David Frost

Which items [on That Was the Week That Was] have caused the most controversy?

There was The Consumer's Guide to Religion. There's a bit of a fuss about that. Yes, and indeed the fuss involved father in that, of course, because suddenly people realised that the man who did this item's father was a Methodist minister. And so he got all the press on him down in Suffolk. And of course, they did as London press do and Suffolk press don't and feed questions about don't you think it was the most blasphemous, disgraceful and disgusting thing, you know, and all this sort of thing. And father, of course, took it all and said yes and no to it. So as a result, he came out saying entirely different things in all the papers.

How has this big and sudden success, what's the big difference it's made to your life?

I suppose just, you know, how little spare time one has, really. Because unlike a sort of first night that goes pretty merrily, with this, of course, you can't look back on it afterwards, because no sooner than one show is over at 11.43 and we're laying into a steak or something afterwards, and one's thinking about the next, you know, there's just no time.

Your chat programmes to start with had a lot of the fierceness of the satire programmes. They were referred to as public lynchings. You were inclined to pitch into people rather heavily for a start, were you not?

Uh very rarely really. When you look back, uh though people have a image and it's delightful they remember programmes from years ago so clearly of Doctor Savundra or Doctor Petro … or something like that. They were two programmes out of the first hundred and four, and there were also programmes with George Brown which drew out George Brown in a gentler but more revealing way than perhaps he'd been drawn out before, and indeed he was superb. … The truth of the matter is I hope that one has always treated the situation ad lib in the way it should be treated, you know, just as it would be difficult to be gener it would have been difficult to be generous … to all of the policies of Dr. Savundra, just as it would be impossible to attack Jack Benny.

With this output of interviewing, obviously you have to rely on a staff of researchers and briefers and advisers. Are you happy? Do you feel you're doing really satisfactory interviews when someone else has to select the questions simply because you haven't the time to dig yourself?

Someone else has to select the research material, but I do the questions and I do the reading too, because that's the only way it can work. Someone else … finds the material, and I find some of it myself, of course, things I've read, things I find, but if you take a particular interview, then someone will have praised three or four things that it's not worth reading all of, but a great deal more I'll read at first hand. No one else could ever do the questions for you, because a talk show depends above all on reality … above all on seeing that the person is interested or bored by the person he's interviewing, you know, and that's a one-to-one thing. And most of the things that happen are Ad Live on the Air. You go into an interview knowing some of the questions you'd like to ask, some of the areas you'd like to get into, some of the quotes you'd like to quote. And after that, you wait for combustion, the Muse, the Holy Spirit, whatever you happen to believe in, to strike, and the thing can go off in almost any direction.

You radiate competence. Are you ever nervous before a show?

I cannot really remember … being truly nervous before a programme never. I was slightly nervous at concert I gave at the White House last Christmas, I think … slightly tenser, maybe, than usual. I never get really nervous. I sometimes get an added tension, not in terms of being that's a strange word to use, tension is probably one an added concentration is probably better because I never get nervous really. Although Hollywood Farewell to Frank Sinatra was an incredible concert to be part of, appearing between Jack Benny and Barbara Streisand. Those sort of occasions, the concentration adrenaline is at its peak.

David, it's estimated that you earn more money than anyone ever has in the history of show business, which has meant you've had to invest it and look after it and become a tycoon. You seem to have taken to the jungle war of the boardroom just as successfully as the infighting of television. Do you enjoy the business side of it?

I love it, yes. I'm sure not more money than anyone in the history of uh show business. I people write, I'm sure, excessive things about compared with other people in television and so on in Britain and so on, but I mean I'm sure not in history of show business, for instance, uh anybody who was in show business in the thirties and bought real estate, you know, hasn't earning, is that you'll put it in the middle of the but I … You're doing all right.

You put London Weekend Television together and you have interests in films, publishing, market research, property investment. How do you have time for all this?

Well, I'm free Tuesday breakfast. … I don't know how much I'm going to do it. … Uh I guess I work uh I guess I sleep six bit more than six, six to seven hours and uh work work about fourteen, I guess.

Do you never relax? Do you knock off at Christmas?

Yes, I do. I knock off for Christmas, I knock off for New Year, and I actually had a two-week holiday last year. I'm ashamed to report. It'd destroy my image. But the basic thing is that the things I do as work I would do as pleasure if I didn't do them as work. If I'd been born with a silver spoon in my mouth instead of a Methodist minister's collar, then I would do them as pleasure.