Frosty humour

It IS questionable whether satire – in either electronic or print form – ever causes meaningful change. But the fact that we are a much less deferential society today can be traced partly to the impact the late Sir David Frost made on television in the early 1960s (your report, 2 September).

That Was The Week That Was caught a prevailing mood, rather than changed it – but it was no less effective for that.

In the 1960s, he fronted a programme about the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe. In those days the organisation was less at ease with a more staid social environment in the capital. Frost mentioned the family having tea in an old-fashioned place adorned by tiered cakestands. The father looked at the substandard quality of some of the fare and said: “Waiter, some of those cakes will never be eaten!” The reply was simple and short: “Perhaps not, sir, but they’ve been paid for five times.”

Even in the period after the famous Nixon interviews, Frost never lost that sense of the ridiculous. He should be remembered not just as someone who could hold the famous to account, but who never lost a sense of what ordinary people found funny.

Bob Taylor

Shiel Court

Glenrothes, Fife