Preview: An Audience With Sir David Frost, Grand Opera House, York

SIR David Frost will be having his usual audience with politicians, movers and shakers over the BBC1 breakfast table tomorrow morning. On Monday night, the table will be turned when the doyen of television inquisitors will answer questions at the Grand Opera House in York.

"I'm really looking forward to doing these one-man shows, which I used to do in the Sixties and Seventies until I had my commitments in America," says Sir David, who will give all his tour proceeds to charity. "I started to do these shows again a few months ago, and they're great fun.

"The first part focuses on my comedy days on That Was The Week That Was and The Frost Report, and in the second half the accent is on the audience asking me questions, some anecdotal, some more serious, but with the emphasis on fun. So please ask your readers to think about questions they'd like to ask me."

There is so much territory for questions in An Audience With Sir David Frost: his CV embraces co-creating the ground-breaking satirical show That Was The Week That Was; television and film producing; writing 15 books; publishing; lecturing and co-founding London Weekend Television and TV-am.

Above all, there have been his television interviews with seven Presidents of the United States and six British Prime Ministers, and his famous Nixon Interviews.

In this age of bullish interviewing techniques on news programmes, Sir David cuts a more relaxed figure. "I think there's a different atmosphere on a Sunday morning compared to weekday nights, and I hope that people note the fact that I clearly enjoy what I'm doing," he says.

Part of the skill lies in his knowing when to probe further, when to cut in, when to let an interviewee remain in full flow. "A lot of interviewing is instinctive. Take silences: you have to work out in those few seconds, is this a pause where a guy will go further if I shut up or is it just an embarrassing pause where he's forgotten what he's saying?" says Sir David.

"That's why it's important to relax them. In a civilised conversation, you can get just as many answers as if you hector them. The danger is that you'll shut them down rather than open them up, and politicians have a tendency to shut up if you hector them.

"I remember John Smith the late Labour leader in his last interview saying: 'David, you have a way of asking beguiling questions with potentially lethal consequences."

From Nixon to Clinton, Nelson Mandela to Muhammad Ali, Noel Coward to Orson Welles, he has interviewed them all. Does he ever experience nerves?

"I've been lucky in that I feel comfortable interviewing and I don't get nervous, but I do really focus. I think it's perfectly valid for people to get nervous, like in the field of classical music, where musicians positively want to get nervous before performing."

With a General Election in the spring pipeline, Sir David will be putting our political leaders under the microscope once more. Would he like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to bash their heads together on his show?

"Not necessarily bash their heads together because that might shut them up! However, to get them on the show together would be a delight - and from a journalist's point of view it's better to have two such strong characters rather than one."

Some might say shows such as Breakfast With Frost contribute to an age where personalities, rather than policies, dictate the political landscape.

"Tony Benn used to say personalities don't matter, policies do, but of course personalities matter, because you judge and vote on the personality of the leader," says Sir David. "When a politician says they want to concentrate on issues it's because they don't want to answer the last question."

An Audience With Sir David Frost, Grand Opera House, York, 7.30pm. Tickets: £15, £12.50; ring 0870 606 3590.

Updated: 12:00 Saturday, January 29, 2005