An historically very important British and American television personality, David Frost, died yesterday.
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Sir David Paradine Frost, Order of the British Empire (OBE) (7 April 1939 – 31 August 2013) was an English journalist, comedian, writer, media personality and daytime TV game show host.
Frost was one of the key figures in the launch of ITV breakfast station TV-am in 1983. For the BBC, he hosted the Sunday morning interview programme Breakfast with Frost from 1993 to 2005. He spent two decades as host of Through the Keyhole. From 2006 to 2012 he hosted the weekly programme Frost Over the World on Al-Jazeera English and from 2012, the weekly programme The Frost Interview.
Frost died on 31 August 2013, aged 74, on board the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth, on which he had been engaged as a speaker.
That Was the Week that Was (TW3)
Frost was chosen by writer and producer Ned Sherrin to host the satirical programme That Was the Week that Was, alias TW3. This caught the wave of the satire boom in 1960s Britain and became a popular programme. TW3 was the last piece of scheduled programming broadcast by the BBC on a Saturday, and regularly overran its time slot. On 23 November 1963, a tribute to the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, an event which had occurred during the previous day, formed an edition of That Was the Week That Was.
An American version of TW3 ran after the original British series had ended. Following a pilot episode on 10 November 1963, the 30-minute US series, also featuring Frost, ran on NBC from 10 January 1964 to May 1965. In 1985, Frost produced and hosted a television special in the same format, That Was the Year That Was, on NBC.
From the Mid-1960s to 1980
Frost fronted a number of programmes following the success of TW3, including its immediate successor, Not So Much a Programme, Mmore a Way of Life, which he co-chaired with Willie Rushton and poet P.J. Kavanagh. More successful was The Frost Report, 1966 and 1967, which launched the television careers of John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. He signed for Rediffusion, the ITV weekday contractor in London, to produce a "heavier" interview-based show called The Frost Programme. Guests included Sir Oswald Mosley and the Rhodesian premier Ian Smith. His memorable dressing-down of insurance fraudster Emil Savundra was generally regarded as the first example of "trial by television" in the UK.
Frost was a member of a successful consortium, including former executives from the BBC, which bid for an ITV franchise in 1967. This became London Weekend Television, which began broadcasting in July 1968. The station began with a programming policy which was considered 'highbrow' and suffered launch problems with low audience ratings and financial problems.
He was involved in the station's early years as a presenter. On 20 and 21 July 1969, during the British television Apollo 11 coverage, he presented David Frost's Moon Party for LWT, a ten-hour discussion and entertainment marathon from LWT's Wembley Studios, on the night Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Two of his guests on this programme were British historian A.J.P. Taylor and entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr.
From 1969 to 1972, Frost kept his London shows and fronted The David Frost Show on the Group W (U.S. Westinghouse Corporation) television stations in the United States. His 1970 TV special, Frost on America, featured guests such as Jack Benny and Tennessee Williams. In the same period he began an intermittent involvement in the film industry. He part-financed The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970), the lead character is partly based on Frost, and gained an executive producer credit.
A declassified transcript of a 1972 telephone call between Frost and Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. In the conversation, Frost urges Kissinger to call chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer and urge him to compete in that year's World Chess Championship. During this call, Frost revealed that he was working on a novel. n 1977 a series of interviews with former US President Richard Nixon were broadcast. Made for American television, they were screened internationally. Later, after the 1979 Iranian Revolution he was the last person to interview Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran.
Frost was an organiser of the Music for UNICEF Concerf at the United Nations General Assembly in 1979. Ten years later, Frost was hired as the anchor of the new American tabloid news program Inside Edition. . However, he was dismissed after only three weeks, and then-ABC News reporter Bill O’Reilly was recruited in his stead.
After 1980
Frost was one of the "Famous Five" who launched TV-am in February 1983 but, like LWT in the late 1960s, the station began with an unsustainable "highbrow" approach. Frost remained a presenter after restructuring. Frost on Sunday began in September 1983 and continued until the station lost its franchise at the end of 1992. Frost had been part of an unsuccessful consortium, CPV-TV, with Richard Branson and other interests, which had attempted to acquire three ITV contractor franchises prior to the changes made by the Independent Television Commission in 1991. After transferring from ITV, his Sunday morning interview programme Breakfast with Frost ran on the BBC from January 1993 until 29 May 2005. For a time it ran on BSB before its later Sunday morning rebroadcast on BBC-1.
Frost hosted Through the Keyhole, which ran on several channels from 1987 until 2008 and also featured Loyd Grossman. Produced by David Paradine Productions, his long production company, the programme was on daytime TV in its last years.
Following the end of the BBC series Frost worked for Al Jazeera English, presenting a live weekly hour-long current affairs programme, Frost Over the World, which started when the network launched in November 2006. The programme has regularly made headlines with interviewees such as Tony Blair, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, Benazir Bhutto and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. The programme was produced by the former Question Time editor and Independent on Sunday journalist Charlie Courtauld. He was one of the first to interview the man who authored the historic fatwa on terrorism, Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri.
During his career as a broadcaster Frost became one of Concorde’s most frequent fliers, having flown between London and New York an average of 20 times per year for 20 years.
