entertain themselves or become famous.
One of those people was David Blaine, an American magician, illusionist and endurance performer who had the completely normal and sane idea to lock himself in a perspex box above the River Thames in London.
It's worth noting that Blaine was already known at the time for his outlandish stunts, having appeared on shows such as David Blaine: Street Magic and Magic Man back in the 1990s.
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He'd also completed other bizarre stunts such as being buried alive and incased in ice. So its safe to say that performing weird and often life-threatening stunts was just a normal day for Blaine.
Fast forward to 2003 and Blaine had travelled to the UK capital with the goal of locking himself in a transparent box which measured three feet (0.9 metres) by seven feet (2.1 metres) by seven feet (2.1 metres) in size and was suspended at 30 feet (9.1 metres) in the air.
Titled 'Above the Below', the stunt saw Blaine locked in the box for a total of 44 days; where he didn't eat for the entire time, consuming only 4.5 litres of water a day.
The stunt received a whole load of media attention, with people gathering under the box to view the spectacle for themselves and one person even flying a McDonald's hamburger up to the box in order to taunt a starving Blaine. Drunk people would even make a detour on their way home to shout all sorts at the magician in his perspex prison.
What a time to be alive.
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The stunt was so popular that Sky One and Channel 4 even broadcast it live every day for viewers. Proving that humans were doing and watching stupid things long before the creation of TikTok.
Blaine was finally freed from his box after 44 days, shouting to 'I love you all' to the crowd before collapsing into an ambulance.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, Blaine was not in a good shape. The illusionist, who was 30 at the time, was rushed straight to hospital after exiting the box in order to begin treatment for severe starvation.
Blaine had lost around 25 percent of his body weight and had to undergo a precarious and highly dangerous re-feeding process.
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It took five days before Blaine could safely eat solid foods again, with the first item be chose to eat being a handful of crisps.
Nostalgia for this particularly weird portion of British history often resurfaces on the internet, with TikToker Tegan Marlow recently posting about the stunt, calling it her 'Roman Empire'.
"This is what the 2020's is missing," she added. "People just doing mad s**t for the sake of it."