David Irving on the David Frost Programme 1977

By 1977 Sir David Frost was at the height of his interviewing career — his celebrated Frost/Nixon interviews had aired earlier that year, and his weekly current-affairs programme was prime British television. David Irving's Hitler's War was published the same year — the book that would come to define his reputation as one of the most controversial historians of the twentieth century. This DVD preserves the encounter between the two of them.

The interview is a primary source — not a summary, not a second-hand account, but the documentary record of how Irving's revisionist position on the Third Reich was first introduced to a mainstream British television audience, interrogated by a broadcaster famous for his sustained questioning of Richard Nixon. The footage runs uncut.

For collectors of David Irving material, this is one of the earliest extant recordings of him at length. For students of late-twentieth-century media, it is a study in how serious television tackled difficult history before the format gave way to cable shouting. For anyone who has read Hitler's War and wants to hear the author defend his thesis when the ink was still wet on the first edition, it is the source.

Format

Region-free DVD. Plays on any standard DVD player or computer drive. The complete broadcast interview, presented as it originally aired.