1962–1963: That Was the Week That Was Frost was chosen by writer and producer
Ned Sherrin to host the satirical programme
That Was the Week That Was, or
TW3, after Frost's flatmate John Bird suggested Sherrin should see his act at The Blue Angel. The series, which ran for less than 18 months during 1962–63, was part of the
satire boom in early 1960s Britain and became a popular programme. The involvement of Frost in
TW3 led to an intensification of the rivalry with Peter Cook who accused him of stealing material and dubbed Frost "the bubonic plagiarist". The new satirical magazine
Private Eye also mocked him at this time. Frost visited the U.S. during the break between the two series of
TW3 in the summer of 1963 and stayed with the producer of the New York City production of
Beyond The Fringe. Frost was unable to swim, but still jumped into the pool, and nearly drowned until he was saved by Peter Cook. At the memorial service for Cook in 1995,
Alan Bennett recalled that rescuing Frost was the one regret Cook frequently expressed. For the first three editions of the second series in 1963, the BBC attempted to limit the team by scheduling repeats of
The Third Man television series after the programme, thus preventing overruns. Frost took to reading synopses of the episodes at the end of the programme as a means of sabotage. After the BBC's Director General
Hugh Greene instructed that the repeats should be abandoned,
TW3 returned to being open-ended. More sombrely, on 23 November 1963, a tribute to the
assassinated President John F. Kennedy, an event which had occurred the previous day, formed an entire edition of
That Was the Week That Was. Frost, according to
Kitty Muggeridge in 1967, had "risen without a trace." He was involved in the station's early years as a presenter. On 20 and 21 July 1969, during the
British television Apollo 11 coverage, he presented ''David Frost's Moon Party'' for LWT, a ten-hour discussion and entertainment marathon from LWT's
Wembley Studios, on the night
Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. Two of his guests on this programme were British historian
A. J. P. Taylor and entertainer
Sammy Davis Jr. Around this time Frost interviewed
Rupert Murdoch whose recently acquired Sunday newspaper, the
News of the World, had just serialised the memoirs of
Christine Keeler, a central figure in the
Profumo scandal of 1963. For the Australian publisher, this was a bruising encounter, although Frost said that he had not intended it to be. Murdoch confessed to his biographer
Michael Wolff that the incident had convinced him that Frost was "an arrogant bastard, [and] a bloody bugger". In the late 1960s Frost began an intermittent involvement in the film industry. Setting up
David Paradine Ltd in 1966, His 1970 TV special,
Frost on America, featured guests such as
Jack Benny and
Tennessee Williams. In a declassified transcript of a 1972 telephone call between Frost and
Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's
national security advisor and
secretary of state, Frost urged Kissinger to call
chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer and urge him to compete in that year's
World Chess Championship. During this call, Frost revealed that he was working on a novel. In 1977, the
Nixon interviews, which were five 90-minute interviews with former U.S. President
Richard Nixon, were broadcast. Nixon was paid $600,000 plus a share of the profits for the interviews, which had to be funded by Frost himself after the U.S. television networks turned down the programme, describing it as "
checkbook journalism". Frost's company negotiated its own deals to syndicate the interviews in the U.S. via the
Mutual Broadcasting System and their local affiliates, as well as internationally. Frost taped around 29 hours of interviews with Nixon over four weeks. Nixon, who had previously avoided discussing his role in the
Watergate scandal that had led to his resignation as president in 1974, expressed contrition saying, "I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life". Frost asked Nixon whether the president could do something illegal in certain situations such as against antiwar groups and others if he decides "it's in the best interests of the nation or something". Nixon replied: "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal", by definition. Following the 1979
Iranian Revolution, Frost was the last person to interview
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the deposed
Shah of Iran. The interview took place on
Contadora Island in
Panama in January 1980, and was broadcast by the
American Broadcasting Company in the U.S. on 17 January. The Shah talks about his wealth, his illness, the
SAVAK, the
torture during his reign,
Khomeini, his threat of extradition to Iran and draws a summary of the current situation in Iran. Frost was an organiser of the
Music for UNICEF Concert at the
United Nations General Assembly in 1979. Ten years later, he was hired as the anchor of new American tabloid news program
Inside Edition. He was dismissed after only three weeks because of poor ratings. It seems he was "considered too high-brow for the show's low-brow format."
1980–2010: Frost on Sunday and later work with
Donald Rumsfeld in 2005 Frost was one of the "Famous Five" who launched
TV-am in February 1983; however, like LWT in the late 1960s, the station began with an unsustainable "highbrow" approach. Frost remained a presenter after restructuring.
Frost on Sunday began in September 1983 and continued until the station lost its franchise at the end of 1992. Frost had been part of an unsuccessful consortium,
CPV-TV, with
Richard Branson and other interests, which had attempted to acquire three
ITV contractor franchises prior to the changes made by the
Independent Television Commission in 1991. After transferring from ITV, his Sunday morning interview programme
Breakfast with Frost ran on the BBC from January 1993 until 29 May 2005. For a time it ran on
BSB before moving to
BBC 1. Frost hosted
Through the Keyhole, which ran on several UK channels from 1987 until 2008 and also featured
Loyd Grossman. Produced by his own production company, the programme was first shown in prime time and on daytime television in its later years. During his career as a broadcaster, Frost became one of
Concorde's most frequent fliers, having flown between London and New York an average of 20 times per year for 20 years. In 2007, Frost hosted a discussion with Libya's leader
Muammar Gaddafi as part of the
Monitor Group's involvement in the country. In June 2010, Frost presented
Frost on Satire, an hour-long
BBC Four documentary looking at the history of television satire. ==
Frost/Nixon==