Frost bites: Sir David talks frankly about philandering, fall-outs and fame

Sir David Frost greets you with the uninhibited zeal of a Labrador retriever being reclaimed from the pound. "Great to see you," he gushes, offering a Cuban cigar in a manner which suggests that the honour is all his. "Wonderful, wonderful. Splendid." The intensity of his flattery is such that you are left fighting for air, buried by an avalanche of unearned affection.

Such, at least, are the kind of images that recur in Frost's cuttings file, from which he emerges as a peculiar mixture of arrogance and obsequiousness. That last Alpine analogy, for instance, appeared in the London Evening Standard, in 2000. And yet, when he arrives to talk to me here, in one of the statelier rooms at Oxburgh Hall, a 15th-century country house near King's Lynn, where he's been filming, the presenter offers nothing more than a cordial handshake. There's no bluster, no avalanche and no cigar. I take my place next to the doyen of British broadcasting on a suitably imposing red velvet sofa. A woman official from the National Trust appears and breaks the news that we aren't allowed on the couch.

Just for a moment, I think he assumes she is joking. It must be some time since Sir David, husband of Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard (daughter of the 17th Duke of Norfolk) and intimate of monarchs, presidents and prime ministers, has been told to shift his butt off anyone's furniture. In the event, his expression, as we're moved on, is one of puzzlement rather than outrage. We settle for a space in a narrow passageway, underneath a flight of stairs. It's pretty cold. There are two wooden chairs here, one with a padded seat. Frost takes the less comfortable one.

We can move in a few minutes, the PR lady says, apologetically, to a warmer reception room. Frost glances at me, anticipating, on my behalf, the prospect of having to relocate, mid-question. I shake my head. "It's OK," he tells her. "We're fine here."

It would be difficult to overstate Sir David Frost's influence in British public life. The author of Millionaires, Multi-millionaires and Really Rich People has counted among his friends people such as Prince Charles, Sir James Goldsmith and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild. The Princess of Wales was godmother to his youngest son. Lord Birt, his ex-protégé and former director-general of the BBC worked, until December 2005, as a special adviser to Tony Blair.

And now, at 69, Frost, a presenter for Al Jazeera English since November 2006, is about to regain the status he enjoyed in the early 1970s, as the best-known television interviewer in the English-speaking world. Frost/Nixon, screenwriter Peter Morgan's fictionalised film, based on the reporter's 1977 interviews with the disgraced former US president, will be released in Britain in January. US audiences, who are likely to turn out in force following the triumphant success of Morgan's The Queen, will be able to see Frost/Nixon from next month. The broadcaster is played by Michael Sheen. In the dramatic climax of the original interviews, now available on DVD, Nixon famously breaks down, when talking about Watergate, and confesses that: "I let down the country... I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden for the rest of my life."

"The Frost/Nixon film is going to immortalise you, for future generations all over the world. It'll be a bit like what When We Were Kings did for the Ali-Foreman 'Rumble in the Jungle'".

"I think you're right," Frost says. "And the reason it will have that effect is that Peter Morgan is a really major talent."

"You said of Richard Nixon that, once you put him on the couch, he headed for the hills. I get the impression that public scrutiny isn't an experience you enjoy, either."

"That's true."

"More than one journalist has accused you of hiding behind a smokescreen of anecdotes. If I can return to a question you asked the Nixon camp: 'How do I know that you won't screw me with stone-walling?' One of your more mixed metaphors, if you don't mind me saying so."

"Very mixed," says Frost. "The interesting thing," he remarks, "is that you can't dictate what people will say."

Interviewers, I suggest, can make for the most frustrating interviewees, because they tend to protect their privacy like Fagin guarded his pocketbook.

"I couldn't agree more."

"I've watched the original tapes of the Nixon interviews several times, with you in that rather grotesque shirt [Frost is wearing something that looks like a drunkard's attempt ' to photocopy a bar code, with a plain white collar]. The more I see that footage, the more I think it might have been the shirt that broke him down."

Frost laughs. "Talk to Turnbull & Asser about that."

Today, he's wearing an elegant light-blue shirt and a scarlet tie that I suspect is less of tribute to socialism than to his football team, Arsenal. It's almost 50 years since he first appeared on television, while he was still a student at Cambridge, in a sketch with Peter Cook. At 23, he was presenting the groundbreaking satirical programme That Was the Week That Was; that was followed by The Frost Report, in the mid-1960s. His reputation may have suffered from the curse of versatility – how is it, some ask, that the senior inquisitor of heads of state could also present Through the Keyhole or The Guinness Book of World Records? – and yet, had the broadcaster achieved nothing else, The Frost Report would have made him a legend, encouraging as it did almost every major young British comic talent at the time.

