Farewell then, David Frost

I'm old enough to remember David Frost when he first appeared on TV in That Was The Week That Was (TW3 we called it) in the early 60s.

That programme launched the careers of many TV personalities and finished the careers of a few politicians and others. It's amazing to see how many famous names got their start on TW3: Bernard Levin, Kenneth Cope, Roy Kinnear, Willie Rushton, Frankie Howerd, Millicent Martin. The scriptwriters were just as famous: John Betjeman, John Bird, Graham Chapman, John Cleese,Peter Cook, Roald Dahl, Richard Ingrams, Gerald Kaufman, Frank Muir, Denis Norden, Bill Oddie, Dennis Potter, Eric Sykes, Kenneth Tynan, Keith Waterhouse. Mind you, it's worth remembering all this was happening in the age of women's lib and all that. There's not much sign of female input in these programmes.

This was the first TV satire programme and boy, could Frost dish the dirt. My parents' generation were shocked and delighted when he beamed into their livingroom on a Saturday night. Things they had suspected were going on were exposed live on TV - and on the BBC. Crooks like Savundra and Rachmann thought they could bluff their way through interviews with Frost and lived to regret their decision to appear. Maybe the biggest scandal exposed by TW3 was the Profumo Affair. The film Scandal is based on this and is well worth a look. 

I lost interest in Frost after the Frost-Nixon interviews, when he moved from political analysis to seeing himself as the most important star in his political programmes and then started fronting daft programmes like Through The Keyhole. In the end, his ego was bigger than his career and it wasn't really surprising when Breakfast With Frost programme was taken off the air.

But we owe a great debt, if not to Frost, then certainly to TW3: it changed the BBC - Auntie cast off her Victorian corset for good; it encouraged TV programmes like Spitting Image and magazines like Private Eye; and most of all, it allowed the public to start questioning what went on in Westminster and in the financial world. It's just a pity satire is out of fashion. We could do with it now.