Comcast-owned Sky‘s Sky Documentaries and its streaming service Now will give viewers a front-row seat for an exploration of recent history and topics that have shaped it, along with big names that played key roles in it — all through the eyes of legendary journalist and interviewer David Frost. That is the promise of new documentary series David Frost vs, which will start airing in the U.K. on Sunday, Feb. 23, with MSNBC set to air it starting on Sunday, April 27.
“Pulling from an archive of over 10,000 interviews recorded over more than 50 years, David Frost vs centers on era-defining David Frost interviews, unveiling a fresh perspective on today through the battles of yesterday,” according to a synopsis. Frost became a household name around the world for his TV interviews with former U.S. President Richard Nixon. “Seen through Frost’s eyes, we encounter the mid-to-late 20th century as a furnace of change and uncertainty that continues to permeate current affairs.”
The six-part series of 45-minute episodes was spearheaded by David Frost’s son Wilfred, who works for Sky News and is also a contributor for CNBC, NBC News, and MSNBC. The show is a Sky Studios production, with Paradine Productions, led by Frost as CEO, and White Horse Pictures serving as co-producers. Paradine was David Frost’s middle name.
The series draws from Frost’s archive of more than 10,000 era-defining interviews, many of which have not been seen for a generation. The archive footage is supplemented by interviews “with an extraordinary list of new contributors, including Michael Sheen, Liam Neeson, Joanna Lumley, Khalilah Ali, and Tony Blair who help uncover Frost’s incredible life and career as one of the nation’s most renowned television hosts and journalists,” the synopsis highlights.
The series is directed by Matthew Hill, Liz Mermin, and Francis Longhurst. Executive producers are Danielle Peck for Sky Studios, Frost for Paradine Productions, and Nigel Sinclair and Cassidy Hartmann for White Horse Pictures.
The first episode centers around Frost’s 16 interviews with The Beatles and the rise of Brits to U.S. and global fame. His interviews with Muhammad Ali and Jane Fonda, and “the growing sense of protest against the Nixon administration,” will be the focal points of episodes 2 and 3, respectively.
The other episodes, set to come out later this year, focus on Nixon, the dark side of fame, centered around Elton John, and a final episode that was originally set to explore the Cold War but changed to a focus on revisiting the “Israel-Palestine conflict through the countless interviews he did,” including with Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and others.
“My jaw was just on the floor thinking I thought this was only happening today, but we have been through it before,” Frost told a recent series preview event in London about his experience watching material in the archive. “On some things, you are sort of depressed … because you are still facing similar questions today as we were then, and it’s wrong that we haven’t progressed.”
Could there be more episodes in the future? “I don’t know. I’m kind of spent,” Frost admitted. “It’s been an enormous amount of work, but the single greatest privilege of my professional life.”
Frost talked to THR about developing the series, its stars and goals, and what he learned about his father in making it.
How long have you wanted to do this and worked on this series? And how much material did you have access to?
My aim of doing this started soon after Dad died, which is over a decade ago now, which is crazy to think. My brothers and I collectively felt we had a duty to celebrate our father’s legacy. And he and mom gave us so much that we really wanted to repay him by celebrating how brilliant he was as a broadcaster. And that has taken quite quite a long time. And after he died, obviously, there were a lot of other priorities and we were trying to come together as a family. And then my brother died too, which delayed things.
But in general, what has filled that time has been me trying to buy back rights, recover and restore lost footage, and get us into a place where this was even possible. I have the archive, digitized, and cataloged. I control about 75 to 80 percent of his interviews now. We were in a position where we could do this by sort of 2019, and my view has always been that the content is so brilliant and powerful that the right opportunity would materialize and the right partners would come along.
That’s a really key thing. Yes, it’s an archive documentary. But it is not a normal archive documentary, because we have purposely selected the conversations that Dad had, which will feel unbelievably relevant today. And they are also clearly focused on the big, blockbuster names. If we weren’t in this controlling position of his over 10,000 interviews, it would be prohibitively expensive. If I license clips of Ali or Elton or The Beatles to others, it costs $10,000 a minute or so. So I think our directors have been so overjoyed that they can pull from these 16 Beatles interviews, 12 with Ali, 10 with Elton or whoever else it might be and be able to use as much of it as they want. So we’re not restrained on using the very best blockbuster quality of the archive. And what we are using is all deeply, deeply relevant today.
How are the episodes set up? Is there an order to them? And any connections to today’s topics and trends?
There are six episodes. Three of them are being released starting [in October], and three more will come in 2025, probably beginning in October as well. But that is to be confirmed. The series is broadly chronological. What comes out this month will cover from the early ’60s to 1975, and there’s a bit of overlap in the chronology, but essentially, it’s broadly chronological.
