The opening of a 1968 Life magazine portrait of David Frost at 28, an enfant terrible and empire builder:

“There is more for England to fret about than the pound, the loss of empire and the damnable decision of her fashion arbiters to lengthen skirts almost to the ankle. There  is also the young man sunk in the ultramodern chair on the preceding page, surrounded by barbed quotes from his new book, The English (Stein and Day), which he wrote with Antony Jay.

There are many influential Britons who feel that the most charitable solution to the question What to Do about David Frost? would be simply the stuff him and put him on display at Madame Tussaud’s where all the other really famous people are. As Britain’s most obtrusive TV personality. David would not mind being there, actually, but not quite yet.

London newspaper columnists these days are demanding his scalp with headlines like THE PERIL DAVID FROST REPRESENTS and stories underneath that say, ‘Is he conducting an entertainment or a public pillory?’ The London Evening News said, ‘Mr. Frost seems to have taken upon himself the role of public inquisitor, and his program reminds one of the Court of the Star Chamber.’ Still another paper complained that the Frost show was becoming a supplementary house of Parliament. 

In seven short years since he left Cambridge, David Frost has become the sometime conscience of his country, a provocateur extraordinaire, a cunning and ferociously ambitious preacher’s boy who at 28 has built out of discomfort a show-business empire that has taken over Great Britain and is reaching across the Atlantic to the U.S.”