10 saturday review Saturday June 11 2022 | the timesD
avid Frost, says his son,
knew more than any-
one that an interview
should be about the
interviewee, not the
interviewer. Wilf Frost
has applied the same
guiding principle to The Frost Tapes pod-
cast, which he has assembled from his
father’s archive. Each episode tells a story,
but it is not a story about “Dad” and still
less their relationship as father and son.
Naturally this makes me eager to ask
about the real David Frost and how Wilf,
now a broadcaster, stepped out from his
gigantic shadow.
In his 50-year career Frost interviewed
everyone worth interviewing with what-
ever it took: bluntness, scathing wit, empa-
thy and, if needed, sycophancy. In the late
Sixties he hosted eight shows a week, five
daily in the US and three over the weekend
for London Weekend Television (LWT),
the ITV company he created at the ridicu-
lously young age of 28. “Before Concorde,”
Wilf says admiringly. “Before flat beds.”
The first season of The Frost Tapes, re-
leased in 2020, contained Frost’s political
interviews. They were arranged themati-
cally (Black Panthers, Women’s Lib), but
included a previously unbroadcast en-
counter with a 1987 presidential hopeful
called Joe Biden. The series ended revisit-
ing the 28¾ hours Frost recorded with
Richard Nixon in 1977 — widely seen as
the greatest TV interview. In season two
he orbits the stars, from Lauren Bacall to
Muhammad Ali. Frost interviewed such
people so often that each episode is a kind
of running-commentary autobiography.
Wilf began tracing and buying the rights
to his father’s work soon after his death in- Fifty missing videotapes were re-
trieved, weirdly, from the Richard Nixon
presidential archive, Nixon’s aides pre-
sumably having been searching for indis-
cretions from their boss’s enemies when
they appeared on the syndicated David
Frost Show. He sees the years he has spent
on the project as a small repayment for the
love his father gave him.
The new season of nine episodes begins
with Elton John, who straight out of rehab
in 1991 told Frost that fame and drugs had
so destroyed his sense of self that there was
nothing left inside at all. The second epi-
sode features Andrew Lloyd Webber, who
recalls writing the song Married Man for
Sarah Brightman, then his mistress.
Both musicians were friends of David.
The Frosts and the Lloyd Webbers holi-
dayed together. Wilf recalls messing about
on Lloyd Webber’s electric keyboard with
his elder brother Miles and wiping an en-
tire song from its memory. “We could see
he was unbelievably worried and con-
cerned,” he admits.
The song was destined for a rare ALW
flop, The Beautiful Game, and the brothers
used to joke that the missing song would
have reversed the musical’s fortunes.
David died from a heart
attack aged 74 and Lloyd
Webber played an ar-
rangement of his Pie Jesu
at the memorial service at
Westminster Abbey. Two
years later Miles died, aged
31, killed while out on a run
by a rare genetic heart con-
dition that his father had
unknowingly also har-
boured (although it had not
caused his death). Lloyd
Webber played Wishing You
Were Somehow Here Again
at Miles’s service. “I remem-
ber breaking heavily into
tears halfway through that,”
Wilf says.
He says that Lloyd Webber and John
remain great friends to Lady Carina
Fitzalan-Howard, whom Frost married in
1983 (after a short marriage to Peter Sell-
ers’s widow, Lynne Frederick). Carina has
been through so much, I say: widowed, lost
her oldest son, survived a cancer tussle
with advanced melanoma...
“And she is a recovering — we must al-
ways say recovering — alcoholic from 13
years ago. It is almost more amazing get-
ting over that than everything else, frank-
ly. But, yes, then losing Miles, then cancer,
which she beat, and then the pandemic,
which I also count as a blow. I think she
locked down too early and when you’re
already a bit lonely it is very tough. Every
two years when she starts to turn the cor-
ner there’s been something else, and yet
she turns another corner.”
Frost was not merely an interviewer of
the stars but a star himself. Celebrities saw
him as one of their own. Should his close
friendships with his subjects worry us,
however? I remember my mother being
infuriated by a Frost interview in which he
gushed over Elizabeth Taylor’s 68-carat
engagement ring from Richard Burton.
“Was he too soft? I don’t think so,” Wilf
says. “I mean, it’s a different debate for en-
tertainers versus politicians, but look at
the content we’re talking about with thisseason. Look at Elton. He got more out of
them because they trusted him. I mean if
by question number two he was telling
Taylor she should sell that ring and it was
outrageous to be wearing it because people
are suffering in the world, not only would
that have drawn that interview to a close
with no revelations, but he would never
have met them ever again.”
