Talk Shows: Back to the Origins

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"What do you get when you cross a home movie camera with a French Revolution? A camera that cuts everybody's head off." That is a "crossing" joke, one of the standard bits of yet another TV talk show, this one chaired by David Frost, out of Britain. Clearly, his crossing gags don't travel all that well, but everything else about The David Frost Show is doing very nicely. In its third month of syndication by Westinghouse Broadcasting Co., the series is running in 63 U.S. cities, and already rates No. 1 in its time slot (mostly afternoon) in Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Frost himself, both physically and professionally, is what you get when you cross a William F. Buckley Jr. with a Tommy Steele. He is a resourceful interrogator with a vaudevillian stage sense. More important, he has brought the talk show back toward its original purpose. As host, Frost asks questions that make sense, and actually listens to the answers. His guests are people worth hearing out—not just routine talk-show circuit riders plugging their latest movies and books.

Leisurely Ambiance. On show after show, Frost and his guests have dug seriously into the Viet Nam issue.* Last week, in a Moratorium Day special, Frost refereed a heated debate between Bill Buckley ("The youth of America are overwhelmingly on the side of heroism") and Adam Walinsky ("Those facts are as fanciful as your casualty figures"). The studio audience was also rung into the fray—a frequently effective device of the Frost show. Most impassioned of the unscheduled guests was Actress Shelley Winters, who chimed in four times from the front row and once, on the verge of tears, implored the panel: "No matter what facts you gentlemen muster, you have to know that millions of boys and girls tonight, all over the country, are saying, they made a goddamned mess of everything and get us out!"

Another major distinction of the Frost show is that a visitor can spiel on as long as he is compelling, and the host does not feel a constant compulsion to bring in disparate guests to hold his audience. Senator Edmund Muskie soloed for 37 minutes. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—who rattled off lines like, "I am probably the only living American, black or white, that just doesn't give a damn"—holds the record so far with a run of 39 minutes.

Sometimes the leisurely ambiance lulls a guest into an unexpected revelation. Raquel Welch insisted that the brain is "a very erogenous zone." Young Actress Anjelica Huston conceded that her father, John Huston, should never have cast her in A Walk with Love and Death. She found herself "no good, awful. There's so many young girls waiting for the opportunity, dying ... I shouldn't have been that selfish." On an earlier show, during a discussion on world overpopulation, Arthur Godfrey leaned over, asked David, "Wanna know a secret?," and then told a nationwide audience that he had himself sterilized. How is one's sex life after the operation? Said Godfrey: "Even better."