The show, broadcast over two seasons from 1966, employed, as Frost recalls, "all five British Pythons. It gave John Cleese his first opportunity to appear on TV." Frost and his producer, Jimmy Gilbert, united Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett for the first time, and the programme's extended cast of writers and performers included Marty Feldman, Antony Jay, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Peter Tinniswood, among many others. The Frost Report proved to be the fountainhead of mainstream British comedy for the next 30 years, and its more or less direct offshoots included Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Goodies, The Two Ronnies, Porridge, Yes Minister and Fawlty Towers.

He has been described as a chancer with no discernable talent of his own: nonsense, according to former collaborators I spoke to, who talked, among other things, of Frost's extraordinary intelligence, tenacious commitment to enabling new talent, and bold originality in devising new television formats. "The other great thing about David," one said, "is that he doesn't bear a grudge."

After almost half-a-century of broadcasting there has, inevitably, been the odd physical change in the broadcaster. His speech, especially, is slower, and its clarity has diminished with age. "This has led some people – one, at least, in print – to speculate that you drink heavily."

"I drink normally. 'I've never liked spirits. It's always been wine."

"Have you noticed a change in the way you articulate consonants? If so, what's caused it?"

"I haven't. Of course my voice is different to what it was when I was young. But as I speak now, to you, it's as I have spoken for as long as I can remember. The phrase the Frost drawl [the presenter mangles these last five words slightly, and who wouldn't] dates back quite a way.

"I talked to a doctor who said that, in view of your well-known appetite for strong coffee and large cigars, and decades of long-distance travel, perhaps you need something powerful to help you sleep."

"Not particularly. I think anyone needs a pill for an overnight flight."

"What do you use?"

"Temazepam," says Frost, referring to the widely used tranquilliser. "In the air, and possibly for one night after a major time change. Otherwise I don't take them. It's the dear old Frost drawl which has always been here, and will always be here. I haven't noticed any descent into incoherence."

"In your book about interviewing Nixon [first published as I Gave Them a Sword in 1978; the updated version, Frost/Nixon, appeared in paperback on Friday] you say that: 'To support his policies during volatile times, Nixon made some questionable judgments.' That reminded me of a phrase the British sportswriter David Lacey used in another context, namely: 'This is a bit like saying that Bill Sykes was a fundamentally decent man who had his moods.' It's pretty generous to Richard Nixon, that line, isn't it?"

"Yes. Well... I tried to give Nixon what credit was due. I remember how, at his funeral, somebody suggested that 'one isolated event' shouldn't affect our view of him. That was rubbish. There was a pattern of anti-democratic behaviour at home. Abroad, his record wasn't perfect either... he wasn't good on Chile."

"I'll say."

"Yet his record on race was probably as good as any president who followed. There were," Frost suggests, "two Nixons: Good Nixon and Bad Nixon."

("Apart from the consideration that Frost is much nicer," Clive James wrote in 1977, "the two [Frost and Nixon] are remarkably similar. They are both essentially role-players. At a level too deep for speech, they understand each other well.")

"Can I read you another commentator's assessment of the late president; one that you will probably recognise? 'Nixon,' it begins, 'had a unique ability to make his enemies seem honourable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. My best friends have hated Nixon. My mother hates Nixon. My son hates Nixon. I hate Nixon, and this hatred has bonded us as a family. Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I too am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."' That was the writer ' Hunter S Thompson's obituary of Nixon in Rolling Stone magazine. The very fact that Nixon allowed the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (brief and informal) access to him; it shows a certain naiveté, doesn't it? It's like Gordon Brown going for coffee with Chris Morris."

"There were gaps in Nixon's awareness of the world. He probably wouldn't have known much about Thompson. His aides should have done."

"It's equally astounding that Nixon consented to record 24 hours of film with you, ceding all editorial control."

"And we insisted on six hours about Watergate. Otherwise, he'd probably have refused to discuss it."