He says his father would have appreciat-
ed Jeremy Paxman’s or Piers Morgan’s ag-
gressive interviewing because it was true
to them. “I think what he wouldn’t have
understood — and I do think there’s a lot
of this now — is people who seem to be
seeking confrontation for the sake of con-
frontation. I think he and I would agree
that’s totally counterproductive.”
I interviewed David Frost over an ex-
pensively lubricated lunch in 2000 and
asked him why, if he believed in a classless
society, he sent his three sons to Eton. His
bizarre reply was that its intake was so
diverse it was like a comprehensive.
“I don’t think he got bogged down about
sending us to Eton. I think he assessed the
school and thought it was good for us,”
Wilf says. “A lot of actors try and pretend
they never did go. I’m very proud I went.
I don’t think it defines me, as clearly it
wasn’t my choice... But I think it was
somewhere I was very fortunate to go to.”The second episode of
The Frost Tapes: Season
Two, with Andrew Lloyd
Webber, is released
on Mondaypodcasts
David Frost: a life among the stars
We know he embraced success, but how
did Frost deal with failure — the cancella-
tion of his daily syndicated David Frost
Show in America, his ousting from LWT,
the disastrous launch of his next venture,
TV-am? “He definitely would rather pre-
tend things were still going right to ac-
knowledging that they were going wrong.
Even if someone was trying to stab him in
the back — and that’s exaggerating the
point — he would kind of refuse to ac-
knowledge it and kill them with kindness.”
Frost was the son of a Methodist minis-
ter, the Rev Wilfred John Paradine Frost.
Wilf surprises me by telling me that his
father remained devout, kneeling to say
his prayers every night. His Sunday morn-
ing current affairs shows on TV-am and
BBC1 getting in the way of church attend-
ance troubled him so much that he devised
a plan to open up a church near their grand
home in Hampshire on Sunday nights to
conduct a Frosts-only family service.
“It worked for about two weeks and then
Mum got the giggles and it all evaporated
and he had to give up. We know that he was
disappointed about that.”
Of the three sons, only Wilf followed his
father’s vocation. Miles set up a private
equity firm. George, the youngest, started
a rum brand, the Duppy Share.
Both clearly inherited the business
sense of their father, who registered
his company David Paradine Pro-
ductions in 1961 as he was leaving
Cambridge University.
Wilf graduated from Oxford to
work in investment management,
but left the sector in 2011 for televi-
sion, landing an anchor’s job with
CNBC. Now, aged 36, he has re-
turned to Britain as a Sky News pre-
senter. His father never saw him
broadcast. I am sure he would have
noticed that his son has inherited his
uncanny ease before the camera.
“Was I reluctant to go into it
because I’d never be able to do better
than him? No, I took a while to go into
it because I thought it was impossible.
Now that I’m in it, I couldn’t care less if
people say, ‘You’re never going to be as
good as him,’ because I quite agree.”
When we talk, Wilf is eight days from
marrying Kaley Adolf, a fashion executive
he met while working for CNBC in New
York. “Dad is an inspiration to me in my
work, but way more there’s the man he
was, the friend he was to people and the
husband and the father he was. I mean, I
have grown up... thinking it will be almost
impossible to repeat what he achieved,
both on the superficial side, but also the
important side: how close can I get to being
as good a person as he was in all sorts of
ways and, most importantly, as a father?
God willing, we’d love to have kids.”
We agree that it is a crying shame his
father is not around to make a wedding
speech. Frost was a great master of cere-
monies, even if his audience could almost
chant the jokes he told. Wilf would warn
that his references were becoming dated
and beg him to skip the line about “three-
and-a-half-inch floppies” being nothing to
boast of: the technology had moved on.
“And one night he told that joke and
there was rapturous laughter across the
room, and I could see him look at me with
this grin that said, ‘See, they still love me.
I’ve still got it.’ ” The podcasts, I promise,
provide much further proof.The interviewer’s
archive is the basis of
a hit podcast series by
his son Wilf. He tells
Andrew Billen about
an inspirational dad
one of the boys Top:
friends Elton John and
David Frost. Left: with
another friend, Andrew
Lloyd Webber. Above:
with sons Wilf, George
and Miles c 1993 in
Daymer Bay, Cornwall