Frost was the only person to have interviewed all eight British prime ministers serving between 1964 and 2010 (Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron) and all seven US presidents in office between 1969 and 2008 (Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush). He was a patron and former vice-president of the Motor Neurone Disease Association charity, as well as being a patron of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, the Hearing Trust,[35] East Anglia's Children's Hospices, the Home Farm Trust and the Elton John AIDS Foundation.[36][37][38] After having been in television for 40 years, Frost was estimated to be worth £200 million by the Sunday Times Rich List in 2006,[39] a figure he considered a significant over-estimate in 2011.[10] The valuation included the assets of his main British company and subsidiaries, plus homes in London and the country. In 1968 he signed a contract worth £125,000 to appear on American television in his own show on three evenings each week, the largest such arrangement for a British television personality[6] at the time. From 1969 to 1972, Frost kept his London shows and fronted The David Frost Show on the Group W (U.S. Westinghouse Corporation) television stations in the United States.[21] His 1970 TV special, Frost on America, featured guests such as Jack Benny and Tennessee Williams.[22] In a declassified transcript of a 1972 telephone call between Frost and Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Frost urged Kissinger to call chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer and urge him to compete in that year's World Chess Championship.[23][24] During this call, Frost revealed that he was working on a novel.[24] In 1977 The Nixon Interviews, a series of five 90-minute interviews with former US President Richard Nixon, were broadcast. Nixon was paid $600,000 plus a share of the profits for the interviews, which had to be funded by Frost himself after the US television networks turned down the programme, describing it as "checkbook journalism". Frost's company negotiated its own deals to syndicate the interviews with local stations across the US and internationally, creating what Ron Howard described as "the first fourth network."[25] Frost taped around 29 hours of interviews with Nixon over a period of four weeks. Nixon, who had previously avoided discussing his role in the Watergate scandal which had led to his resignation as President in 1974, expressed contrition saying "I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life".[26][27] Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution Frost was the last person to interview Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah of Iran.[28] The interview took place in Panama in January 1980,[29] and was broadcast by ABC in the United States on 17 January.[30] Frost was an organiser of the Music for UNICEF Concert at the United Nations General Assembly in 1979. Ten years later, he was hired as the anchor of the new American tabloid news program Inside Edition.. He was dismissed after only three weeks, and then-ABC News reporter Bill O'Reilly was recruited as his replacement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frost

• published: 18 Sep 2013
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