A word in your ear.

I’ve told all the family and I’m telling you: be sure to have windscreen wiper liquid in your car instead of plain water. It prevents legionnaire’s disease. Whilst you’re at it squirt some antiseptic lotion on your shower head.

According to a recent survey most of us don’t know our neighbours and pensioners are the friendliest. The latter is true in these parts. When I visited my friend D the other day she had been surprised to find her opposite neighbour – a widower - up a step ladder trimming her hedge although she now has a gardener. Apparently his house is up for sale, he’s going to live near his daughter and was bored. He’s 94.

D is much more comfortable after a cortisone injection for her knee. We think she should probably have a new knee but as she is a carer and in her eighties I think there is a reluctance to operate and with noro virus and the rest, it does seem more of a risk these days. We get our new local hospital on Valentine’s Day next year, so hopefully it will be virus free and we won’t have to do the 30 mile trip to Taunton.

Mark Lawson, as an interviewer, is growing on me. His affable, slightly bumbling persona hides a sharp intelligence and those gimlet eyes behind his glasses miss nothing. He was talking to the man who has interviewed everybody of note over the last fifty years, so he needed all his skill. David Frost – now 70 was the subject, his features softened with age but with his ambition and lust for life undiminished. He’s looking for the next frontier to broadcast from – maybe outer space?

Some of the old quotes were mentioned: Peter Cook saying his greatest regret was saving David Frost from drowning. He did save him but Frost queries the quote.

Mark asked him if all his life passed before him, and Frost said he wished it had as it would have been interesting.

He had already been saved from drowning as a child, when swimming in Beer – the little seaside town we have just visited. Then his life did pass before his eyes but there was little of note.

Further quotes: Billy Graham saying sex before marriage was wrong because ‘it’s blunting your love.’

‘David Frost rose without trace.’ That might have been Peter Cook again.

From his days at Cambridge when he was in The Footlights and with Granta he was surrounded by brilliant, witty and talented people and later on seemed to be hanging on their coat tails. He was asked if he had ever used anyone else’s material.

‘Not knowingly,’ he said.

He doesn’t like to waste money but more importantly he hates to waste time and one remembers the days when he would have breakfast in London and lunch in New York on a weekly basis. That ground breaking show ‘That was the week that was,’ introduced so many stars and it wouldn’t have been the same without him. And unlike many of them - he’s still standing.

He spoke movingly of his Methodist father who died in his sixties and when asked what he would like his obituary to say answered;

something about he didn’t waste time and if he had been half as good a father to his three boys as his own father he would be happy.

He was wearing scarlet socks and I wondered if – like Richard Burton - he had Welsh blood.

A reminder of that great Saturday night show below