Sir David Frost is back on BBC Radio 2, with a new series of interviews with some of Hollywood’s legends. Kate Whiting turns the tables on the iconic 1960s interviewer

JOAN COLLINS has survived and I think she’s going to keep on surviving for a very long time... booms the deep, instantly-recognisable voice of Sir David Frost from a recording booth deep in Western House, the home of BBC Radio 2, on London’s Great Portland Street.

The broadcaster is recording links between songs for his latest outing – a series called Hollywood Greats, where he interviews a string of iconic actors, including Sir Michael Caine and the ever-youthful Joan Collins, and plays some of their favourite tunes.

Moments later, all smiles, he welcomes me into the booth. At 73, like Collins, he’s still going strong, but looks tired at the end of another typically busy day. He’s also just flown back from South Africa where he was interviewing Desmond Tutu for the next series of Frost Over The World on Al Jazeera English.

Sir David is charm personified. While his hair’s being coiffed into place for photos, he offers me a nibble of his coconut madeleine and, always the interviewer, asks how my own career is going.

When he was first on BBC Radio 2, in 1964, it was then called the Light Programme and his on-air antics nearly got his producer fired.

“I was doing That Was The Week That Was (aka TW3 on BBC TV) and they asked me to do this radio show for 13 weeks and we called it David Frost At The Phonograph. We had two or three guys, including Barry Cryer, who’d come and do a really ad-lib show,” he says, immediately diving into a long reminiscence.

One week, the group came up with an idea to spice up the Saturday lunchtime news broadcast at 12.30.

“We waited until there was a very boring first news story and sure enough this week, the first item was going to be ‘Mr Fanfani, the Italian Prime Minister has arrived in London for lunch at Windsor with the Queen’.

“So when we got to 12.29 and 30 seconds, live on the air, I said, ‘And now we come to our feature of news requests, where you the listeners have sent in your requests for items and this week it’s Mr LJ from Chelmsford who said he’d love to hear a really boring news item. Well all right Mr LJ, here it is...’ “You could hear the hatred in the voice of the announcer, who had to say ‘Mr Fanfani, the Italian Prime Minister...’ It was fabulous. There were a few ructions about it, but nothing definitive, so we thought we’d do it again the following week.” The next week though, they did ‘newscaster auditions’: “We said, ‘Okay number one, go ahead’ and he was absolutely drunk.

Barry Cryer said things like, ‘Burble, burble, hic, the United States, hic’ right up until 12.29 and 58 seconds and then slumped to the floor. I said ‘Next!’ and it was the real newscaster. After that, the producer of the radio show was given a fairly clear warning that their job might be in danger. But at least we did it for two weeks.”

In the first two episodes of this new series, he asked Shirley MacLaine about her encounters with Alfred Hitchcock, the Rat Pack and the Mafia’s threat to kidnap her daughter.

While older fans will know Sir David from satirical 1960s shows TW3 and The Frost Report, which launched the careers of the two Ronnies and John Cleese, in 2008, he was introduced to a new generation and immortalised in the film Frost/Nixon. Michael Sheen played the young Sir David in 1977, when he interviewed the former president Richard Nixon over the infamous Watergate scandal.

BUT it wasn’t his first brush with movie stardom. In 1963, he joined Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles on the set of The VIPs, to shoot a cameo directed by Anthony ‘Puffin’ Asquith.

“They wanted someone who was the hot new person on television and it was a great joy because that was when I got to know Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles and they became friends for life.

Sir David has made many famous friends over the years and admits he finds it easier interviewing them because “you don’t have to warm up, you can get straight into doing the business”.

However, he always lays the ground rules beforehand.

“I don’t think you can have things that are offlimits, particularly with politicians. I’ve quite often felt the need to say, ‘Remember tomorrow’s interview is live, it’s a professional gig, it’s not a relaxing lunch’,” he reveals.

“Oddly enough, I said it once to Henry Kissinger about 30 years ago. We knew each other quite well and it was about the first volume of his book which was controversial and so I said, ‘Remember this is a journalistic encounter’ and he didn’t really take that on board.

It was a memorable confrontation and we didn’t really speak for 20 years.”

The pair have since made up, but the fall-out from the incident is testament to his integrity as an interviewer. Frost’s career could have been very different. Born in Kent, the son of a Methodist minister, he was offered a contract to play professional football for Nottingham Forest when he was 18, but turned it down to study English at Cambridge.

“Ministers’ sons are always expected to rebel at some stage, but I never did, I don’t know why,” he reflects.

FROST ON INTERVIEWS:

  • “The last interview Benazir Bhutto gave, we did by satellite before her tragic death. She was a controversial figure in some ways but was prepared to risk her life for democracy.”
  •  “Sammy Davies, the greatest all-round entertainer ever, sang eight songs, did 20 impressions and at the end of the interview said, ‘Thank you so much’ and took off his stunning diamond watch and gave it to me. It was my most precious possession and then it was stolen from a hotel room.”
  •  David Frost’s Hollywood Greats continues on BBC Radio 2 at 10pm on Tuesday, 10pm.

The first two episodes are now available on iPlayer