David Frost annoyed with Nixon film

Being the arch self-promoter and egotist that he is, Sir David Frost (pictured in the 1970s) is relishing being portrayed in the film adaptation of the Peter Morgan play Frost/Nixon which receives its premiere in London tonight. The only thing to spoil his fun is that, for much of the film, he is depicted as a slightly frivolous character.

The movie deals with Frost’s famous 1977 interview with the late American president Richard Nixon, in which he got him to apologise for the Watergate scandal. Morgan's production notes says that Frost – played in the film as in the play by Michael Sheen - is "a jet-setting featherweight television personality with a name to make", and the early part of the film depicts him as a shallow playboy whose career has hit the buffers.

Needless to say, Frost does not accept that his career was in decline the year the interview took place, much less that he was primarily a light entertainer. He says: "In fact, by that time I'd interviewed two or three presidents, two or three prime ministers, Moshe Dayan [the late Israeli Defence Minister], the Archbishop of Canterbury, a whole list of people. I had done a hell of a lot by then.”

However, he admits that “a lot of people thought that one of the reasons Nixon said yes was that he wasn't aware of a lot of the more serious stuff that I had done here [on British television]."

More than 45 million Americans watched the Frost-Nixon encounter on TV - a record for a news programme – and were transfixed as Frost managed to get ‘Tricky Dicky’ to admit for the first time the extent of his guilt over the Watergate scandal. In the (real) interview, Nixon said: "I let down my friends, I let down the country, I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government . . . I let the American people down. And I'll have to carry that burden the rest of my life."

Frost says of the film: "It's an interesting situation to be in. It's not my film. [He gave up editorial control but retains financial rights.] It's just . . . my life! There's 10 or 12 per cent of fiction in there, one or two bits of which I could do without."