“But you’re going to complete the film?”

“Of course. I’ve signed a contract. I’ve never broken a contract in my life. I’m a professional. But I’m bored with it. What you’re asking me to do is like asking Rubinstein to perform on a player-piano. Given the apparatus anybody could do it.”

“You know of course that we asked you to make this film simply because you are the greatest magician in the world—the greatest magician of all time, if you like—and that gives tremendous added attraction to our film—”

“It’s been many years since I was called an added attraction.”

“Let me finish, please. We are presenting a great magician of today doing honour to a great magician of the past. People will love it.”

“It shows me at a disadvantage.”

“Oh, surely not. Consider the audience. After we have shown this on the B.B.C. it will appear on a great American network—the arrangements are almost complete—and then it will go all over the world. Think how it will be received in France alone, where there is still a great cult of Robert-Houdin. The eventual audience will be counted in millions. Can you be indifferent to that?”

“That just shows what you think about magic, and how much you know about it. I’ve already been seen all over the world. And I mean I’ve been seen, and the unique personal quality of my performance has been felt by audiences with whom I’ve created a unique relationship. You can’t do that on television.”

“That is precisely what I expect to do. I don’t want to speak boastfully. Perhaps we have had enough boasting here tonight. But I am not unknown as a film-maker. I can say without immodesty that I’m just as famous in my line as you are in yours. I am a magician too, and not a trivial one—”

“If my work is trivial, why do you want my help? Film—yes, of course it’s a commonplace nowadays that it is an art, just as people used to say that Robert-Houdin’s complicated automatic toys were art. People are always charmed by clever mechanisms that give an effect of life. But don’t you remember what the little actor in Noel Coward’s play called film? ‘A cheesy photograph’.”

“Please—”

“Very well, let’s not insist on ‘cheesy’. But we can’t escape ‘photograph’. Something is missing, and you know what it is: the inexplicable but beautifully controlled sympathy between the artist and his audience. Film isn’t even as good as the player-piano; at least you could add something personal to that, make it go fast or slow, loud or soft as you pleased.”

“Film is like painting, which is also unchanging. But each viewer brings his personal sensibility, his unique response to the completed canvas as he does to the film.”

“Who are your television viewers? Ragtag and bobtail; drunk and sober; attentive or in a nose-picking stupor. With the flabby concentration of people who are getting something for nothing. I am used to audiences who come because they want to see me, and have paid to do it. In the first five minutes I have made them attentive as they have never been before in their lives. I can’t guarantee to do that on TV. I can’t see my audience, and what I can’t see I can’t dominate. And what I can’t dominate I can’t enchant, and humour, and make partners in their own deception.”