‘I didn’t join the Establishment — it joined me’
Sir David Frost recalls start of stellar career
Fifty years ago, a young David Frost was sitting in a cafe on the King’s Road in Chelsea, searching through the newspapers for a verdict on the daring thing he’d just done.
“There was a review, the only one that morning. It was fantastic. That was a relief, with a little bit of ecstasy on the side,” he says.
Now Sir David Frost, he looks over the top of his rimless glasses, with his hands clasped before him, and flashes a famous smile. “Ecstasy in the old sense, of course.”
He was only 23, but had just presented the groundbreaking late-night satirical television show That Was The Week That Was. The sketches, interviews and songs poked fun at politicians, priests, royalty and other members of the Establishment. Nothing like it had been seen on British television before. The age of deference was over. “In the widest sense,” he says, “it was a game-changer.”
These days, Frost is an international superstar, married to the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. His penthouse office on Kensington High Street is decorated with photographs of him with prime ministers and presidents, from Tony Blair and Nelson Mandela back to Richard Nixon.
His finest moment as an inter- viewer came when he coaxed a sweaty mea culpa from the disgraced former president, as dramatized four years ago in the film Frost/Nixon.
The first review was in The Telegraph, and declared TW3 “brilliant” and evidence that a television set “can be as lethal as a gun.”
Frost was only one of many clever Cambridge graduates keen to poke fun at their elders but he was the young man in the sharp suit chosen to lead TW3. As the audience climbed to 12 million viewers, he suddenly became very famous. The impact of the show was so great that, after three weeks, the Postmaster General tried to take it off air.
He was stopped by then prime minister Harold Macmillan, who said it was “better to be mocked than to be ignored.”
But TW3 was cancelled anyway in the autumn of 1963, ostensibly amid fears it would have too much influence in an election year. What did it really achieve?
TW3 opened the door for brilliant writers and performers, including Peter Cook, Dennis Potter and the Monty Python team. “It revolutionized the image of the BBC, which had been seen as not at all for the people but up there with the aristocracy. Sympathy for the BBC came flooding back.”
However, last week, one of his former collaborators made a startling claim. Christopher Booker, who co-wrote the opening sketches for TW3 with Frost, said that the BBC’s current crisis could be blamed on the hubris created by the success of the show: “The program marked a moment when the BBC’s denizens began to be inflated by their self-importance to make their own rules and set their own agenda.”
Frost disagrees. “That is a bit of a stretch. I think it was a rush of fresh air at the BBC.”
He also hosted the TV show Through The Keyhole, which invited viewers to scrutinize celebrity homes. Having challenged deference, didn’t he become known for it? “I went through a brief phase when there was a little run of articles asking, ‘Has he gone soft?’ I would respond by quoting John Smith, the former Labour leader. He said: ‘David, you have a way of asking beguiling questions with potentially lethal consequences.’ I’d be happy to have that on my tombstone.
“You can ask a serious question in a friendly manner …”
Here goes, then. Sir David, you were lucky enough to send your sons to Eton and to marry Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard. Have you joined the Establishment you once satirized so well?
“I don’t think so. Although the Establishment does still exist to a certain extent, it is nowhere near as powerful as it was then, and so it is far less of an adversary. What I have said before is that I haven’t joined the Establishment, but maybe they’ve joined me.”
What does that mean? “I’m still a reformer, I still believe in many of the same things, such as the freedom of the press. I don’t think I’ve joined the Establishment.”
In 2006, he took another risk by joining al Jazeera English, to host a chat show attracting some of the most powerful people in the world. It’s hard not to wonder if the sharp young man was blunted by the good life.
Did he fall too much in love with the money, the fame and the company of beautiful people? There’s a pause, then he says: “I mean, why not? Those three things seem to be acceptable parts of a life.”