Rob Blackhurst

November 25, 2006 Saturday

Financial Times Weekend

Back on air for Al Jazeera, the broadcaster is also back in the news for coaxing confessions out of Tony Blair. Rob Blackhurst reports

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MP3 of David Frost

Sir David arrives at his global headquarters in Kensington High Street in a whirl of post-prandial bonhomie, slurred rollercoaster vowels and quixotic mid-sentence pauses. "Would you like a cigar?" he offers, delving into his velvet-lined cigar box. I decline, but he gives me a useful lesson in case I'm ever invited to one of his parties. "The vital thing is that you must never be able to hear a cigar,"he says, massaging a fat, stubby Epicure No 2 close to his ear, "because if you can hear it, then it's too dry."

Glimpsed through the fug of flame and cigar smoke, Frost is a long way from the fresh-faced scourge of the establishment that burst on to the black-and-white BBC in 1962 with That Was the Week That Was. But today he's flushed pink with recent triumph. Last Friday, in his first appearance for the new satellite channel Al Jazeera English, Frost made worldwide headlines by getting Tony Blair to agree with him for the first time that the Iraq war had been a disaster. (Blair gave a single mumbled "it has".) According to which close textual reading you believe, this was either a slip of the tongue (Downing Street) or a rare moment of candour yielded by Frost's stealthy ambush-on-a-sofa technique (the BBC's political editor). Unsurprisingly, Frost sides with the view that he has reeled in a scoop: "I thought it was an involuntary glimpse into the private sorrow about what's been happening. It was an ad-lib moment."

Sir David's new weekly programme, Frost Over The World, broadcast from the London Al Jazeera studios at the very Frostian address of 1, Knightsbridge, seems exactly like Breakfast With Frost until you notice the backdrop of mosques and minarets next to Big Ben. English treasures like Gyles Brandreth and Anne Widdecombe pop up in between news from Qatar and Kuala Lumpur.

Frost will be using his well-worn contacts book to try to arrange an interview on Islam with Prince Charles and - perhaps a more difficult call to make - President Bush. Famously, the president discussed bombing Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar, though Frost thinks he was joking. Was he worried about how his friends in Washington and Whitehall would react to him taking the Al Jazeera shilling? "Well, this is Al Jazeera English. In that sense it isn't an Arabic channel at all. It seeks comparisons with other international news stations. My editorial freedom is absolute. And the more I investigated, the more I saw that they were in the clear (from any links with extremism). Since Qatar is one of our closest allies in the Middle East, it would have been odd if they had been."

When Frost was "persuaded" by BBC executives to give up Breakfast with Frost after 12 years last spring, it seemed that the 67- year-old's four decades in television were drawing to a discreet close. But these days he appears to be as ubiquitous as in his 1960s prime. His Hello-magazine-on-TV show, Through the Keyhole, produced by his own production company David Paradine Productions, returns to the BBC's daytime schedules for its "20th glorious year" (with Jackie Collins hired as Hollywood presenter).

He has also raised the funds to remake a version of The Dam Busters, produced by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, with an entirely British cast. When I mention the film, Frost leans forward and almost punches the air. "Yes, yes. It's a British triumph and you cannot have - as with a couple of recent war films - Americans coming in and doing the decisive thing at the end."

Al Jazeera aside, another reason for Frost's Indian summer is Frost/Nixon, an unlikely theatrical hit (with a film version planned) that has just transferred to the West End. It tells the high-wire story of Frost's attempts to extract a mea culpa from President Nixon over the Watergate scandal in a series of interviews in 1977, three years after he had resigned from the presidency in disgrace. In a typical Frost moment of chutzpah, he outbid the major US networks - offering Dollars 600,000 plus 20 per cent of profits to Nixon for the privilege of exclusive interview rights. Frost raised the money for the interviews by selling his 5 per cent original stake in London Weekend Television.

Half-way through the project Frost was confronted with public failure and financial ruin as an agile, well-briefed Nixon filibustered his way through Frost's questions about Watergate. But, with reels of tedious footage, mounting expenses, a mutinous crew, and broadcasters rejecting the interviews, Frost salvaged the project by knocking Nixon off-balance and securing a huge scoop. The former president admitted, with tears in his eyes, that he had "let the American people down" and would "have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life". When the Frost/Nixon encounters were aired, the New York Times reported that they had secured the "largest audience for a news interview in history".

