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Over more than 50 years, from a post-Cambridge traineeship with the Associated-Rediffusion ITV franchise to a role with al-Jazeera, Frost was the interviewer of eight UK prime ministers and seven US presidents, a pioneer of TV satire and comedy, the tormentor-confessor of Richard Nixon, a TV entrepreneur and early innovator of self-production, a master of the chatshow sofa and a long-running gameshow host.
Frost's first brush with showbusiness came as secretary of the Cambridge Footlights revue, where contemporaries remember the cast's bemusement when on tour to see posters declaring David Frost presents The Footlights.
After his traineeship with Rediffusion, and aged just 23, Frost first entered the nation's living rooms in November 1962 as the young, unflappable, distinctively voiced and quiffed host of That Was The Week That Was. Selected by show creator Ned Sherrin, who had seen him perform at a cabaret club, Frost was the fulcrum of the BBC's then revolutionary mix of satirical songs, skits and comic monologues. TW3, as it was known, was considered subversive enough to be cancelled after two series lest it risk influencing the 1964 election. TW3 began Frost's long association with soon-to-be famous names, using writers including Bill Oddie and Keith Waterhouse
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After reuniting with Sherrin for the less successful Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, his next big hit came in 1966 with The Frost Report.
At around this time, a story emerged that Peter Cook, a contemporary at Footlights, had said one of his great regrets was saving Frost from drowning in a pool on tour. Frost was sore about this and said : "That wasn't Peter's line, that was Alan Bennett's joke." Frost has said that Cook was proud of his act.
If TW3 influenced TV satire for decades, his next hit, The Frost Report, more or less set out the future for British TV comedy in its 29 episodes. The main performers, apart from Frost, were John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, whose most celebrated sketch saw them line up in height order for a routine about social class. It was on the set of The Frost Report that production staff began to refer to Barker and Corbett as "the two Ronnies', while the writing team included Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle – the show had every Monty Python member bar Terry Gilliam.
It was now that Frost's catchphrase: "Hello, good evening and welcome" – which, as critics pointed out, was an essentially meaningless way of saying hello in three different ways – became well-known and much mimicked.
Returning to Associated-Rediffusion, Frost showed his more serious side with The Frost Programme, each hour-long episode of which featured an in-depth chat with just one guest or set of guests, among them Enoch Powell, the Beatles, Orson Welles and Prince Charles.
For all the later criticism that Frost lobbed over-easy questions at his guests – something dismissed by many of those on the receiving end, who noted how the casual style often lulled people into unexpected confessions – in his early interviewing days Frost was sometimes seen as too aggressive and opinionated. The most famous Frost Programme involved Emil Savundra, a notorious insurance business fraudster whose evasive answers clearly enraged the interviewer, and was condemned by some as trial by television. A slightly later encounter with the young Rupert Murdoch, newly in charge of the News of the World, enraged the budding media tycoon sufficiently that he briefly tried to take over Frost's new ITV franchise, London Weekend Television.
Frost's successful co-launching of two ITV franchises – LWT and later TV-am – indicated another steely side to a man who spent decades being underestimated and patronised. The most famous put-down came from Malcolm Muggeridge's wife, Kitty, who noted that after his early success Frost did not, as expected, sink, but instead "rose without trace".
In fact, by the late 1960s Frost was already making programmes with his own production house, David Paladine Ltd (Paladine was his middle name), again pioneering something now common in TV.
His most celebrated moment came in 1977 when he arranged and self-financed 12 interviews with Richard Nixon, edited into four 90-minute TV episodes watched by millions in the US. After hours of verbal sparring, Nixon conceded: "I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life." The events were retold in a hit play, Frost/Nixon, that became a film, with Michael Sheen starring as Frost.
Frost co-founded TV-am in 1983 as one of the "famous five" presenters. While others fled the initially beleaguered operation, Frost remained until 1992, converting with success to Sunday interviewing – a politics-and-showbusiness chatshow that he took to the BBC in 1993 as Breakfast with Frost.
While Frost continued to interview prime ministers, presidents and sports stars, for many viewers he was later best known for a slightly curious, peeping tom-based celebrity show, Through The Keyhole, which ran on ITV from 1987-2008, in which guests were asked to divine the identity of a famous person though a tour of their home. Only his co-host, Loyd Grossman, had a voice and diction to, if anything, rival Frost's own.