Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home - David Frost
Sir David Frost was aboard the
MS Queen Elizabeth, when he died of a suspected heart attack.
David Paradine Frost was born on the 7th of April 1939
in Tenterden, Kent, England. At Cambridge, Frost was editor of both the student newspaper,
Varsity, and the literary magazine
Granta. He was also secretary of the
Footlights Drama Society,
which included actors such as
Peter Cook and
John Bird.
After leaving university, Frost became a trainee at
Associated-Rediffusion and worked for
Anglia Television.
Frost was chosen by writer and producer
Ned Sherrin to host the satirical program
That Was The Week That Was, alias
TW3. This caught the wave of the
satire boom in early 1960s Britain and became a popular programme.
TW3 was the last piece of scheduled programming broadcast by the
BBC on a Saturday, and regularly overran its time slot. On 23 November 1963, a tribute to the
assassinated President John F. Kennedy, an event which had occurred the previous day, formed an edition of
That Was the Week That Was.
An American version of
TW3 ran after the original British
series had ended. Following a pilot episode on 10 November 1963, the
30-minute US series, also featuring Frost, ran on
NBC from 10 January 1964 to May 1965. In 1985, Frost produced and hosted a television special in the same format,
That Was the Year That Was, on NBC.
Frost fronted various programmes following the success of
TW3, including its immediate successor,
Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, which he co-chaired with
Willie Rushton and poet
P. J. Kavanagh. More successful was
The Frost Report, broadcast between 1966 and 1967. The show launched the television careers of
John Cleese,
Ronnie Barker and
Ronnie Corbett, who notably appeared together in the
Class sketch. He signed for
Rediffusion, the
ITV weekday contractor in London, to produce a "heavier" interview-based show called
The Frost Programme.
Guests included Sir
Oswald Mosley and
Rhodesian premier
Ian Smith. His memorable dressing-down of insurance fraudster
Emil Savundra was generally regarded as the first example of "trial by television" in the UK.
Frost was a member of a successful consortium, including former
executives from the BBC, which bid for an ITV franchise in 1967. This
became
London Weekend Television, which began broadcasting in July 1968. The station began with a programming policy which was considered '
highbrow'
and suffered launch problems with low audience ratings and financial
problems. A September 1968 meeting of the Network Programme Committee,
which made decisions about the channel's scheduling, was particularly
fraught with
Lew Grade expressing hatred of Frost in his presence.
He was involved in the station's early years as a presenter. On 20 and 21 July 1969, during the
British television Apollo 11 coverage, he presented
David Frost's Moon Party for LWT, a ten-hour discussion and entertainment marathon from LWT's
Wembley Studios, on the night
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Two of his guests on this programme were British historian
A.J.P. Taylor and entertainer
Sammy Davis, Jr.
From 1969 to 1972, Frost kept his London shows and fronted
The David Frost Show on the
Group W (U.S. Westinghouse Corporation) television stations in the United States. His 1970 TV special,
Frost on America, featured guests such as
Jack Benny and
Tennessee Williams.
In the same period he began an intermittent involvement in the film industry. He part-financed
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970), in which the lead character was based partly on Frost, and gained an executive producer credit.
In a declassified transcript of a 1972 telephone call between Frost and
Henry Kissinger,
President Nixon's
National Security Advisor and
Secretary of State, Frost urged Kissinger to call
chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer and urge him to compete in that year's
World Chess Championship. During this call, Frost revealed that he was working on a novel.
In 1977,
The Nixon Interviews, a series of five 90-minute interviews with former US President
Richard Nixon
were broadcast. Nixon was paid $600,000 plus a share of the profits for
the interviews, which had to be funded by Frost himself after the US
television networks described them as "
chequebook journalism".
Frost taped around 29 hours of interviews with Nixon over a period of
four weeks. The interviews were syndicated on American television, and
screened internationally. The interviews were noted for Nixon's first
apology to the American people for his role in the
Watergate scandal.
After the 1979
Iranian Revolution Frost was the last person to interview
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last
Shah of Iran.
Frost was an organiser of the
Music for UNICEF Concert at the
United Nations General Assembly in 1979. Ten years later, Frost was hired as the anchor of the new American tabloid news program
Inside Edition. He was dismissed after only three weeks, and then-
ABC News reporter
Bill O'Reilly was recruited as his replacement.
Frost was one of the "Famous Five" who launched
TV-am
in February 1983 but, like LWT in the late 1960s, the station began
with an unsustainable "highbrow" approach. Frost remained a presenter
after restructuring.
Frost on Sunday began in September 1983 and
continued until the station lost its franchise at the end of 1992. Frost
had been part of an unsuccessful consortium,
CPV-TV, with
Richard Branson and other interests, which had attempted to acquire three ITV contractor franchises prior to the changes made by the
Independent Television Commission in 1991. After transferring from
ITV, his Sunday morning interview programme
Breakfast with Frost ran on the BBC from January 1993 until 29 May 2005. For a time it ran on
BSB before its later Sunday morning rebroadcast on
BBC 1.
Frost hosted
Through the Keyhole, which ran on several channels from 1987 until 2008 and also featured
Loyd Grossman. Produced by
David Paradine Productions, his own production company, the programme was first shown on prime time and daytime television in its later years.
Following the end of the BBC series Frost worked for
Al Jazeera English, presenting a live weekly hour-long current affairs programme,
Frost Over The World, which started when the network launched in November 2006. The programme regularly made headlines with interviewees such as
Tony Blair, President
Omar al-Bashir of Sudan,
Benazir Bhutto and President
Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. The programme was produced by the former
Question Time editor and
Independent on Sunday journalist Charlie Courtauld. Frost was one of the first to interview the man who authored the
Fatwa on Terrorism,
Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri.
During his career as a broadcaster Frost became one of
Concorde's most frequent fliers, having flown between London and New York an average of 20 times per year for 20 years.
In 2007, Frost hosted a discussion with Libya's leader
Muammar Gaddafi as part of the
Monitor Group's involvement in the country.
In June 2010, Frost presented
Frost on Satire, an hour-long
BBC Four documentary looking at the history of television satire. Prominent satirists who were interviewed for the programme include
Rory Bremner,
Ian Hislop,
John Lloyd,
Chevy Chase,
Bill Maher,
Jon Stewart,
Will Ferrell and
Tina Fey.
Frost was the only person to have interviewed all eight
British prime ministers serving between 1964 and 2010 (
Harold Wilson,
Edward Heath,
James Callaghan,
Margaret Thatcher,
John Major,
Tony Blair,
Gordon Brown and
David Cameron) and all seven US presidents in office between 1969 and 2008 (
Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford,
Jimmy Carter,
Ronald Reagan,
George H. W. Bush,
Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush).
He was a patron and former vice-president of the
Motor Neurone Disease Association charity, as well as being a patron of the
Alzheimer's Research Trust, the Hearing Trust,
East Anglia's Children's Hospices, the Home Farm Trust and the
Elton John AIDS Foundation.
After having been in television for 40 years, Frost was estimated to be worth £200 million by the
Sunday Times Rich List in 2006.
The valuation included the assets of his main British company and subsidiaries, plus homes in London and the country.
Over the last half century the television interview has given us some of
TV's most heart-stopping and memorable moments. On the surface it is a
simple format - two people sitting across from one another having a
conversation. But underneath it is often a power struggle - a battle for
the psychological advantage - David Frost
Good Night David
Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa
quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
