He wasn’t what you’d call an “eminence grise” of journalism.
The post I wanted to do when I started this morning. Felt I had to dispose of Syria first, which I’ve done more briefly and effectively than the million words I’ve seen written so far. And then there was the (dud) Brizoni underwear bomb, which also had to be dealt with.
Sigh.
Back to David Frost. He’s dead. An opportunity for consideration of the frailties of both cultural and personal memory. Isn’t that more interesting than pounding punditry about the farce American foreign policy has become?
His American obits focused exclusively on his interviews of Richard Nixon, as if that’s what should be engraved on his tombstone. What I remembered too. There was a movie with Anthony Hopkins playing Nixon and someone else playing Frost, and all I knew from the fact of having lived through it was that the movie was a hagiographic fake — of Frost, not Nixon, obviously. And I resented it. A resentment conferred unfairly on Frost in retrospect, in fact vicariously.
Which means that for all my hyper consciousness about the duplicity of the MSM, I am still prey to what the MSM do and by no means immune to their packaging of reality.
[I haven’t looked up his bio because I’m trying to remember what I can remember, not fit memories to facts I never had. Although I’ll make a partial exception later.]
Part of my resentment was that I remembered Frost as a particularly stereotypical Brit presenter. Lower class London accent spiffed up to include concluding T’s and the otherwise missing ends of words generally. Always thought Steve Coogan’s brilliantly cruel spoof of the type in his “Alan Partridge” incarnation was largely if not wholly inspired by David Frost:
Sorry. For a long time Frost had a talk show aired in the United States. He was the Jon Gruden of talk show hosts. Every guest was the greatest, most talented, most wonderful light ever to shine on the celebrity stage. Then, suddenly, when he too had long disappeared from public view (like Alan Partridge), there he was talking oh so earnestly to Richard Nixon with the same clipboard he’d always had to remind him where he was and who he was talking to (usually Marlo Thomas. Fan-TAS-tic!). When did he become Cronkite, Severaid, Brinkley, Murrow, or Lowell Thomas? When it served the purpose of the MSM, that’s when.
Case closed. I revisited my Jon Gruden circus act.
My wife just wanted, quite understandably, to watch a football game without having the experience ruined by her husband. I plead guilty with extenuating circumstances. My impersonation of Jon Gruden is spot on, and most of you would enjoy a few minutes of it, as did my wife the first time she heard it. I draw on my knowledge of the dactylic nature of glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) to imbue my performance with satiric cruelty, which amuses the performer no end and ultimately bores the listener into a coma because once started — just like glossolalia — it just keeps going, impossible to stop.
One can become formulaic in one’s views.
What I remember. The incantational rhetoric of David Frost. Never gave him a second thought. Just another partridge on the wing, flapping rhythmically.
Frost with Nixon was a reason to dismiss a whole life. Which I did when I heard he was dead on the move at the age of 74.
And I was wrong. Not just for what I didn’t know. But for what I’d forgotten. That’s the most discomfiting thing. I knew there was more to David Frost. It was the first thing I’d ever known about him. And I forgot it.
When I was a kid, my dad couldn’t watch the news on TV. Three networks, giant egos pontificating and slanting the news leftward on each. So serious, so sure, so pompously, stultifyingly final. He had only two outlets. a fifteen minute broadcast once a week by Fulton J. Lewis. Which I’ve remembered before. And, when it came along on Channel 12, a bizarre news satire from Britain called “That Was the Week That Was.”
This was actually the first time that the edifice of television news had ever been mocked. Fifty years before there was Jon Stewart, there was TWTWTW, and my dad was a fan. They made fun of everyone, left and right, but my dad loved it anyway because they were puncturing the balloon of swollen journalistic egos. It was finally okay to laugh.
I remembered that because my personal memory is so searching and comprehensive that I couldn’t not remember it. Horseshit. I forgot it until I chanced to see a Monty Python documentary this morning, part one of six, called “The Not Very Interesting Beginnings.” Of the Monty Python troupe in case you were still wondering. I’m not even going to claim serendicity. I think the IFC network knew they were adding a timely bit of biography to a skewed and truncated obit of David Frost.
They go on. And on. They converge on a tosser named David Frost, the negligible commoner who finally put them all together. Go figure.
If so, I thank them. I got it. Without the money-grubbing, nonjournalist, low class opportunist named David Frost, there would never have been a Monty Python Flying Circus. Its upper-upper class cast of three from Cambridge, two from Oxford, and one from America’s boutique Occidental College would never have had the opportunity to write together, gell into a primal cultural force, and knock over every lamp in western civilization’s hotel room.
The sad thing, the truly saddest thing, is that they have no comedic heirs. Comedians today are following their fancied lead, but they are knocking down what has already been knocked down. Now they are trampling on ruins.
We need a new Monty Python. Unafraid to take on political correctness, the nanny state, and glowering totaliarianism. Which means, maybe, we also need a new David Frost to find and unleash that kind of talent on the status quo. Is that why the MSM fail to remember the truly glorious contribution he made? Or are they just too damn dumb to know what happened way back when? I know where my bet is placed. You?
So, God bless David Frost. I will say what I should have said a day ago: Good man. I will miss you.
