Diary – 29 March 2003

Breakfast with Frost (the actual breakfast, not the programme which precedes it) is usually a rather jolly affair. Uniquely in today’s cost-conscious BBC – where, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a plastic cup of some thin brown liquid called ‘coffee’ and a dusty artefact described as a ‘bun’ – Sir David’s star status entitles him, J.-Lo. style, to accountant-mocking extravagances. Like, for example, the Great British Breakfast Fry-Up, complete with fine napery and waitresses; amazingly, for the sternly non-smoking BBC, heretical ashtrays are scattered everywhere. Sir David is partial to a breakfast cigar or two, which allows us lesser mortals to indulge in a quick drag on a fag once the great man has lit up. You often share the Frost fry-up with guests whose presence alongside your eggs, bacon and black pudding can be a mite disconcerting if you’ve recently insulted them in print or on air. One Sunday I forked uneasily through the scrambled eggs next to a dour-faced Andy Gilchrist of the FBU, whom I’d just described as a donkey – as in ‘lions-led-by-donkeys’ – and Iain Duncan Smith, whom I’d equally recently described as someone whose very presence ‘took the oxygen out of the air’.