"Returning to Thompson's Nixon obituary. One passage reads: 'Some people will argue that words like "scum" and "rotten" are wrong for objective journalism. Which is true. But they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective Rules that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He seemed so all-American that he was able to slip through the cracks of objective journalism. You had to get subjective to see Nixon clearly. And the shock of recognition was often painful. He was not only a crook, but a fool. After he quit, he told a TV journalist' – this was you of course – 'that, "If the President does it, that means it's not illegal."' And yet this is the same man whose Christmas party you hosted, at the White House, in 1970. Part of you seems to empathise with Nixon to an extent some would find uncomfortable."

"In 1970," Frost replies, "it was an honour for a Brit to do the Christmas entertainment at the White House. This man was commonly respected at that point, as president of the United States. He was not then indicted for anything."

"You say Nixon was commonly respected in 1970. But when was it that, after he'd been accused of running a (legal but secret) political slush fund, he made that broadcast about having been given that sweet cocker spaniel called Checkers? That speech makes me want to throw up every time I hear it. What year was that?"

"Well, that was much earlier."

"1952, wasn't it?"

"But it wasn't a crime. Anybody would have said yes to an invitation to the White House in 1970."

This is a suggestion that would have had some Nixon observers, Hunter S Thompson among them, choking on their Chivas Regal. The secret bombing of Cambodia was authorised at the end of April 1970. The resulting protests involved the killing, on 4 May, of four students at Kent State University in Ohio by state troopers; deaths that, some felt, Nixon handled with a little too much sang-froid.

"What," Frost asks, "was the point of your ..."

"That you empathised more with Richard Nixon than some could have managed."

"I think that suggestion is disproved by my interview with Nixon. At certain moments I may have empathised with him – somewhat. I never sympathised with him because, at the time I was doing those interviews, there were about 30 people in prison for doing things he had asked, or ordered, them to do. On occasions you could empathise."

"Empathise with what?"

"I suppose with the way that Good Nixon was swamped by Bad Nixon. I once wrote that he was a sad man who wanted to be great. And there was tragedy in that."

Tragedy, empathy: either state, as any Shakespeare enthusiast will tell you, requires a degree of identification with the subject. I can imagine that, with his church background, the broadcaster might easily relate to the concept of Good Frost/Bad Frost. It's harder to see how Sir David would identify with the condition of "a sad man who wanted to be great" (with the exception, that is, of the last five words of that phrase). As a young man, his unbridled ambition was a source of scorn from some contemporaries. He was, as he once told the writer Gordon Burn, "not driven, but flown".

David Paradine Frost was born in Tenterden, Kent, on 7 April 1939. His father Wilfred was a Methodist preacher. Physically, he more closely resembles his mother, Mona, from whom he inherited his formidable stamina. His two sisters both applied themselves to the family's philanthropic tradition: Jean married a missionary doctor who moved to Nigeria; Margaret was a children's nurse. Jean and Margaret are older than David by 16 and 14 years respectively, so he was subject to the same kind of expectations as an only son. He spent his boyhood in Gillingham, Kent, then Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.

"You preached yourself, didn't you? After seeing Billy Graham perform in Haringey?"

"I was a lay preacher for two years. Just before I went to Cambridge."

"Can you recall your sermons?"

"I remember one," Frost replies, "that was quite good. It was based on the song 'Ol' Man River.' The line I used was, er..."

"Darkies all work on de Mississippi?"

"No."

"Tired of livin' and scared of dyin'?"

"That was it."

"Not very biblical, is it?"

"No. In the sermon, I reversed it: 'Scared of livin' and tired of dyin.'"

At Cambridge, he edited the magazine Granta, and appeared in Footlights productions. He bonded with Peter Cook, who was in the year ahead of him. Once he'd gone into television, Frost generated resentment in some members of Beyond The Fringe, the comedy review conceived by Robert Ponsonby and established by Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Cook was especially vitriolic. The charge, repeatedly expressed in Private Eye, was generally one of plagiarism, especially when That Was the Week That Was took off on UK television in 1962, while the cast of Beyond the Fringe were performing on stage in New York.

"The Bubonic Plagiarist – or There's Methodism in His Badness", one Private Eye headline read. "After his latest [That Was the Week That Was] show," the story claimed, "400 people rang the BBC: three in favour, four against, and 393 to say they wrote the script."

"I was much more closely involved in all aspects of That Was the Week That Was than some concede," says Frost.

"Peter Cook once said: 'The only time I have disliked David Frost is the period when he became inflated to an outrageous degree.' Which years do you think he was referring to?"

