David Frost: That Was The Life That Was – his Irish biographer brings us backstage

David Frost died in August 2013, at the age of 74. His life had been lived fully, intensely – and in the public eye, for he was emphatically a television personality, among the first to recognise the possibilities of television as a means of communication, and certainly among the most successful in harnessing and sustaining its possibilities in the course of a 50-year career.

I had a good general understanding of Frost’s story when I was approached to write an authorised biography of his life. He had been a consistent presence in my television-watching experience: there in a surprising variety of guises, over many years. I understood too his early prominence: my parents had often remarked on the significance of Frost’s explosion onto the scene in 1962 at the helm of That Was The Week That Was: they had moved to London in that same year and, like millions of others, had been riveted each Saturday night by the programme’s satiric electricity.

I also knew that with time, Frost had moved to the centre of the British Establishment. His summer garden party was famously a fixture on the London social scene: he boasted a network of powerful friends across the world, and an address book of influential contacts. My task was in part to illuminate these facets of his life: to detail the personalities, explore the anecdotes, examine the nature of power and prominence. But it was my duty also to excavate in the manner of an archaeologist, to dig the ground over, to see what else might be turned up.

And to take the task seriously, for the writing of a life is not something to be regarded lightly. There is a sense of implicit responsibility in the task: to those who knew and loved the subject of all these pages and words and thoughts; to the reader, who is entitled to expect a book of weight and substance; and not least, to David Frost himself. This is someone’s life, a precious individual fact, as well as a public story.

For several years, I had mulled the idea of writing a biography. A theoretical biography: whose biography, I knew not; nor did I have any clear sense how I might settle on a subject or begin to put it together. But the notion attracted me, partly because of its implicit moral weight. My writing has over the years woven fiction and non-fiction. My published work has consisted mainly of history – works on the history of Dublin, then Ireland, then London – with fiction written in parallel, and drawing on other imaginative impulses. Biography is a form of history – the history of a life – and in due course, a biography came my way.

How to find the right starting point? Frost’s position as a personality was certainly a useful entry to the subject, but also a potential pitfall. We tend to know something about personalities – but the reality of the flesh-and-blood figure as a result becomes more difficult to discern. And this was emphatically the case with Frost, who was a man well able to negotiate the virtual world. I soon discovered that he was, ironically, a deeply private man. He fended people off – charmingly, pleasantly – by asking questions, by inexhaustible interest in the lives of others. This interest was genuine – he was a truly engaged man, and this curiosity was a significant factor in his professional success – but it also meant that he didn’t have to say too much about himself. It was a good ploy, and it tended to work.

This private David Frost, I discovered, possessed a deep sense of moral purpose, which can be traced back to his Methodist upbringing. Methodism is a passionate creed: it is evangelical, proselytising, broadcasting; and it is democratic in its instincts, holding that every soul is entitled to God’s grace. The older Frost turned to a rather different form of broadcasting, but the passion and the instinct for democracy, for the widest possible audience – these remained. His taste for a wide variety of vehicles – breakfast television, weighty political shows, the epoch-defining Nixon interviews, the agreeably populist Through the Keyhole – frequently brought carping from television critics, who prefer that TV people remain safely in their separate silos. They missed the essential point that for Frost, television was an expansive, democratising medium – and his job was to bring the best of it to the widest possible range of viewers.

Hermione Lee notes in her book Body Parts: Essays in Life Writing that readers of biography are “greedy, with an insatiable appetite for detail and story”. As a reader, I have always felt this gluttony. I can never have too much everyday detail: what people ate, what they drank, what they wore and where they were when they wore it; and what was going on in the world as they lived their lives. And so I took an interest in David Frost’s diet (plain food, dry white wine, cigars, messy eating habits); and in his clothes (a luxurious cashmere Doug Hayward coat); in the interiors of his houses; in his history of glamorous lovers, who were happy to speak and remember the man they knew; in his sporting habits (football and cricket), and his extensive charitable interests.

I noted too the knocks he had taken. In particular I was interested in the youthful Frost who, as a student at Cambridge in the late 1950s, was disliked by many of his socially elevated peers for being rather too big for his boots. Here was a grammar-school boy of modest background who dared to wear his vast ambition on his sleeve – and who then went on to outstrip these same peers in terms of career, and personal fulfilment. Frost was careful to show no public resentment, but it was not difficult to detect a man in reaction to this early pain, determined to show what he could do and achieve. It was the making of him – but he carried the scars, and it is natural to empathise.

It has long been a truism of biographical work that empathy with the subject is fundamental. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Carlyle wrote that a biographer must “have an open, loving heart”. The dangers of this precept are obvious, for empathy may cloud objectivity. But I find that a discovery of all the influences behind a figure like Frost inevitably produces a kind of understanding that can only be described as empathetic. Such an understanding emerges from the practical skills a biographer must cultivate: to be self-effacing, a good listener, a silent observer of strength and weakness, grief and joy. In order to gather knowledge of David Frost’s life and context, I sought to merit the trust of family and friends, and occasionally to place myself behind Frost’s eyes and see the world as he saw it. Every person’s existence leaves only fragments behind: public and private records, testimonies, anecdotes, voices. My job was to piece together these fragments – carefully, scrupulously – in order to create something that is, once more, a unity, and able to support the weight of a life.

Frost: That Was The Life That Was: The Authorised Biography by Neil Hegarty is published on September 10th by WH Allen, at £25.

@nphegarty