Hello, good afternoon and welcome back, as someone might say. Welcome to Sir David Frost OBE returning after more than 20 years to a live studio audience with The Frost Programme. But Frost off the box is a hard man to penetrate. He seems to be stage-managed.

Unusually for a newspaper photograph, he insists on being made up and appears with puffed-up hair, foundation and lip-liner. Even the management of that time-warp restaurant Odin’s protests there is only one table he’ll sit at.

This is the 54-year-old co-creator of That Was The Week That Was – television producer, author, joint founder of LWT and TV-am, and famed interviewer of Richard Nixon, the late Shah of Iran, five prime ministers, six American presidents and assorted royals. The one-man conglomerate, as he was once described, has ink on his fingers, teeth that look like they need a dentist and television screen spectacles that magnify his eyes so that it is hard to gauge his responses.

How would Frost interview Frost?

‘Aahhhaa,’ he says, as if pricked with a pin. ‘I’d be . . . interested to quiz . . . myself (cavernous pauses) . . . about why I get such a buzz from doing a lot of work. Getting to the roots, which I suspect are partly to do with my parents and Methodist upbringing, and that magical quantity, adrenaline.’

What technique would he use to make himself reveal the real David Frost? ‘Make myself forget I was interviewing myself and just have a conversation. That’s the key to a good interview.’

Frost should also ask Frost why his trousers are frayed. ‘Aahhhaa. Very observant of you. They were made a fraction too long.’

Whether he’s sold out and gone soft by accepting a knighthood and doing Hello!-style interviews. ‘I don’t know whether there is an Establishment any more, or whether the Establishment has joined me!’

About his salary. ‘Before not answering your question, you could guess $1 million a year or some nice meaningless figure.’

Whether he still has the stomach for confrontational Sixties-style interviews. ‘Yes.’

Why his friends are all movers and shakers and famous. ‘Dunno. Why not?’ (Laughs.) Why he works so hard at being liked. ‘Dunno that I work particularly hard.’

What he dislikes about himself. ‘As Ned Sherrin said, ‘David always learns from his mistakes without admitting he’s made any’.’

Why he’s driven so frenzied by the pursuit of fame and work. ‘People talk about the terrible pressures of fame. The pressures of failure would be a bloody sight worse.’

Then he should move on to romance. He is happily married to the former Lady Carina Fitzalan Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. Before their 1983 wedding, was he unlucky in love?

‘I rarely talk about my private life.’ He had high-profile affairs – and was twice dumped virtually at the altar – and a 17-month marriage to Peter Sellers’s widow, Lynne Frederick.

‘Jeanette Scott was my first really serious girlfriend. I was 15 when I saw her first screen kiss in Now And Forever. I leched after her like mad. When our relationship came to an end in 1965, it was a real shock to the system.’ But all his girlfriends were ‘terrific’ and ‘wonderful’. And Lynne?

‘We ought to have kept it as a terrific affair.’ What went wrong? ‘We got married.’ And marriage now? ‘I’m incredibly lucky to have played the field and then to have fallen in love more than I’d ever fallen in love and to have three children.’ He became a father at the age of 44 and now rates family and work a ‘joint priority’.

Next Frost should ask Frost that age-old Frost question of whether he believes in God or knows there’s a God. ‘I’m nearly in the second category,’ he replies. ‘I’ve never varied from being in the first.’ He says grace before meals, goes to church once a week and prays almost daily. What does he pray for? ‘To be at my best, most thoughtful, caring, cheerful and awake to the potentialities of any situation for the best.’

Frost is more relaxed live on television than live in person. But he still talks in the famous inebriated voice with moist lips, flickering ironic smile and head thrown back for that car engine warming-up laugh. He fiddles, rubs his hands, crunches paper, moves back, moves forward, holds on to the chair.

‘I don’t think it’s nerves. I’m waiting for the photographer to go so that I can have a cigar.’ He thinks Lew Grade has copyright on that shot. Jack (as in Frost), as he was known, had an ordinary, secure childhood, although money was tight. His Methodist minister father earned £350 a year. ‘My parents wrought financial miracles. We had a joint, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, every week.’ He was 14 years junior to his youngest sister and thus effectively bought up as an only child. He has never confessed any unpleasant childhood memories. What would he tell a shrink? ‘I’d bore him to death with how happy my parents were, and he’d despair!’ Ask Frost to press Frost and he recalls his woodwork master punishing him with a steel ruler. He whacks his hands in a graphic demonstration and winces. ‘I can still feel the agony.’

We’re now sitting in a taxi, Frost famously clock crunching, en route to a board meeting. He flatters, asks questions, expatiates, is unthreatening, solid and jocular; the sort of person you would want as an uncle. Does he believe in Heaven? ‘Yes. One day we will all be submitted to the ultimate interview. Goodness knows what the interviewing style will be.’ Like his? ‘I don’t know. I think it will be a no-nonsense interview.’ Before then Frost should inform Frost that what you see is what you get.