‘A Fiery Tribune’
David Frost, who died suddenly on Saturday, went from stand-up comedian to challenging Richard Nixon in a series of blockbuster interviews.
Indeed, the major networks had spurned the Nixon interviews and they were shown via an improvised syndication deal engineered with desperation by Frost. There was little appreciation that it was Frost himself, in the 1960s, who had brought an entirely new level of aggression to confrontations with the mighty and the illustrious.
He burst upon British television like a fiery tribune of the people, conducting interviews live and with a studio audience—something never done before—five nights a week at primetime from a London broadcaster, Rediffusion.
But it was the BBC that discovered him as a young stand-up comedian and gave him the role of a mock news anchor on a show called That Was The Week That Was. Although it was billed as satire, the material was current and politically savage, particularly and brilliantly making fun of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and his government.
Frost also had another gift that was a true metaphor of the technology that he had mastered: a mind that worked like a video tape.
Propelled to almost overnight stardom by That Was The Week (itself one of the inspirations for Saturday Night Live) Frost felt that satire would restrict him, even though the show and his material marked a revolution in its lack of respect for and deference to the BBC’s previously timid rules of political coverage. He also encountered hostility among the corporation’s “serious” broadcasters who felt strongly that television journalism should not be “entertainment” and that Frost was, in manner and cast of mind, an entertainer.
Frost, on the other hand, realized that television journalism, rid of pomp and ready to pose questions framed not by respectful editors but informed by a sense of how a vox pop audience would ask them, could become a gripping new public forum. He deliberately took a year off from television and enlisted a small band of journalists, including me, to work out the form of the show he would anchor, called simply (and grandly) The Frost Programme.
At first the journalism was punctuated by short satirical sketches (many of them written by the future cast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and it seemed an uneasy compromise—enforced by the broadcaster’s conviction that a primetime show must be leavened. But gradually Frost was able to lure for interviews senior politicians and luminaries from all sides of public life. Many of these were responding to what seemed an almost gladiatorial challenge, as Frost’s instinct for the sudden, revealing question would strike home and leave blood on the floor.
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