Sir David Frost who died aboard the Queen Elizabeth of an apparent heart attack at 74 was a giant presence on television for half a century.
He actually reinvented TV twice -- first by making it a perfect medium to satirize current events and world affairs with his landmark TW3 (That Was The Week That Was) program and then with his landmark interviews of the famous and the infamous, most notably former President Richard Nixon.
Frost was smart, incisive, enormously well-informed, inquisitive, wordily and exceptionally well spoken -- all without being not the least bit pompous nor presumptuous.
And that's the key, we suppose. Frost was very human. His reactions were there for all of us to see. And yet at the same time he had the perfect personality for television (and for a TV interviewer) because a part of him always remained hidden. He was always somewhat restrained. In the face of it all, as he took on hot-button topics and questioned hot personalities, he remained cool. And as the late TV guru Marshall MacLuhan pointed out, TV is a decidedly cool medium. The aptly-named Frost was perfect for this detached though nonetheless probing medium.
And he loved TV. It was his life.
Frost was that rare master of the medium who seemed to be able to do everything. He was a journalist, a writer, an entertainer, a producer/businessman, a broadcaster and a larger-than-life personality.
But what better way to summarize Frost's impact than to have him comment (on television) himself in an interview about interviews from BBC This Week in 2012:
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