While each episode will, on the surface, focus more on one of Dad’s guests than others – The Beatles for episode 1, Muhammad Ali for episode 2, and Jane Fonda for episode 3 – the defining characteristic for each episode is a theme, a theme that has been chosen because of its striking relevance to today. It’s funny how you asked about comparisons to today. This was a debate during the development period, a fantastic debate we had often: “Will we need to be explicit about the comparisons to today or not?” I’ve always felt you don’t need to that. It’s so patently obvious. And actually, the great beauty of this project is that the viewer can make their own judgments from from what they watch.
Any examples?
One of those examples is the Muhammad Ali, race in America episode. We obviously use our lead as a way to bring in conversations Dad had with civil rights, legends, and racist leaders. So, with Governor Wallace, he had a fabulous 1968 interview. And then on the other side, Shirley Chisholm, the first black Congresswoman of America, Jesse Jackson, Jesse Owens, Huey Newton. And if you look at the debates they were having, then in the late ’60s, early ’70s in America, and you’ve spent any time in America, as I have during the last five years, you can’t fail but watching and having your jaw on the table and thinking that these are conversations that are still going on today.
It’s not for us to dictate what the viewer thinks about that. We want the viewers to make their own conclusions. The only thing I’m very confident in is that at multiple times, throughout the entire series, people will be thinking: “wow, this is all going on today.”
I think this is particularly pronounced with the Nixon interviews and the Nixon administration as a whole. This episode is coming out in October, just before the U.S. presidential election. Central, of course, to the whole Nixon debate, which Dad himself was at the heart of, was the question: does somebody who has broken the rules, or broken the law, even deserve to be president? And that is a question we will be grappling with as we approach the election in November.
What else do you think viewers will find out about your Dad when watching?
He understood that the best interviews are when you make them about the interviewee. He was an observer or, as he would say, a catalyst for the conversation of the protagonists of the most important parts of the 20th century. But he did have a front-row seat as the protagonist outlined these key moments in history, and that’s what we’re trying to do with this documentary series – bring the viewer to sit alongside Dad as he had that front-row seat as these moments in history unfolded.
Have you licensed parts of the David Frost library to others?
We do license some clips. But anything that I’ve thought over the last decade might one day feature in this series I haven’t licensed to other people. I’ve held it back. Most of it did air in the first place, although there are some clips that never did for various reasons. So they have never been seen. And most of it is unseen for a generation. I think that will give a great feel. Even if you’re a Beatles aficionado, I think there’ll be stuff that you’ve never seen – unless you were there on that day in 1967, when it first aired.
Do you have an example of something that didn’t air and why?
There are, for example, amazing what I put in inverted commas “off-camera” moments where clearly they’re on camera, because we’ve got the footage, but they weren’t part of what would have probably been a live broadcast back then in the ’60s and ’70s. So you see Dad chatting to them before they come out of a break or getting them relaxed before the interview or laughing with them afterwards. And the cameras are still rolling, and the mic is still hot. You really get great insights into the personal relationship Dad had.
I would say one of the key and often overlooked skills he had was to make people feel relaxed and at home as if the cameras weren’t there, so they could really open up.
There are also some interviews that weren’t live. I think possibly the best interview Dad ever did with Elton was for PBS. The raw tape is an hour and 25 minutes, but what went out was 55 minutes. And that only ever aired in the U.S., never in the U.K. There are 30 minutes there that literally have never seen the light of day. And it’s amazing as time passes how different things become relevant or irrelevant. We interviewed Elton, so he’s going to be reliving some of those moments with us, and that adds great depth to the project.
Talk a bit more about your father’s style as a TV interviewer and beyond?
Clearly, he was a showman, too. He was a great performer and started his career in satire and comedy, and he was made for television. I really believe that. But when it came to the interviews, he knew that the interview was about his guests.
How did Sky come on board?
Finding a partner who shared my vision was always important for me. I did have a few opportunities to do a one-off 90 minutes on Dad. And just like Dad knew that the interview is about the guests, I always felt that this series needed to be about these moments in history, and not about Dad specifically. With that in mind, I wanted to do an episodic approach where we went through 50 years of history via Dad’s front row seat to the big moments as they unfolded as opposed to a David Frost biopic. Of course, over six episodes, we have time to drop in parts of Dad’s storyline as that intertwines with these moments.
It was always important to me to find a partner who wants and can do this big, immersive blockbuster six-parter, as opposed to just 60 or 90 minutes on Dad himself. With the latter, you have the issue of being stuck in only one minute here and two minutes there of each guest. But in this approach and format, we can be much more immersive.
And I will just say that both White Horse Pictures and Sky Studios have been phenomenal. And Sky Studios has frankly become the best place to make top-quality content in the U.K. and has shown that with all sorts of projects they invest and get the best content.
Anything else you’d like to highlight?
It’s been a lot of work and quite emotional for me. It’s been a total privilege. As his Dad’s son, I could not be prouder, but as a journalist as well. This is a privilege. It’s an important job that we deliver this right because these are some seminal moments, important moments in history, and seminal conversations that Dad had with the key players, and we’ve got to get it right. I’m confident that we have, and I can’t wait to share it with everyone.