In 2007, Frost hosted a discussion with Libya's leader Gaddafi as part of the Monitor Group’s involvement in the country. In June 2010, Frost presented Frost on Satire, an hour-long BBC Four documentary looking at the history of television satire. Prominent satirists who were interviewed for the programme include Rory Bremner, Ian Hislop. John Lloyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Will Ferrell and Tiny Fey.
Death
On 31 August 2013, Frost was giving a speech on board the Cunard cruise liner, the MS Queen Elizabeth. During his speech he had a suspected heart attack and died. His employer carried a report on his death which also featured a statement from his family that read: "Sir David died of a heart attack last night aboard the Queen Elizabeth which is a Cunard [cruise] liner where he was giving a speech. His family are devastated and ask for privacy at this difficult time." Cunard said that the vessel left Southampton for a ten-day cruise in the Mediterranean ending in Rome. British Prime Minister David Cameron was quick to offer his tribute, writing on Twitter: "My heart goes out to David Frost's family. He could be – and certainly was with me – both a friend and a fearsome interviewer."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frost
The Nixon Interviews
The Nixon Interviews were a series of interviews of former United States President Richard Nixon conducted by British journalist David Frost, and produced by John Birt. They were recorded and broadcast on television in four programs in 1977. The interviews became the subject of the play Frost/Nixon, which was later made into a film of the same name; both starred Michael Sheen as Frost and Frank Langella as Nixon.
Background
After his resignation in 1974, Nixon spent more than two years away from public life. In 1977, he granted
Frost an exclusive series of interviews. Nixon was already publishing his memoirs at the time; however, his publicist Irving "Swifty" Lazar believed that by using television Nixon could reach a mass audience. In addition, Nixon was going through a temporary cash flow problem with his lawyers, and needed to find a quick source of income. Frost's New York-based talk show had been recently cancelled, leaving him consigned to a career based around the stories covered by the proto-reality show Great Escapes. As Frost had agreed to pay Nixon for the interviews, the American news networks were not interested, regarding them as checkbook journalism. They refused to distribute the program and Frost was forced to fund the project himself while seeking other investors, who eventually bought air time and syndicated the four programs.
Frost recruited James Reston, Jr. and ABC News producer Bob Zelnick to evaluate the Watergate minutiae prior to the interview. Their research allowed Frost to take control of the interview at a key moment, when he revealed details of a previously unknown conversation between Nixon and Charles Colson. Nixon's resulting admissions would support the widespread conclusion that Nixon had obstructed justice. Nixon continued to deny the allegation until his death, and it was never tested in a court of law because his successor, President Gerald Ford, issued a pardon to Nixon after his resignation. Nixon's negotiated fee was $600,000 and a 20% share of any profits.
Nixon chief of staff Jack Brennan negotiated the terms of the interview with Frost. Nixon's staff saw the interview as an opportunity for the disgraced president to restore his reputation with the public, and assumed that Frost would be easily outwitted. Previously, in 1968, Frost had interviewed Nixon in a manner described by Time magazine as "so softly that in 1970 President Richard Nixon ferried Frost and Mum to the White House, where the Englishman was appointed to produce a show in celebration of the American Christmas."
Interviews
The 12 interviews began on March 23, 1977, with three interviews per week over four weeks. They were taped for two hours a day, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, for a total of 28 hours and 45 minutes. The interviews were managed by executive producer Marvin Minoff, who was the president of Frost's David Paradine Productions, and by British current affairs producer John Birt.
Recording took place at a seaside home in Monarch Bay, California, owned by Mr. Harold H. Smith and Mrs. Martha Lea Smith, who were both longtime Nixon supporters. This location was chosen instead of Nixon's San Clementer homer, La Casa Pacifica, on account of interference with the television relay equipment by the Coast Guard navigational-aid transmitters near San Clemente. Frost rented the Smith home for $6,000 on a part-time basis.
Broadcasts
The interviews were broadcast in the US and some other countries in 1977. They were edited into four programs, each 90 minutes long.
In the weeks preceding the interviews with Nixon, David Frost was interviewed by Mike Wallace of CBS’s 60 Minutes, the same news organization that Frost had "scooped" (CBS had also been in negotiations to interview Nixon, but Frost outbid them). Frost talked about looking forward to Nixon's "cascade of candor".
The interviews were broadcast in four parts, with a fifth part containing material edited from the earlier parts broadcast months later:
The premiere episode drew 45 million viewers, the largest television audience for a political interview in history — a record which still stands today.
In Part 3, Frost asked Nixon about the legality of the president's actions. Nixon replied: "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
Part 5 opened with Frost's blunt question, "Why didn't you burn the tapes?"
Aftermath
A Gallup poll conducted after the interviews aired showed that 69 percent of the public thought that Nixon was still trying to cover up, 72 percent still thought he was guilty of obstruction of justice, and 75 percent thought he deserved no further role in public life. Frost was expected to make $1 million from the interviews.
DVD Releases
There have been several releases on DVD
- 1 disc edition, 85 minutes
- 2 disc edition, 377 minutes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nixon_Interviews
Afterword:
The Nixon interviews were subsequently presented as a Broadway play and as a movie starring Frank Langella as Nixon. Langella won a Tony for his portrayal of Nixon on stage and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for the same role in the film. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Langella
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