Did Frost like Nixon after spending 23-and-a-quarter hours interviewing him? "Like is too personal a phrase. He had this wall erected between him and other people. That's one reason why he had no small-talk." One clumsy attempt at mateyness is documented in the play when Nixon asks a startled Frost, before an interrogation, whether he had been "fornicating atthe weekend".

In Peter Morgan's script, the 1970s Frost is an international playboy with a taste for double-breasted blazers, Italian slip-on shoes and any beautiful woman sitting opposite him in club class. How accurate is this version? Sir David chooses his words carefully, while flashing his trademark red socks: "Well, it wasn't quite the case of a girl in every airport but it was a great time to be single. That was something else about the 60s and 70s."

In truth, the logistics of Frost's life in the early 70s probably meant that airports were the only places that he spent enough time to meet anyone. Between 1969 and 1972, insanely, he was fronting prime-time talk shows on both sides of the Atlantic. "I would fly to New York on a Monday morning, do a 90-minute show on the Monday night, Tuesday night, two on a Wednesday, one on a Thursday night and belt off to the airport, fly off to London and do Frost on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So I was beating the diary by doing eight shows in a seven-day week. On an overnight flight you'd have to take sleeping pills. Morecambe and Wise would make occasional trips to the US and we'd meet at the airport. I'd say to them, 'Oh, it's great to see you boys. We'll have a really good chat.' I'd be asleep before I got to the end of the sentence."

Frost/Nixon implies that behind Frost's glad-handing and indestructible self-confidence there was an emptiness and existential despair. Is there any truth in that? "No, I don't get depressed," says Frost, bemused, sucking hard to reignite his spluttering cigar. "I am pretty much a Pollyanna." The depths of Frost's sunny social graces are immortalised in the story, confirmed by Frost, of how, in the 60s, his drunken Cambridge contemporary, Peter Cook, threw stones at his bedroom window at 3am. Eventually the curtains parted and that familiar voice, obviously roused from a deep sleep, cried: "Peter! Super to see you!"

Frost's contemporaries at Cambridge in the late 50s remember the grammar-school-educated son of a Methodist minister from Kent as an irrepressibly sociable and ambitious figure, preceded wherever he went by the waft of Old Spice. Even as an undergraduate, he apparently talked on the phone as if he had three secretaries. "It was an amazing time to be at Cambridge. Peter (Cook) was ahead of me, Jonathan (Miller) was five years ahead. Alan (Bennett) and Dudley (Moore) were a bit older. My contemporaries were John Cleese and Graham Chapman, actors like Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi and directors like Trevor Nunn. People would write plays and there would be more London critics there than on the first night of something in London. I said, not altogether joking, that the competition was much greater in Cambridge than it was in London."

When Ned Sherrin gave him the job presenting a new Saturday-night programme, That Was The Week That Was, riding the wave of London's satire boom, the 23-year-old Frost became a household name in a few weeks: "We had been yearning for something to detonate the current establishment from 1956 onwards - we'd had Suez and John Osborne's Look Back In Anger. Over six weeks (viewing figures) went from 2.5m to 12m. And it was on at 10.30 at night, later then than it would be now." Later, on The Frost Report, he developed a rapid-fire interrogative technique, which quickly became known as "trial by television" and, for the first time, replaced on-cue studio clapping with an audience "who could groan or interrupt".

It can be hard to reconcile the chippy matador of the 60s with the clubbable friend of the powerful who has been married, for over 20 years, to the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. But I suspect he's always been less anti-establishment than he seemed. Even through those long 60s nights, he retained his Methodist faith. "I've always been a believer though not necessarily a stunning church attender. Billy Graham was one of the people I most admired. It's got a bit more certain as I've got older." And, for the moment at least, his softly-softly interrogations seem to be paying dividends. Frost takes a final puff of his Cuban cigar. "The Labour leader John Smith said to me. 'You have a way of asking beguiling questions with potentially lethal consequences.' I'd be happy to have that on my tombstone."

'Frost Over the World' is on Al Jazeera English (Sky channel 514) on Fridays at 6pm