Frost
Comfy sofas and comfy questions: does this sum up the anchorman of Breakfast with Frost, a man who has interviewed the last six British Prime Ministers and the last seven American Presidents? Or does his star-studded form suggest the alternative title of the ‘interviewer’s interviewer’? Frost certainly has the c o m f o r t a b l e style down to a tee. He is charismatic and likeable, his speech basically patrician yet with a slight trans- Atlantic quality and a softening slurriness.
While discussing Cuba h e stops to light his cigar and laughs, “appropriate to be smoking a Cuban cigar while we’re discussing Castro!” Yet for those who see his interviewing style as likeable and relaxed there are others who see it as uncritical, and argue that Frost is too much a part of high social circles to be an effective critical interviewer.
The contrast with the Paxman style is informative but Frost makes no apologies: “I don’t believe that the hectoring sort of approach to interviewing, the automatic knee-jerk hostility that some people like to use makes any sense. One’s always trying to open people up rather than shut them up.” He talks fondly about his early roots in satire and his collaboration with the comic dream team that was John Cleese, Peter Cook and the Two Ronnies in his Cambridge days.
Frost focused on satire in this formative part of his career and he stresses the importance of detachment for a good satirist. Bright young things, fresh up to London, should do weekly satire shows, he argues. The reason? Aknowledge of those being satirised can hold a satirist back, his terrible speech in Parliament is harder to mock convincingly when you know that that person was up all night with a sick child, he argues. Somehow I think he’s dodged the point.
Isn’t it rather the friendship and intimacy with the person that acts as the limiting factor rather than the knowledge itself? And why should detachment be important for satire but not for interviewing? “Even if you’re on first name terms with the person, the interview is a professional assignment, a journalistic assignment, and they know that.” Indeed, sometimes his softly, softly approach produces great moments.
Amongst the most memorable Tony Blair’s dumbfound silence when Frost slipped in an innocuous little question: “What do you think your greatest weakness is Mr Blair?” There was an eerie silence. His likeability has certainly paid dividends; with access to people of huge standing from all fields, from Tennessee Williams, to Nelson Mandela, from the Beatles to Richard Nixon. The Nixon interviews made Frost into the household name that he is now.
With unprecedented access of around 28 hours, Frost was able to quiz Nixon on a host of subjects in the wake of the Watergate scandal. “Richard Nixon, even after 30 or more years in politics, had no small talk, so in the Green Room the conversation would be quite awkward. But once he got into the interview then he was ad-libbing and articulate,” he explains. The relationship between Frost and Nixon himself was more distant.
Frost won’t say that he liked Nixon: “It’s almost too intimate a word to use about Nixon … I wasn’t sympathetic to him, because there were people in jail because of what he’d done but I empathised with him…[he was] a sad man who so wanted to be great.” In a lively aside Frost recounts their last meeting, “Just for a moment all the clouds lifted and for 20 minutes he was sprightly, humorous.
?? Sometimes Frost’s observations are often more charming than insightful: “Of course you would interview Saddam Hussein differently from Julie Andrews.” It’s not that Frost isn’t up to the challenge of the questions involved but rather that he’s less interested in them than in the personalities of the people he has interviewed. He is an archetypal ‘people person’.
Yet on the subject of the Conservative Party his analysis is sharp, arguing that they need to effect a change on the scale undertaken by New Labour prior to the 1997 election. “The Conservatives haven’t found anything really memorable to change yet.” Memorable seems to be a quality on which Frost places a lot of emphasis. It’s a word that applies itself easily to his career. Frost has set himself up as a jack-of-all-trades, interviewing being only his most famous and recent.
He is also a producer, a writer, a publisher, a lecturer and a CEO. Compared to other political interviewers such as Jeremy Paxman and Andrew Marr, his career is much more diverse. Speaking before the decision to appoint Marr was taken, Frost has fulsome praise for his successor. Frost looks back fondly on his career.
“The late John Smith, the Labour leader, said after an interview, perhaps the last one he did, ‘David you have a way of asking beguiling questions with potentially lethal consequences.’” In fact he is less lethal than he would probably like to accept, but he has a style that is an antidote to the dominant combative tone of political debate and interviewing.
Perhaps in this sense Frost is the Charles Kennedy of the interviewing world, likeable and engaging but liked a little too much for his own good.
19th May 2005