Everything about 29-year-old Steven Frayne is small, gentle and unassuming. 

He’s just 5ft 6in, barely 8st and softly spoken. His waist is teeny, his arms are bird-like and his hands are small, pink and currently rummaging in his enormous Louis Vuitton bag for a pot of hair-styling wax.

‘I was going to put a bit in for the photos, but I can’t find it now,’ he says.

He doesn’t look the sort of man to swallow your gold necklace whole and, minutes later, pull it out of his tummy — straight through the skin. 

Or to walk through glass windows and down the side of buildings. Or levitate both Lindsay Lohan and comic actor James Corden, turn Austrian snow into diamonds and Fanta into Coke, melt coins in his hands and make cardboard butterflies come alive.

Oh yes, or walk on water — he made it halfway across the Thames last summer before he was picked up by a police boat and cautioned. 

But Steven Frayne is otherwise known as Dynamo, the Bradford-born street magician whose extraordinary illusions have left millions amazed, confused, shocked and occasionally scared.

Last week, he was awarded the magic world’s highest honour — Associate Membership of the secret inner sanctum of the Magic Circle — up there with Paul Daniels, David Copperfield and Derren Brown.

‘With a silver star,’ the citation says. ‘Which must be good, mustn’t it?’ he grins shyly. It is indeed. Very few magicians are awarded the AIMC with a silver star. ‘

They say it’s the highest degree you can earn for examination in the Magic Circle, and I’ve not even been examined! My mum will be so proud — they just gave it to me. Can you believe it?’

Frankly, yes. Because while he might not look, or act, like a  superstar, pretty much everything Dynamo, 29, has touched over recent years has turned to gold.

His first TV series Dynamo: Mission Impossible was a huge word-of-mouth hit, attracting an average 1.7 million viewers and a nomination for most popular entertainment programme at the 2012 National Television Awards — despite airing only on the satellite channel Watch. 

His second series, Dynamo: Magician Impossible, started on Watch last week.

He has performed at celeb parties in Las Vegas, Rio de Janeiro, Venice, Los Angeles and Clarence House — once claiming: ‘P Diddy ain’t got nothing on Prince Charles when it comes to putting on a party.’