Back to the Origins

"What do you get when you cross a home movie camera with a French Revolution? A camera that cuts everybody's head off." That is a "crossing" joke, one of the standard bits of yet another TV talk show, this one chaired by David Frost, out of Britain. Clearly, his crossing gags don't travel all that well, but everything else about The David Frost Show is doing very nicely. In its third month of syndication by Westinghouse Broadcasting Co., the series is running in 63 U.S. cities, and already rates No. 1 in its time slot (mostly afternoon) in Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Frost himself, both physically and professionally, is what you get when you cross a William F. Buckley Jr. with a Tommy Steele. He is a resourceful interrogator with a vaudevillian stage sense. More important, he has brought the talk show back toward its original purpose. As host, Frost asks questions that make sense, and actually listens to the answers. His guests are people worth hearing out--not just routine talk-show circuit riders plugging their latest movies and books.

Leisurely Ambiance. On show after show, Frost and his guests have dug seriously into the Viet Nam issue.* Last week, in a Moratorium Day special, Frost refereed a heated debate between Bill Buckley ("The youth of America are overwhelmingly on the side of heroism") and Adam Walinsky ("Those facts are as fanciful as your casualty figures"). The studio audience was also rung into the fray--a frequently effective device of the Frost show. Most impassioned of the unscheduled guests was Actress Shelley Winters, who chimed in four times from the front row and once, on the verge of tears, implored the panel: "No matter what facts you gentlemen muster, you have to know that millions of boys and girls tonight, all over the country, are saying, they made a goddamned mess of everything and get us out!"

Another major distinction of the Frost show is that a visitor can spiel on as long as he is compelling, and the host does not feel a constant compulsion to bring in disparate guests to hold his audience. Senator Edmund Muskie soloed for 37 minutes. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.--who rattled off lines like, "I am probably the only living American, black or white, that just doesn't give a damn"--holds the record so far with a run of 39 minutes.

Sometimes the leisurely ambiance lulls a guest into an unexpected revelation. Raquel Welch insisted that the brain is "a very erogenous zone." Young Actress Anjelica Huston conceded that her father, John Huston, should never have cast her in A Walk with Love and Death. She found herself "no good, awful. There's so many young girls waiting for the opportunity, dying ... I shouldn't have been that selfish." On an earlier show, during a discussion on world overpopulation, Arthur Godfrey leaned over, asked David, "Wanna know a secret?," and then told a nationwide audience that he had himself sterilized. How is one's sex life after the operation? Said Godfrey: "Even better."

Though Frost's interviews run deeper than the shallows of rival talk shows, in deference to ratings realities he does not neglect show biz. He tries to book music acts on a slightly higher plane than the competition (Mel Torme, prerecorded segments of the Rolling Stones), but his comedians are often bottom of the barrel. Appearing this week for the third time is Leonard Barr, a comic whose major credential is that he is Dean Martin's uncle. Frost likes to involve his audience, with mixed results. A prune-eating contest was embarrassing, but when F. Lee Bailey cross-examined studio volunteers as if they were veniremen for a potential murder-trial jury, the result was TV at its best.

False Hank. Whether shallow or deep, Frost maintains a certain Cambridge aplomb (except for his non-U cackle of a laugh). The son of a Methodist preacher, he went through university on a scholarship, emerged on a dead run. By age 23, he was star of a satirical nightclub revue and a prime mover behind the BBC's That Was the Week That Was. A tepid version of the show, featuring Frost, ran briefly on NBC. Today, at 30, he is a dominant figure in British

TV. As anchorman for ITV, the commercial network, during July's moon-landing coverage, he outrated the BBC. Frost is also a key partner in the consortium controlling Britain's weekend commercial programming.

By dint of a merciless commuting schedule that shuttles him to London every Wednesday and back to New York every Sunday, he produces four British comedy series and stars in two one-hour talk shows. Not even a nasty tumble in a bathtub could stop him last week. He went on with a hank of false hair to hide the four stitches in his scalp. "I shall stick to this pace," he quips, "until I drop dead at 32."

Come December, Frost will take leave of his London talk show to concentrate on the States. With unshakable self-confidence, he obviously sees himself as the Rod Laver of television and would consider success in the U.S. the culmination of his own grand slanr. Westinghouse pays him an estimated $500,000, and a bachelor like Frost can make do on that (his women, he says, "must be beautiful and have done something I respect"). He is unfazed by the fact that other U.S. talk shows conducted by Donald O'Connor, Woody Woodbury and Joan Rivers have gone out of production, and that Merv Griffin and Joey Bishop are in rating jeopardy (see following story).

Frost's public explanation for his invasion of the New York TV jungle is that the U.S. is where the free world's decisions are being made and where political involvement is taken for granted. "In England," he says, "very few issues are still to be ascertained. In America, the verdict is still in the making." Furthermore, he says, he seeks to raise U.S. television coverage of those issues to a higher level. The networks, he feels, "always underestimate the American public. The great danger in TV is not programs that arouse people to fury or offense but those that do not arouse the people to fury or offense." Besides, he adds, "I can't see anywhere else where the grass is greener."

* By contrast, CBS's Merv Griffin asked Theodore Sorensen the obvious how-are-we-going-to-get-out question, and let him get away with the answer: "Boats."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.