Legendary British television interviewer Sir David Frost died Saturday night at the age of 74.
Frost, whose 1977 interview with Richard Nixon forever changed the tenor of political interviews on television, suffered a fatal heart attack on a cruise ship on which he was speaking. At the time of his death, Frost was employed by Al-Jazeera English, where he hosted two different interview programs.
British Prime Minister David Cameron released a statement calling Frost an “extraordinary man with charm, wit, talent, intelligence and warmth in equal measure.”
Frost’s showmanship, understated humor, and access to some of the most iconic figures of the latter half of the twentieth century helped elevate the one-on-one interview to global event status, paving the way for the likes of Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Geraldo Rivera and Martin Bashir. His mannerisms were moneyed but his interview style was populist, his interests the same as the average viewing public’s, his methods for getting to the point assertive and unfailing.
Frost’s story was not unlike that of Nixon himself. A middle-class minister’s son born at the tail end of the Great Depression, Frost worked his way to Cambridge and found himself successful in his craft at a very young age before a period in the professional wilderness and a major comeback.
Frost first gained national attention in his native Britain as host of “That Was the Week That Was,” a satirical news and comedy show that ran for two seasons on the BBC in 1962 and 1963. Airing live on Saturday nights as the Beatles were breaking out in Britain and shortly before Lenny Bruce was tried for obscenity in the United States, “TW3” lampooned politics and religion in landmark ways, with Frost playing the sly, buttoned-down presenter to a barrage of subversive sketches, including Lance Percival’s dirty talk with an English-speaking car. The show was controversial enough to warrant cancellation prior to the 1964 elections, only to resurface in a less edgy incarnation on NBC in the United States from 1964-65.
Frost’s return to the BBC, first with a short-lived program co-hosted by poet P.J. Kavanaugh and then with “The Frost Report,” allowed him to refine his role as the conservative straight man against a backdrop of countercultural anarchy. “The Frost Report” employed the talents of future Monty Python stars John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle, as well as Britain’s beloved “Two Ronnies” and writer Marty Feldman.
Though the program, laced with class satire and a liberal political undercurrent, influenced “just about every satirical programme in the UK for the next 30 years” according to a BBC retrospective, Frost himself never broke out as much of a comedic performer. In fact, just two years after the “Frost Report” ended, Cleese announced Frost’s personal telephone number on an episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” leading to numerous prank calls.
Smarmy and well-coiffed, Frost was aesthetically representative of traditional British television — just hip enough to use his persona to clash onscreen with the likes of Cleese, but not quite hip in his own right. Such was his curse throughout the Vietnam War era, as he crisscrossed the globe to host a string of middlebrow interview shows in England and New York, including “The David Frost Show” from 1969 to 1972, which featured then-Beatle John Lennon tossing “acorns for peace” at the studio audience. His journalistic remote segments were relatively lightweight but frequently entertaining, as exemplified by his 1974 piece at Muhammad Ali’s training site as Ali braced himself for his victorious “Rumble in the Jungle” against heavyweight champ George Foreman.
By 1977, Frost was in his late thirties, and, as depicted by Michael Sheen in Ron Howard’s cinematic adaptation of Peter Morgan’s play “Frost/Nixon,” hosting a tacky Australian human-interest show while hungering for a second shot at American success and a vaunted table at Sardi’s. In convincing Richard Nixon to sit for an interview with him, Frost personally arranged, via Nixon’s Hollywood agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, a payment package for the disgraced president that ended up amounting to more than $1 million, and set up sponsorships for the syndicated “Nixon Interviews” himself.
Presenting himself as a veritable boxer in the run-up to the interview, Frost was profiled on “60 Minutes” by Mike Wallace, who asked why Nixon would give up key Watergate details to Frost rather than disclose them in a forthcoming book.
“Because he realizes that television is a more powerful medium than a book,” Frost replied.
Frost’s four-part, six-hour “Nixon Interviews” debuted to 45 million viewers, smashing ratings records.
“I let down my friends. I let down the country. I let down our system of government, the dreams of all those young people who ought to get into government but will think it’s all too corrupt and the rest,” Nixon said in the interview’s most famous segment, as Frost looked on, astonished.
“Yep, I let the American people down. And I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life,” Nixon said.
Initial reaction to the interview was actually somewhat mixed, according to a contemporaneous New York Times News Service article.
Frost “never asked the big question: ‘Why? Why did you do it?’ The show was interesting, but I don’t think we learned anything new,” said Nixon operative Donald Segretti.
“If I were charged with the offenses Richard Nixon is, and I believed myself to be innocent, and if I had the chance to talk about it on television, I would not charge $1 million,” said George McGovern, Nixon’s Democratic opponent in the 1972 presidential race.
The Nixon interviews provided Frost a lasting place in the British cultural mainstream, which he used over the last three and a half decades to question some of the most important politicians, businesspeople and celebrities in the world. His shows on TV-am, ITV, the BBC and later Al Jazeera English put him face to face with controversial world leaders, while his annual summer party made him one of Britain’s foremost arbiters of high culture. Frost returned to full-time American television work just once during these years, with a disastrously brief stint hosting “Inside Edition” in 1989 that led to his firing and replacement by a young anchor named Bill O’Reilly.