Turning the politician into a clown not a good idea

Syndicated to newspapers on 6 January 1968

ONLY A FEW weeks ago I was worrying about the impact of The Frost Programme on the national scene. Was the glib, wisecracking Mr. David Frost really fit for this role of popular Ombudsman that he was rapidly acquiring?

“It is basically a programme that trivialises some of the most sacred and significant issues of the day,” I wrote. “And because it trivialises, because it defuses social dynamite, it reaches the level of receptivity that most people have towards serious events.”

Its success, I claimed, was its ability to reduce the moot serious issues to the level of entertainment and its recogniton of the fact that TV is at its most viewable when it is devoted to the art of embarrassment.

Any implicit warning in these words was certainly not heeded by the Minister of Defence, Mr. Denis Healey, when he decided to submit himself to the Frost treatment.

The resultant confrontation confirmed to the hilt one’s deepest anxieties and fears. Here was trivialisation and embarrassment oozing out of the TV screen like some clammy overspill of burnt porridge at one of Mr. Frost’s famous breakfast parties.

It was clear that Mr. Healey thought that he was in for a nice, cosy chat along the lines that endeared Mr. Frost to to many other senior politicians who had appeared on the programme.

It would appear that the public relations machines of both major parties have come to look upon The Frost Programme as a kind of political launderette.

Politicians slightly soiled by the dirt splattered up for some vicious political fight can enter this telly detergent machine reasonably confident that when he has emerged grey will have been forced out and white forced in, the blue whitener will have done its work and every housewife will be able to tell at a glance how much cleaner he looks.

Massage

Thus when George Brown was being harassed for one of his frequent social gaffes, when Edward Heath’s popularity was at the bottom of the public opinion polls, when Ray Gunter had finished a rough tussle with the dock workers, they wore given the Frost magic massage and emerged more sparkling, more lovable and more humanised than before.

Mr. Healey had also just been through a bad spell of publicity that could have done him little good. He had been represented as one of the Cabinet Ministers who had supported the view that certain arms should be sold to South Africa.

What better way of refurbishing his image than a sensible chat with Mr. Frost, informal, heart-to-heart, non technical about defence.

What be obviously didn’t expect was the low level of debate to which he would be subjected.

He good-humouredly tried to shrug off these palpably silly questions (“Why can’t we get rid of all our armed forces and carry on with 1,000 men for ceremonial duties?” was one of Mr. Frost’s penetrating suggestions) by insisting that they were naive and that Mr. Frost’s research team had not done its homework.

Now there is one area in which interviewers like Mr. Frost are particularly sensitive. They do not like letting the public in on the secret that all their casually delivered questions are the work of backroom boys burrowing about preparing them for the frontman to deliver as if he had himself thought them up.

Mr. Frost would obviously prefer his audience to believe that he himself is the expert, ready with penetrating questions.

This time his team blundered. They had equipped him with a set of erroneous facts and childish queries and Mr. Healey had no recourse but to insist on the futility of Mr. Frost’s exercise.

Reprisal

But Mr Healeys bantering, mocking tone had quite clearly irritated the usually composed interviewer. Almost as a sort of reprisal he began to harry the Defence Minister.

What position did Mr Healey take up on the arms ban to South Africa? Mr. Frost wanted to know. Any first year student of politics could have told Mr. Frost that if the Minister had answered his question he would have broken his oath of secrecy and would have had to resign from the Cabinet immediately.

When Mr. Healey protested, Mr. Frost insisted on an answer. He was the public, he implied, and had a right to know. And anyway hadn’t the Cabinet Office already leaked this information to the Press?

Now things began to get ugly. Mr. Healey suggested Mr. Frost would have to apologise for that remark. Mr. Frost then called upon his audience to let us know what they thought of Mr. Wilson.

And when someone ya-booed that we must be pretty hard up if Mr. Wilson was the best man we could find as Prime Minister, Mr. Frost leaned back with a relieved gesture to confirm that he felt he had won the argument.

All the potential dangers of The Frost Programme were here starkly revealed. The way in which important politicians have to win their popularity as entertainers rather than thinkers or administrators, the low level of discussion in which complex, subtle, marginal issues have to be converted into blunt over-simplifications for the most ignorant voters; the suggestion that politicians who have secrets are devious and suspect, and undemocratic; the assumption that a audience no matter how unscientifically selected and assembled somehow represents “the people.”

No one wants to see political discussion off the air.

TV has a duty to probe for the truth and display politicians under the earnest glare of public scrutiny. There are serious programmes where this is done. The Frost Programme tends to turn them into clowns, puppets, or scapegoats. In the long run, that can be no good for parliamentary democracy.