"I don't know. There was that brief rivalry when he was in America."

"It got quite bitter, didn't it? An anonymous satirist alleges, in the archives, that you 'cheapened' what Beyond the Fringe did."

"They were jealous because TW3 was a national institution. When Peter rescued me from drowning in his pool, he said he had to, or people would assume he'd pushed me in."

"Saving your life was the only act he ever regretted, isn't that what he said?"

"That was Alan Bennett's joke, at Peter's funeral. It was a good gag, but it wasn't Peter's. I was at his last birthday party, shortly before he died."

In January 1966 Frost gave a public display of his networking ability when he hosted a breakfast at the Connaught Hotel in London. Guests included Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Robert Maxwell and Lords Longford, Chalfont and Soper. It was possibly the first demonstration by a broadcaster of the now-commonplace idea that you could, as someone said, "blend all celebrities into the same dream".

Frost's resilience was never more sternly tested than during the period of three years, beginning in 1969, when he was making five TV shows a week in New York for the Westinghouse network, and three a week for LWT, the company he had co-founded in 1967. On the US chat show, which ran until 1972, he entertained stars such as Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Groucho Marx. In Britain, he pioneered the technique of audience participation; as early as 1967, he had eviscerated the crooked Sri Lankan financier, Emil Savundra, to cheers from his studio audience. The footage of Frost's bravura performance is compulsive viewing, even if, every time I see it, I can't help being reminded of that alternative proverb: "Never kick a man when he's down? Name me a better time."

For all of the drama of that confrontation, and despite his many less hysterical encounters on his British Sunday-morning shows, between 1993 and 2005, the presenter's most famous single achievement remains his collision with Nixon, recorded over 11 gruelling sessions.

"John – now Lord – Birt was with you during the filming. Was he vital to the process?" '

"He was."

"Am I right in thinking that he was sent over to New York, to interview you for World In Action, in late 1969 or early 1970? Conspiracy theorists have suggested that the fact that no programme was ever broadcast was connected with Birt's move to LWT (where he produced The Frost Programme) in 1971. This unproven tale (widely recounted by John Birt's many enemies when he was BBC director-general) has it that Birt asked you something that made you break down in tears, at which point they stopped filming. Is there even a shred of truth in this? Did John Birt ever interview you in New York?"

"Er... I think he did. But I don't know what happened to the documentary. I was told that it was never made because it was deemed too favourable to me. The rest is all fiction."

"So you didn't break down in tears?"

The idea that he, too, suffered a "Nixon moment" under questioning is, Frost says, pure invention.

"Did you know Birt before he came to interview you in New York?"

"No."

"Why would World in Action [at that time a hard-nosed investigative programme] be making a favourable show about you?"

"I don't know. Maybe it wasn't very favourable, but they thought it was. And favourable to a rival company. Because Granada and LWT were theoretically colleagues, but also bitter rivals. That may have been the problem."

"This interview took place in a hotel, didn't it? Do you recall the conversation?"

"I can't remember where it was. I don't remember any details at all."

"Did you recruit John Birt to LWT?"

"No."

I ask if Sir David will get Lord Birt to call me and lay this spiteful gossip to rest once and for all. A few days after our first meeting, Sir David calls to say "John has decided to take a holiday from doing interviews."

"A holiday? How long? A fortnight? Twenty years?"

"I think John's enjoying his privacy. He refers you to pages 106-108 of his autobiography."

In this section of his 2002 memoirs, The Harder Path, Birt states that World in Action had been motivated to interview Frost by the perception that "He had betrayed his satirical heritage; he had signed up with the mighty when he should have kept his distance." The programme, Birt explains, was intended to investigate Private Eye allegations that "David had abused his position as a founder of LWT to win preferential deals to supply programmes from his privately owned company."

"I interviewed David at the Algonquin Hotel in New York," Birt goes on, "and put to him the allegations of impropriety, which he vigorously denied. We had no evidence to sustain them, so the interview fell flat." Frost, he says, opened all his files to World in Action, and absolutely no impropriety was found. "Our film was a damp squib with no edge. I learnt a lesson from this that I would never forget," Birt concludes. "Allegations had to be sustainable."

In The Harder Path, Birt also explains how he was approached about moving from Granada to LWT in 1971.

