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Headline:

Frost bites: Sir David talks frankly about philandering, fall-outs and fame

Synopsis:

In 1977, Sir David Frost skewered Richard Nixon in a series of interviews immortalised in Peter Morgan's new film, 'Frost/Nixon'. But can the smooth-talking doyen of British broadcasting cope with a similarly fierce grilling on his own life and work?

Sir David Frost greets you with the uninhibited zeal of a Labrador retriever being reclaimed from the pound. "Great to see you," he gushes, offering a Cuban cigar in a manner which suggests that the honour is all his. "Wonderful, wonderful. Splendid." The intensity of his flattery is such that you are left fighting for air, buried by an avalanche of unearned affection.

Such, at least, are the kind of images that recur in Frost's cuttings file, from which he emerges as a peculiar mixture of arrogance and obsequiousness. That last Alpine analogy, for instance, appeared in the London Evening Standard, in 2000. And yet, when he arrives to talk to me here, in one of the statelier rooms at Oxburgh Hall, a 15th-century country house near King's Lynn, where he's been filming, the presenter offers nothing more than a cordial handshake. There's no bluster, no avalanche and no cigar. I take my place next to the doyen of British broadcasting on a suitably imposing red velvet sofa. A woman official from the National Trust appears and breaks the news that we aren't allowed on the couch.

Publish date:

23 November 2008

Author:

Robert Chalmers

Source:

Independent on Sunday

Media:

Access Interview