David Frost vs., Episode 1: The Beatles (Paradine Productions, White Horse Pictures, SKY Studios, MS-NBC, originally aired April 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, May 26) my husband Charles and I watched two quite interesting TV shows together, the first episode of the mini-series David Frost vs. and the 1967 movie The Dirty Dozen. I’m a bit surprised at the title given to the six-part TV miniseries on Frost, David Frost vs., because David Frost was never known as a particularly combative interviewer. Indeed, when it was announced in 1977 that he would be doing the first (and, as it turned out, only) interviews with Richard Nixon between Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency in 1974 and his death 20 years later, Frost was considered too much of a lightweight to give Nixon the intensive grilling a lot of people disappointed by his successor Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon wanted. Frost wrote a memoir of the process by which the Nixon interviews happened called “I Gave Them a Sword,” from a remark Nixon made during the interviews to the effect that his involvement in the Watergate cover-up had given his long-time Democratic enemies in Congress the weapon with which to remove him from power, in which he detailed the elaborate negotiations that brought about the Nixon interviews and the research team he assembled to prep him on what questions he should ask Nixon.

The first episode of the David Frost vs. mini-series (of six in all) was called David Frost vs. The Beatles. It made the point that David Frost and The Beatles both emerged on the British cultural scene in the same year, 1962: Frost as the host of a weekly TV series satirizing the news called That Was the Week That Was and The Beatles with their first two singles, “Love Me Do” b/w “P.S., I Love You” and “Please Please Me” b/w “Ask Me Why.” It began with Frost’s first-ever interview with a Beatle on his later talk show, and the Beatle he got was Paul McCartney. It’s certainly an interesting clip, especially given Paul’s musings about his future, in which (among other things) he mulls over the prospect of an early retirement. It’s especially amazing given that Paul has never retired; he’s still making music, releasing records and even giving live concerts into his 80’s. Later there’s a clip of John Lennon and George Harrison from a 1967 Frost show with the Maharishi Maheah Yogi during the time in which The Beatles had embraced Transcendental Meditation, and Frost was tolerant with both the Beatles and the Maharishi. The Maharishi spoke in an annoying sing-song voice (there are plenty of East Indians who became proficient in English as a second language during and even after the British colonization, but the Maharishi wasn’t one of them) and it’s obvious that he was using The Beatles as a tool with which to push his own business.

When Frost interviewed the three of them they had just got back from a week-long meditation marathon in Bangor, Wales (during which they learned of the death of their manager, Brian Epstein) and they would go on to spend an entire month at the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, during which they would write most of the songs for the so-called “White Album.” The Beatles became disillusioned with the Maharishi during their stay in Rishikesh; Ringo said it was like being in a summer holiday camp and John, noticing the way the Maharishi was cruising Mia Farrow, said, “Oh, he’s just a man after all,” and wrote the song “Sexy Sadie” caricaturing him. George got more serious about Indian spirituality, departing the Maharishi and adopting Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, as his new guru; at one time the two biggest financial contributors to Hare Krishna were a successful Indian car dealer and George Harrison. As for the Maharishi, with The Beatles unwilling to put together a tour that would include the Maharishi lecturing and a rock performance, he got The Beach Boys to tour with him instead – a financial disaster for both parties that was canceled in mid-tour. John’s next interview with David Frost was with Yoko Ono in early 1969 to publicize what he called his commercial advertising campaign for peace. In between he presented The Beatles performing “live” before an in-studio TV audience and doing the song “Hey Jude,” and the intertitles for this show note ruefully, “This was the greatest performance The Beatles ever gave on TV. It was also their last.”

John and Yoko again appeared on Frost’s American TV show in 1972 to promote their radical politics and perform the song “Attica State,” which got a hostile reaction from members of the audience in the back of the theatre. Two people, a man and a woman, started calling out that however the prisoners at Attica State Prison had been treated during the brutal suppression of their prison riot in 1971, they were still dangerous criminals and shouldn’t be whitewashed the way they felt John and Yoko were doing in their song. Frost, as he often did with hostile members of his audience, invited them to come to the front of the theatre and debate them directly. The credits noted the irony that when John Lennon was murdered in New York City on December 8, 1980, his killer, Mark David Chapman, ended up as a prisoner at Attica State. The show made the bizarre claim that David Frost was the only TV host who dared to have John and Yoko appear at the peak of their radical political phase. In fact, John and Yoko were invited to co-host Mike Douglas's show for one week from February 14-18, 1972 and were permitted to pick the other guests. There’s even a documentary film, Daytime Revolution (2024), about the week John and Yoko co-hosted the Douglas show. Frost’s last interview with a Beatle was with the one who’d started it all: Paul McCartney, in 2012, just a year before Frost himself died. That clip is posted on YouTube and one commentator, Mark Hildebrand, wrote, “Wow! An interview where the subject is allowed to express himself completely without being interrupted every 30 seconds. Terrific interview, thank you.” There’s a kind of “two old warriors reminiscing about the old days” feeling about this interview that made a nice postscript to the show.