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Sir David Frost Passes, Aged 74

Sir David Frost has passed, aged 74, yesterday, from a heart attack.

He was many things to many people. Talk show host, political interviewer, game show host, TV and film producer, journalist, broadcaster, comedian and a man famed for his parties at the centre of society.

To me, however, he was the face of most important television show in British history, That Was The Week That Was, in the early sixties. It took the satire boom, popular in the fashionable parts of London's high society and put in on the television, making it accessible to the whole country and changing the way the nation considered its leaders.

Overnight, the natural respect held for politicians was turned on its head. Corruption was exposed. Hypocrisy held up to the light. Racism, sexism, even homophobia ridiculed, before such a thing was ever fashionable, indeed while homosexuality was still illegal. And David Frost was in the centre of it, with his killingly sarcastic endline "But seriously, Prime Minister, you're doing a wonderful job."

It was The Daily Show, just fifty years before. And as a result, needing far bigger balls.

Other notable achievements include the BBC's The Frost Report, which also laid the framework for Monty Python's Flying Circus, starting up London Weekend Television and TV-AM, and his Sunday morning political interviews in the nineties and noughties that managed to ask hard questions of politicians expecting an easy ride. Many will know him for his interview with Richard Nixon in America, but he interviewed more Presidents and Prime Ministers than any other, more recently doing the same on Al Jazeera.

But for me, it will always be TW3. Here's are some clips;

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmDwQLWwUcg[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGwKrjtZ2f8[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h56_IbHqTIo[/youtube]

And a full episode.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INxp98-2i6A[/youtube]

Thank you David. Goodbye, good evening and welcome.


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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