Super man of legend

On 13 March 2014 a congregation of 2,000 people, including many of the great and the good, gathered in Westminster Abbey for a memorial service for David Frost, who had died suddenly six months previously while travelling on the Queen Mary to America. During the service a select band, led by the Dean of Westminster, John Hall, retired to Poets’ Corner, sacred to the memory of Keats, Shelley and others of the immortals, where the Prince of Wales laid flowers on a tablet in the floor bearing the illustrious name of Frost. Given that in only a few years’ time Frost’s name, along with many of today’s celebrities, was likely to be forgotten, it might have been better to dedicate the tablet ‘To the Unknown Television Personality’.

Considering that he had never been a poet, and that, unlike many far more deserving than he, he had been fast-tracked, this extraordinary if posthumous feat of Frost’s marked a suitable climax to his career — one which had begun in 1939 in the humble home of a Methodist minister in Tenterden and led to success, fame and fortune on a lavish scale, to a knighthood, a beautiful country house, a titled wife, three fine sons all educated at Eton etc. Didn’t he do well? as his fellow TV knight Sir Brucie might well have observed.

Now comes the icing on the cake in the form of an ‘authorised biography’, rapidly completed in only a few months by an Irish writer and journalist Neil Hegarty. There are signs of haste about the book, so that while it describes at the outset the premature death while jogging of Frost’s eldest son Miles, he is on p. 413 still ‘building his venturecapital enterprise’. No doubt the publisher was more alert than the Church of England to the speed at which TV celebrities fade from view and was anxious not to delay things by altering the text.