Jonathan Miller dubbed him “the Bubonic plagiarist”; Bernard Levin believed his wit would have made him a good barrister; Malcolm Muggeridge called him “the arch-prophet of the reign of mediocrity”. From his early days as an enfant terrible of political satire to his later appearances as a suave Sunday morning interviewer of prime ministers and celebrities, David Frost was liked, respected, feared and loathed in almost equal measure.
He burst on to British television in 1962 as the cocksure 23-year-old presenter of the revolutionary BBC political satire That Was the Week That Was. The Saturday-night programme became acknowledged as a watershed in British society. It marked the end of the deference that the broadcast media showed to political leaders and British Establishment figures and