No amount of mocking from cynical journalists will make the slightest difference: David Copperfield, the cheesy magician rather than the Dickens orphan, is one of the richest entertainers on the planet.
This is the reason ATV can dare to show one of his interminable 'specials', David Copperfield (World, 9.30pm), instead of a film tonight. (Come back lousy action movies starring Christopher Lambert! All is forgiven!) If fans want a night out in a theatre watching the self-proclaimed maestro do his thing, fair enough. But why does anyone bother to watch the act on television where we know almost every image is manipulated? How can audiences tune in to sci-fi serials one night, cop shop dramas the next, fantastical traditional stories complete with talking monkeys and a flying horse on a third, and Copperfield after that and not see that each is as unreal as the other.
Is it merely the magic of television that enables him to walk through walls? Great Walls even? To levitate? To make large objects disappear? Maybe not, but it might as well be.
Copperfield, who was born David Kotkin, which is a much better name for a magician really, is undoubtedly a master of something. His talents emerged early: he was a ventriloquist by age 10, and admitted to the Society of American Magicians only two years later - the youngest member ever.
According to the biographies, he was so widely respected he was actually teaching a magic course at New York University by the age of 16, although I must say at this point I begin to doubt the biographers. Why would New York University offer a course in magic? How could he teach them anything without giving away literally all the tricks of the trade? Envious critics have muttered darkly that Copperfield takes other magicians' tricks and calls them his own, but this does seem slightly churlish.
Penn and Teller have gleefully proved that most of the best-known tricks all work to formula anyway.