Sir David Frost: TV’S leading inquisitor of the rich and powerful
1939-2013
SIR David Frost, who has died at the age of 74, began his career satirising the patrician establishment and ended it with a knighthood, a duke as a father-in-law and a reputation as the television personality by whom politicians on both sides of the Atlantic most wanted to be interviewed.
Frost made his name in the 1960s on the BBC’s late night satirical series That Was The Week That Was . With his sardonic manner, slurred diction, nasal voice and alarming surges in volume, he was the first to show that quirkiness and unnaturalness could work better on television than the “natural” but bland presentation that had been the norm.
He was also one of the first television presenters to recognise instinctively the value of a catchphrase as an indispensable prop in fixing a personality and establishing a rapport with television audiences. His tautological “Hello, good evening [or morning] and welcome” was delivered with a conscious air of self-parody long before he himself became a butt of the satirists.
From the early days of The Frost Report in the 1960s, and The Frost Programme in the 1970s, to Frost on Sunday in the 1990s, he was rarely off British television screens, appearing in everything from news and documentaries to chat shows, quiz shows and comedy. In total, Frost presented more than 20 television series, produced nine films and wrote 14 books. In 1969 a poll revealed that he was, after the queen and the prime minister, Harold Wilson, the best-known person in Britain.
Frost had a genius for access, and he interviewed nearly everyone who was anyone, including six US presidents, eight British prime ministers, several members of the royal family and a galaxy of celebrities. He had a phenomenal memory and an instinctive understanding of the value of flattery; most of his interviewees considered themselves personal friends.
“The big names answer the phone to him,” observed an envious colleague. “Nobody else can phone the people he can and get through — and they’re pleased to talk to him.” President George Bush snr announced across a crowd of leading British public figures at No 10 Downing Street: “Now at last here’s someone I recognise.” At the Frosts’ annual garden party, held in the second week of the Wimbledon championships, leading politicians
Frost moved in for the kill, and Nixon found himself apologising for his role in the Watergate affair
would rub shoulders with show business personalities, sports stars and minor royals.
Frost also had a Panglossian ability to look on the bright side. Although he had failures that might have sunk a more introspective personality, he was always able to put them behind him.
Kitty Muggeridge famously remarked that after That Was The Week That Was, Frost was expected to sink without trace; instead, he “rose without trace”. The phrase seemed to encapsulate both the suddenness of Frost’s rise and the lack of any obvious intellectual anchorage in his career.
For Frost never appeared to have any considered views about life. He was never heard to utter a political opinion and never voted in an election. Interviewers asking direct questions about his personal feelings on an issue would be fobbed off with anecdotes about what someone else had said. They were often left with the impression that Frost was not interested in anything other than his own career.
Not even in the lengthy first volume of his autobiography did Frost provide any insights. He knew the rich and famous, but had nothing interesting or original to say about them. He travelled the world, but his most interesting observations were that Americans eat hamburgers and call pavements “sidewalks”.
David Paradine Frost was born on April 7 1939 at Tenterden, Kent, the son of a Methodist minister, the Rev WJ Paradine Frost. There was no alcohol or swearing in the Frost household, and no Sunday newspapers or television.
His father would have liked him to follow him into the ministry, but David’s talents seemed destined to take him in other directions.
At school he excelled at sport and displayed an early talent for satire, selling his classmates bottles of soapy water labelled “Bill Haley’s Bathwater”. Frost could have been a star striker for Nottingham Forest. A club scout was present when he scored eight goals with eight shots at a school match, and offered to sign him up. But Frost was determined to go to Cambridge, where he arrived in 1958 as an undergraduate.
Frost’s first screen appearance came during his student days on Anglia Television’s Town And Gown series, on which Frost, according to the local paper, made “unrestrained appearances as an explorer, Professor Nain, Lionel Sope, Goalie Finn and Ron Plindell”. Frost immediately knew he had found his métier. “The first time I stepped into a television studio,” he recalled later, “it felt like home. It didn’t scare me. Talking to the camera seemed the most natural thing in the world.”
At the height of his fame during the 1960s, Frost enjoyed a reputation for aggressive and fearless interviewing. He eviscerated Rupert Murdoch on the subject of pornography in an interview so hostile that it was said to have contributed to Murdoch’s decision not to live in Britain. He stood his ground against the formidable Enoch Powell in an interview on the subject of racism.
Frost became a symbol of ’ 60s glamour, dynamism and irreverence. Newspaper diarists delighted in documenting his dalliances with actresses and models. He was engaged twice but dumped both times, virtually at the altar; all his girlfriends, he always insisted, were “terrific” and “wonderful” and most remained friends.
In 1977, he secured perhaps the biggest coup of his career by signing up the disgraced former US president Richard Nixon to an exclusive contract to give a series of four interviews; it was the first time since his resignation that Nixon had agreed to answer questions on the record.
Deceptively easy-going at first, almost at the end Frost moved in for the kill, and Nixon found himself apologising to the American public for the first time for his role in the Watergate affair. Frost packaged and sold the interviews to nearly every country in the world, and they achieved the largest audience for a news interview in the history of television.
Having established himself again at the centre of world affairs, in 1981 Frost married Lynne Frederick, the widow of the actor Peter Sellers, but the marriage ended in failure 18 months later. In 1984 he married Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. It was, by all accounts, a conspicuously happy union.
As Frost became more of an establishment figure, opinions were divided on whether he offered television viewers anything more than the interviewing equivalent of Hello! magazine. “What is the real thing you want to get across?” and “How would you like to be remembered?” were typical of the sort of questions that politicians could expect to be asked. It was hardly surprising that they queued up to be on his shows.
Yet some politicians were said to view him as the most dangerous inquisitor of them all, a man who would lull the interviewee into a false sense of security before bowling a googly. Frost himself believed he got more out of his subjects by being nice to them and felt that the impact of interviews was more compelling and sometimes chilling done conversationally than as a courtroom confrontation: “There’s little point weighing into the interviewee from the start. Much better to let him damn himself out of his own mouth, then you’ve got the ammunition you need.”
He and his wife had three sons. — © The Daily Telegraph, London