Television - Andrew Billen watches an old conjuror outsmart the bright kid on the block

Louis Theroux said in a recent article that he made documentaries about eccentrics, "people who are blind to their place in the world". Agreed. This is why his films are so intent on putting his victims in their place. But When Louis Met Paul and Debbie (20 February, BBC2) was, he went on to say, a departure from form. This I could not see. The semi-retired, sixtysomething TV magician Paul Daniels and his wife, Debbie McGee, who has "entered" her forties, are not in the same league as Eugene Terre'Blanche, Jimmy Saville or the self-esteem salesmen and arranged-marriage middlemen of Theroux's recent outings, nor are they any more eccentric than the Bruceys, Bobs and Tarbies of their era. But in the cool of current TV, they are miles out of place. As Debbie said to Theroux, explaining her husband's ill-concealed suspicion of him: "We're not your sort of people . . . We're old-fashioned, not into the things you're into."

Like exhibits in a natural history documentary, Paul and Debbie obediently displayed the obvious points about themselves early on. Debbie banned the crew from filming their back door because "it's not finished", and Paul - who boasted in his autobiography that he had slept with 300 women and here compared his bride to one of those pneumatic figurines used as paragraph-breakers in Playboy - banned Theroux from their bedroom. She was discreetly anal, didn't like people seeing her "untidy areas" and praised Paul for being "a very clean person". He was low-level paranoid, as must be all those who were once more famous than they are now.

Doubtless to Theroux's surprise, however, as he accompanied the duo on the halting launch of Debbie's new dance company last autumn, they also turned out to have a remarkably good idea of how others saw them. The difference was that Paul cared and Debbie didn't. For a quiet life, she chose to take Theroux's compliments at face value, saying "Thank you, thank you" when he praised the "pride" she took in her appearance, as if this was the very tribute she had been awaiting all her life. In comparison, Paul was an anthology of grumps and scowls, a man who had not bothered even to feign politeness towards the producers of Celebrity Ready Steady Cook (a programme that he clearly felt was beneath his talents, yet had agreed to participate in). As for Theroux, well, Paul knew his game.

In Lincoln, at the start of the Ballet Imaginaire's national tour, Theroux asked if he could operate the plywood swan that Daniels had designed to float across the backdrop of the troupe's rendition of Swan Lake. The answer, said Daniels, was no. "Ask me why?" "Why?" "Because you have a devious and distorted sense of humour." Visiting the warehouse that stored his old stage equipment, Daniels entombed Theroux, in a very literal manifestation of an unexpressed wish, in the same magic cabinet where the Lovely Debbie was once skewered by trick scabbards.

Daniels's spirits rose considerably when financial force majeur demanded that he take his magic show on the road once more, but the programme captured very well the long, slow departing roar of stardom. Daniels looked so small and old that Theroux's teasing about his wig and his sex life seemed aimed against someone who no longer existed. For the most part, the Lovely Debbie played a loyal, straight bat, ignoring Theroux's flirtations. Towards the end, however, she weakened and, over a slightly tipsy dinner a trois, she said something she must have regretted. "Here we are in the kitchen of Debbie McGee," began Daniels, in high spirits at last, perched on a kitchen cabinet, " . . . where a garden gnome has come in and sat on my work surface," said Debbie, breaking rank unforgivably.

Yet, like the magician he is, Daniels managed, in the dying moments of the film, to conjure up a magic moment - the apparition of his old self-esteem. With a little more drink in him than was wise, Theroux had blown the chance to ask the couple a killer question about their marriage, and sentimentally praised the strength of their union. "A genuinely happy couple is a rare thing," he slurred. Daniels pounced. On the contrary! "There are billions of us, but it's the manky, miserable people who make the biggest shout!" The couple had refused to enter the unhappy place that had been prepared for them, and Theroux departed mankily. The camera followed the triumphant duo as they skipped back home in Eric'n'Ernie formation.

Theroux trades in the same observational cynicism as Nick Broomfield, who is older, and Jon Ronson, who is less fanciable, but he is craftier than both. The slyness of his irony, even more than his age or his looks, accounts for his current ascendancy over his rivals. Pragmatically, it means he will not run out of subjects any time soon, and it is also charitable that Theroux's programmes leave his victims still standing at the end. I couldn't help thinking, however, that leaving Paul and Debbie prancing was a kindness too far. And, probably, an unintended one.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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