Frost bites back
When multi-award winning Sir David Frost broadcast his final show for Breakfast with Frost last year, the nation could hardly believe that the godfather of Sunday morning television could really be gone for good. Having started his career as a presenter at the age of just twenty three, he has interviewed countless celebrities, from Mick Jagger to almost every recent American President. And he will be returning to our television screens in June with Al-Jazeera’s new international channel.
O+: What made you decide to take the job with Al-Jazeera? DF: I am always looking for new frontiers in my career and while my previous shows were tailored to a specific audience — in Britain for British people, in the States for American people — this is going to be broadcast to the whole world, so the scope is much wider.
It will be a real challenge to produce material that is of universal interest, and I think it would be unrealistic to expect more than about eighty percent of the world to tune in. I’ll still be interviewing. There’ll be none of that “now, I’m standing by the Great Wall of China” stuff. It’ll be in much the same vein as Breakfast with Frost with about three or four interviews per show. O+: Donald Rumsfeld has described Al-Jazeera as a “terror network”.
Tony Blair also voiced disapproval. Are you concerned about a bad reception over here? DF: Washington does indeed think it is anti-American but four countries in the Arab world have banned the channel on the grounds that it is too pro-Western, including Egypt. It has never been banned in Israel though. Overall I have been pleasantly surprised by people’s reactions, I expected a lot more personal flack.
O+: Have you always aspired to be a broadcaster? DF: By the time I was at university, I knew I wanted to appear on TV. At Cambridge, I was in the Footlights and Peter Cook and I did a spoof show. We went to the Anglia studios to record it and as I walked in I thought, “this is home, this is where I’m going to live”. We did the pilot show for TW3 the July after leaving university and it was on air by November, with two and a half million people watching the first week.
Those are pretty impressive ratings for a brand new show. The thing is that we were doing so much for the first time. We did sketches about royalty and religion, breaking the taboo was extremely exciting. Over the years people have said that the show liberated them, they felt they could do and say so much more. O+: What do you think is the secret behind your success? DF: There are three things that I think are essential to remember as an interviewer. The first is to do your homework thoroughly.
The second, and this may seem quite obvious, is to listen. When I first went over to the States they noticed that I really listened. It seems madness, I know, to give an interview and not listen to the answers, but at that time they had so many interviewers who just wanted an opportunity to get another of their own gags in. Finally, the third thing is to try to establish a relationship with the person you are interviewing, so that they really want to convince you.
O+: Which interviewee would you pick to be stranded on an island with? DF: After spending twenty eight and a half hours interviewing Nixon it may well be him, but for the company I’d say Jane Fonda. O+: Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring broadcasters? DF: Show your interest in broadcasting on your CV, doing as much as possible at university. You have to really care about it and be keen and dedicated. Then you get a good job after university and your career builds from there.
25th May 2006