"I received a call from David Frost... Would I consider moving to LWT to produce his next series? The circumstances in which I had met Frost – the aborted World in Action on him – had been uncomfortable for me [and] trying for David. I was surprised and uneasy at his approach. I had been persuaded, however, that Frost had done nothing wrong... in addition to the Frost series, LWT offered me dramas and documentaries to direct, and a big pay rise."

In the 1960s and early-1970s, the late Ned Sherrin remarked, the broadcaster's personal life was "like a Feydeau farce: I don't know how he got away with it." When I read out a list of old flames, including actresses Janette Scott, Diahann Carroll and Carol Lynley, and model Karen Graham, and ask which ones he proposed to, Frost looks genuinely confused. Perhaps he's just a little uneasy revisiting what some ex-girlfriends might describe as Bad Frost's past.

"You must have broken a lot of hearts back then."

"I don't know. The 1960s was a perfect time, in many ways, in terms of your private life."

"You mean the contraceptive pill, penicillin, and no Aids?"

"Exactly. I had a marvellous time. And, hopefully, so did they."

"It all sounds a bit unhygienic."

"I totally agree. With your admirable concern for my hygiene."

"You came to marital bliss fairly late, in 1983." (Frost and Carina now have homes in Chelsea and Hampshire; their three sons are at Eton.) A first, 17-month marriage to Lynne Frederick, Peter Sellers' widow, which ended in 1982, goes unmentioned in Frost's Who's Who entry. "Referring to Carina, you've described discovering the perfect spouse as like finding 'love at 17th sight': I couldn't help wondering if there was a digit missing in that number."

"You mean, at 70th sight?"

"I was thinking 170th. Would that be nearer the mark?"

"As Nick Clegg said, or rather didn't say, I won't put a number on it. I was lucky in that I was able to play the field, then have children when I wanted them. I was 43 when I married and 44 when I had children."

In late 2003, Carina was found unconscious at their London home after taking an overdose of painkillers.

"You have emphasised that was an accident. But did the experience make you reflect on the amount of work you were doing?"

"Not really. All I would say is that, extraordinarily, it made us closer than ever."

Though his life may be less frenetic now than in 1970, one thing that has never changed, I suggest, is his passionate commitment to the work ethic.

"People might refer to my Methodist background: 'that feeling that you have a duty not to waste time; to use your talents to the full."

"Use your talents, OK, but with a view to what? I can see how your father, a church minister, felt he mustn't waste a second when he could be helping the poor, comforting the sick or saving souls. But – and I'm not seeking to diminish your overall contribution to television – why would you worry about not applying your full energy to Through the Keyhole? That's something you'd do for amusement, presumably. Or money."

"Or fun."

"Fame?"

"Fame is never the target."

"What is?"

"Well the target... the target... is to do with doing something that you enjoy and believe in. That's the ideal. Then you can be pretty much genuine all the time."

"You've been here today promoting a joint venture between Sky TV and the National Trust. What drew you to this? Cash?"

"Not really. The National Trust is a unique institution that does a great deal of good. To watch these shows on Sky, in HD, will be fantastic."

"It's funny to hear you say that; I mean, aren't you the man who managed to skewer Rupert Murdoch more effectively than anyone in television history?" (It was the first colour programme on ITV in 1969, just after the Australian had bought The News of the World.)

"That was, I have to say, a rousing programme. He tried not to give an inch, but of course I knew all of the stories much better than he did."

"And now?"

"We've got to know each other a bit. But I don't think he'd rush to do another interview."

Frost's snug relationship with the great and the good is typified by the story that he once asked an aide of George Bush Senior to "have him call me at home".

He does not believe that power necessarily corrupts. "I think," he tells me, "that political office can enable a person to realise their potential."

"Who are you thinking of?"

A long pause.

"George Bush Senior."

"Pardon?"

"I said 'Senior'."

"I know."

Positions of power – corrupting or not – have a habit of finding you out, eventually. What are Frost's own weaknesses?

"If I had a serious fault, I don't think I'd advertise it. I'd say something like..."

"Evasiveness?"

"Punctuality."

"I don't know if you can call punctuality a character defect. Unpunctuality is easily fixed in a way that immodesty, say, is not."

"Whether I do or I don't have a serious weakness," Frost repeats, amiably, "there's none I want to go public with."

"Some would argue that you've abandoned hard-hitting social commentary and become over-impressed by wealth, privilege and titles; that you enjoy the company of people who are – how should I put this – rolling in it. People with yachts."

