TV Preview: Frost On Interviews

Reading his first – and to date only – volume of memoirs had in a way prepared me for this. Although fascinating on the professional and cultural details of his dizzying rise in the 1960s – writer Kitty Muggeridge once quipped that Frost had risen without trace – it rarely pauses for self-analysis. Nevertheless, it leaves little doubt that he was always incredibly ambitious.

“I think I was from the beginning,” he concedes, sipping from a cup of thick black coffee, “and that’s an easier thing to say than it was 30 or 40 years ago, because the word ambitious has lost a bit of negative penumbra as it were. In those days to be ambitious, people sort of depicted you as slightly risky and selfish. But today that’s much less true. People talk about ambition in terms of achievement rather than advancement. But in those days you’d have to explain that you weren’t ambitious in the sense of achieving anything whatever the cost, it was about achieving certain targets.”

For the young Frost those targets included, whether by happenstance or design, fronting groundbreaking satire showcase That Was The Week That Was, incubating the Two Ronnies and most of the future Monty Python troupe on The Frost Report, bringing a new informality and confrontational approach to current affairs programming, and hosting two hit chat shows in Britain and the US simultaneously. And all by the age of 30.

Did he ever think, “My God, I’m on top of the world.”? “Everything that was going on at the time was so exciting and so involving, one didn’t have time to pinch one’s self,” he says. “It was so hectic, you did a show on a Saturday night, talked it over on Sunday, and were then back in the office on Monday. There were letters and newspaper articles and all sorts of things to respond to, in addition to meetings with the writers and the writing that we did ourselves. And that’s probably good, because one would not have been at one’s most effective if one had not been concentrating on the material for next week.”

Ahead of his new BBC4 series, Frost On Interviews, which looks back over nearly 60 years of the television interview, it’s typical of Frost to wax anecdotally about the past while being less inclined to offer anything definitive or remotely contentious about the present. Of the ongoing investigation into phone-hacking and police corruption, he’ll only talk about it in terms of being “riveting and in many ways unbelievable,” and how it must be a constant source of “absolutely irresistible material” for television news programmes.

But he also states, quite rightly, that a journalist must always be honest when conducting an interview. “If the interviewee makes an unacceptable request, like demanding the right to cut out anything they don’t like, you have to refuse that. If anybody says there’s one thing they will not talk about – my battle with the killer pug from the garden next door, or whatever – then you have to say, ‘Well, if we’re going to go ahead, we’ll have to broadcast that at the beginning of the interview: this is an absolutely free interview that follows, but there’s one proviso that so and so will not discuss the following.’ You have to say that in order to go ahead honestly.”

So what does he make of those tear-sodden showbiz interviews conducted by the likes of Piers Morgan, which can look as if they have been stage-managed? While politely conceding that I may have a point, Frost cites Morgan’s infamous interview with Gordon Brown as a particularly skilful example of the form.

“I didn’t think necessarily that there was any collusion there. I felt that Piers was calling the shots all the way through. He got some good stuff. I got the impression that he was the master orchestrator rather than the colluder.”

Tellingly, when discussing the art of interviewing itself – during which we get lost in a rambling anecdote about Neil Kinnock – Frost has this to say about the power balance between interviewer and interviewee: “In the end it should be a tie really. It should be that the interviewer has the ability to bring out interesting questions, and he’s setting the tone in a way. But when the interviewee speaks no one is compelling him to say anything particularly, except what he wants to say.”

Frost, clearly, is a man who knows what he wants to say. Having at least achieved my goal of not mentioning his classic interview with Richard Nixon – an over-familiar subject which even Frost himself must be tired of discussing – I close by asking him a question he once put to every candidate during the 1968 US Presidential race (Nixon among them, of course): if there was someone who only knew you as a public figure, and they got to know you privately, what would surprise them the most?

He pauses for some considerable time, despite having to bustle off to his next appointment. Finally he says: “I suppose the fact that the whole area of God and belief do still matter to me. I’m a Methodist minister’s son, but it’s not because of that, it’s just that over the years it’s stayed with me. Interviews with Billy Graham have been very memorable and so on.”

He also retains an enormous passion for sport, decades after turning down a contract with Nottingham Forest to study at Cambridge. “The maximum wage for a professional footballer at the time was £20 a week, rather different to today,” he smiles, “and that was a good reason not to take up a sporting career. But it would have been something I would have enjoyed, and in fact if national service had not been moved from before university to after university, if I’d had two years to fill in the army, I might have ended up as a professional footballer. Who knows?”

And upon that rumination our time is up. He politely helps me on with my jacket (I mistakenly think he’s going in for a showbiz hug, and almost hug him back), shakes me warmly by the hand several times, and walks me to the lift, joshing amiably all the while.

My last image as the doors slide shut is of this consummate professional bidding me exuberant adieu. “Have a safe and speedy journey! Until next time!”

Asking the questions

1958 Enrols at Cambridge University, where he becomes editor of the student newspaper Varsity and the literary magazine Granta.

1962 Frost’s satirical show That Was The Week That Was launches on the BBC.

1969 The David Frost Show launches, continuing until 1972. He also hosts David Frost’s Moon Party, which runs in between ITN news coverage of the first moon landing. The same year, he is awarded an OBE.

1977 An in-depth interview with Richard Nixon in which the former US president admits he let the country down over the Watergate scandal. The interviews are later dramatised in the film Frost/Nixon.

1987First hosts Through The Keyhole.

1993Launches his morning TV show, Breakfast With Frost.

2006 Frost over The World launches on Al Jazeera English. Tony Blair is the first of many political figures to appear on the show.

2009 Honoured at the Emmy awards with a Lifetime Achievement prize.

• Frost On Interviews is on BBC4 on Tuesday at 9pm