The idiot box

How to sum up David Frost? The lazy writer’s friend, aka Wikipedia, calls him ‘an English journalist, comedian, writer, media personality and television host’. To which I would add only: ‘Britain’s first TV superstar.’ (To some he was also ‘The Bubonic Plagiarist’, but we won’t dwell on that.)

That Was The Week That Was, The Frost Report and The Nixon Interviews made him a key cultural figure of the 1960s and 1970s. But his true significance struck me only recently. He may have damaged Britain, unintentionally, as much as anyone in living memory.

Frost, in my view, was a Pied Piper who helped to lure a generation of the brightest and best away from meaningful careers and into the often vacuous, inconsequential world of television. He was exciting — that interview confronting the insurance swindler Emil Savundra, for example — glamorous and funny. Thousands of Bright Young Things watched him and thought: ‘Yesss! That’s what I want to do.’ After three decades in TV, I’ve lost count of those who were inspired by visions of Frost.

Arguably, these BYTs wasted their talent. Wasted, that is, if you think running an influential think tank or government department or attaining an office of state is preferable to making instantly obsolescent visual wallpaper. Not all TV programmes are crap, obviously. But what’s more valuable: trying to get people to change channels or trying to change the world?

Take Mark Damazer, a former editor of BBC’s Newsnight and The Nine O’Clock News, whose baldness was, wags said, caused by the heat emanating from his brain — much like the chrome-domed Tory thinker David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts. Mark got a double starred first in history from Cambridge and was briefly my boss in the 1990s.