At 70, David Frost finds that he is a star all over again. This time it is not a new interview that has catapulted him to the limelight but a very old one. In the late 1970s Frost did a series of interviews with Richard Nixon, a few years after the former President had been forced to resign in disgrace. While the interviews covered a range of subjects, they were most notable for Nixon’s willingness to express regrets about Watergate and the circumstances of his exit.
A few years ago writer Peter Morgan (The Deal, The Queen, The Damned United etc) wrote a play about the interviews and called it Frost/Nixon. When it became a hit (in London and on Broadway), the film rights were bought by Hollywood and last year the movie of Frost/Nixon became one of the best reviewed pictures of the year, winning many Oscar nominations.
So Frost suddenly finds that cinema has brought him a new kind of fame. As he himself concedes over a glass of Chardonnay at the bar at Delhi’s Imperial Hotel, after the movie he can pretty much write his own ticket on American TV.
But he’s not doing that. Instead he’s here in Delhi to interview Indian politicians (Kamal Nath, Pranab Mukherjee, Prakash Karat etc) for Al Jazeera where he has been the network’s star ever since its global English channel was launched.
Does he miss the BBC show that revived his profile in the 1990s: Breakfast With Frost? Is it a little strange for a man who has now been celebrated on stage and screen to be making programmes for a Middle Eastern network? It’s a question Frost has clearly been asked before and he has his answer ready. Al Jazeera is no a mere Middle Eastern network. It is a global channel that focuses on the South and addresses concerns that American and British networks tend to ignore. For instance, he says, President Lula is the most important man in South America but until Frost turned up, he had never been interviewed by an English-speaking channel.
{{/usCountry}}Does he miss the BBC show that revived his profile in the 1990s: Breakfast With Frost? Is it a little strange for a man who has now been celebrated on stage and screen to be making programmes for a Middle Eastern network? It’s a question Frost has clearly been asked before and he has his answer ready. Al Jazeera is no a mere Middle Eastern network. It is a global channel that focuses on the South and addresses concerns that American and British networks tend to ignore. For instance, he says, President Lula is the most important man in South America but until Frost turned up, he had never been interviewed by an English-speaking channel.
{{/usCountry}}Besides, he says, it’s not as though he’s restricted to Al Jazeera. He does 40 shows a year for them — at what is reputed to be a staggering fee — but he also does stuff for Western television. And after the movie of Frost/Nixon, his market value is higher in the West than it has ever been.
Frost is a notorious optimist who always likes to look at the bright side of life so he praises the movie while playing down the way in which it caricatures his personality. In Frost/Nixon, the former President is portrayed as a giant, a Goliath even, who gives an interview to an ignorant show-bizzy journo imagining that he will get away with murder. But the journo turns out to be David (in more senses than one) and fells Goliath in the final interview by forcing him to come clean on Watergate.
It’s a nice story. But it’s not really what happened. Frost has always had range so he’s done a fair number of showbiz interviews. But he was never an ignorant showbiz journo. He made his reputation in Britain in the early ’60s with That Was The Week That Was where his tough interviews (the most famous of which was his demolition of conman Emile Savundra) became legendary. By the time he interviewed Nixon he’d already interviewed British prime ministers like Harold Wilson and had an enviable reputation. So he was hardly the midget taking on the giant.
Nor was the Watergate interview the climax to a series of interviews in which Frost had been outwitted as the movie suggests. In fact, it took place halfway through the series of interviews.
I ask Frost if he is happy to be portrayed as a Jay Leno type who goes up against a political giant in the movie. What about his own record as a master interviewer?
Frost looks philosophical. Peter Morgan had to take his permission to write the play (and then the movie) and though Frost has clearly made money from the ventures he says he gave up all editorial control so that the play would be seen as entirely objective.
Fair enough. But objective is not the same as wrong.
Frost concedes the point. About 15 per cent of the film is pure fiction, he agrees. Morgan decided that for the play to work it had to be a David and Goliath story and that Nixon had to be humanised. So chunks of the play are made up. The David Frost of Morgan’s imagining is not quite the real Frost. The conversation between Frost and a drunken Nixon late one night is also made up. So is the question Nixon asks Frost: “Did you do any fornicating over the weekend?” And so is the sequence of interviews. It made more dramatic sense to put the Watergate interview last.
But of course, Frost is not complaining. He is now even better known than he was in his Sixties/Seventies heyday. The success of the movie has guaranteed that like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein after All The President’s Men (also about Nixon coincidentally), Frost will become the general public’s idea of a heroic journalist.
It’s a pity though that his real achievements may be forgotten. That Was The Week That Was brought satire to television. His 1960s BBC programmes created such stars as John Cleese (at one stage, all the British Pythons worked on Frost’s show) and the two Ronnies. In the ’70s, he was the first man to simultaneously anchor separate shows on both sides of the Atlantic. (He flew between New York and London every other day).
In America he and Barbara Walters broke the mafia of booking-agents who got guests on to TV shows by pursuing celebrities themselves. In Britain, he parlayed his TV celebrity into a variety of media ventures, investing in such companies as London Weekend Television and TV-AM. Even now, he is part businessman and part journo.
Does he think that the art of the TV interview has changed since he first started in the business? Oh yes, he says. When he began, politicians would never give a straight answer to a question. Instead they would give long-winded responses in the hope that the interviewer ran out of time. (I tell him that most Indian politicians and spokesmen still do this.)
Now, he says, politicians have realised that viewers are not idiots and that they have to give straight answers to questions. It’s got to the stage, he says, where politicians come to TV studios knowing that they are expected to offer one or two news points and take trouble to work out what these will be beforehand. (It’s not like that in India, I explain.)
Further, the tradition of the all-purpose interviewer has ended. Frost has always prided himself on his diversity. He could interview Nixon one day and Elizabeth Taylor the next. Even on Breakfast With Frost he liked to mix and match his guests, mingling Tony Blair (who he has interviewed 30 times!) with the rock sensation du jour.
Today’s interviewers are much narrower in their appeal. Either they do political interviews or they do showbiz interviews. Very few people seem able to straddle that divide.
But of course, Frost’s appeal straddles not just that divide but the whole world. With shows on Al Jazeera and British and American television and his Frost/Nixon fame, David Frost is back to being the world’s best known TV interviewer.