"Not yachts. I'm not mad on yachts. Or water. I tend to drown."

"Mansions?"

"Well I do think that, over time, your technique of interviewing changes... it's pointless to get hostile with people, if you don't have a smoking pistol; you shut them up rather than opening them up."

"I wasn't thinking about interview technique, so much as the people you choose to knock around with. Your enemies might say that, if your life was Lord of the Rings, you have become not Gandalf but Gollum."

"I'm not conscious of having many enemies. Maybe that's being Polyanna. It doesn't worry me."

"I've read a discussion you had with Billy Graham, where you agree on the possibility of an afterlife, and debate whether Beethoven will be there. I have to admit that on the train, coming here, I sketched out these two seating plans for the banquet in the great hereafter. I was imagining that it's, say, a hundred years from now. So we're both comfortably dead. I've placed you at Table B with (friends and acquaintances past or present) Prince Charles, Sir James Goldsmith, Margaret Thatcher, Andrew Lloyd Webber, (the late publisher) Lord Hamlyn, a couple of Rothschilds and Princess Diana. Now here at Table A – I show Frost the drawing – I've got another group, this time of your earlier associates. This is the table that, given the chance, I would be trying to gatecrash: Willie Rushton, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Humphrey Lyttelton and Tom Lehrer. Given that this is eternity, I don't think it will be long before you're with us. Because the conversation will be better. And because this will be a place where rank and wealth no longer have any meaning. That last remark, I admit, may be worth a punch in the mouth."

"No, I think it's a very interesting postulate. Who's on my table again?" (I repeat the names.)

"Well you've got a bit of wealth on your table too, come on. Michael has done very well."

"But Michael Palin's achievements are not defined by money. You know what I'm saying. You'd be over in five seconds, shooting the breeze with Humphrey Lyttelton and Willie Rushton. I know you would."

Frost laughs. "Well I loved both of them, it's true. But," – he returns to Table B – "I love a lot of these people, too. I mean... I think that, er, there is a sense in which friendship happens to you rather than you actually seek it."

"Because of what you're drawn to."

"In part. It's also the people you come into contact with. If it's royalty, it may be through things that one has done for The Prince's Trust. Andrew Lloyd Webber... we have worked together."

"You like his music?"

"I love it."

"You and Billy Graham weren't sure if you'd be able to hear Beethoven in paradise. I have to be straight with you: if Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem is playing in heaven, I'm out of there. Do you think that piece of music will be listened to by anybody, in a hundred years' time? Apart from blood relatives, obviously."

"I don't know about the Requiem, but I do think Phantom of the Opera. And some of the other works in his canon."

A conversation that was supposed to take 90 minutes continues over a glass of wine in the bar of the Castle Hotel, Downham Market, and then on the train to London. Frost's conversation is never – to use a phrase he used sarcastically, to describe what he'd hoped for from Nixon – a "cascade of candour". But he is amusing, generous in spirit, and never boring. On the London train, he chooses an empty coach in standard class in preference to the "mingy" seats in first; an adjective, I tell him, that recalls what a Concorde steward once said to him: "I'm sorry..."

The broadcaster completes the phrase: "... it's caviar again, Mr Frost."

He reminisces about past interviewees, including John Lennon. "I remember saying to him that, when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, if people had said "peace and love" to him, it wouldn't have done much good. Lennon said, 'No, but what if they had been saying it to him from the moment he was born?' That was wonderful."

Another of his favourites was Noël Coward. "I asked him, 'What sort of a child were you?' He said: 'When paid constant attention, loveable. When not, a pig."

Recalling one of his most recent interviewees, Sir Alex Ferguson, he says: "I was just knocked out by him. By how impressive he was; by his irony at his own expense; by his tremendous compassion and his imagination. These are things you just don't usually see. I mean... he even knew I was an Arsenal supporter. And he still talked to me."

When we reach King's Cross and I watch Frost wander off with his chauffeur, it occurs to me – if I can strike a subjective note for a moment – how well age suits him, and how much I would have liked to listen to him a bit more. And that if there is, as he believes, an afterlife, then the party at Table A won't quite be complete until Good Frost has come over, and pulled up his chair.

'Frost/Nixon' opens in cinemas on 9 January 2009.

Sir David Frost is supporting High Definition Britain, a campaign by Sky and the National Trust to bring the nation closer to the great British outdoors. Ten of the most captivating views will be shown in High Definition on Sky ArtsHD