Armando Iannucci and Richard Schiff, the American actor who plays Toby in The West Wing, were on Radio 4 on Wednesday, trying to work out why American politicians are treated more respectfully than British ones on stage, film and TV.
The debate struck a chord, because I've just seen Peter Morgan's terrific play, Frost/Nixon. Morgan, who also wrote the Brown/Blair TV film, The Deal, gets politics in the way a lot of playwrights don't. He conveys more human pity for Richard Nixon than Iannucci's The Thick of It managed for any politicians.
On Radio 4, Schiff and Iannucci made some sensible points. They noted that the US remains immensely powerful, whereas we have sunk into post-imperial irony that makes it hard to admit our leaders ever do well. They were also correct to point out that it is the office of the presidency that Americans respect, that makes them stand when the incumbent enters the room, call him Sir and - until the day he dies - "Mr President", never Bill or George.
But they missed the critical detail that separates parliamentary systems from presidential ones. The Prez is also head of state. Ronald Reagan was both the Queen and Mrs Thatcher. He was better at being the Queen; Nixon was much better at being Mrs Thatcher.
So did Nixon get respect? As the play reminds us, he was a man destroyed by the very insecurities that had driven him to the very summit of politics. He tried to fix his 1972 re-election, although no one could imagine him losing to the delightful George McGovern. Why burgle the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate Hotel? Just to be sure, you understand.
When David Frost saw the Donmar Warehouse production, after it had transferred to the Gielgud, he told the Daily Telegraph that it was "brilliant". He complained only that Morgan the craftsman had compressed, reordered and exaggerated many things for dramatic effect in his telling of the televised 1977 confrontation, which saw the disgraced president finally confess - just this once - to his wrongdoing.
Morgan's crucial invention is a late-night call from a drunken, self-pitying Nixon to Frost's hotel. Nixon has just read Frost's biographical notes and realised they are both insecure poor boys, determined to get to the top and stay there. Both have seen their careers slide, and when they complete the 28 hours of filming next morning, Nixon says: "Only one of us can win."
Unsurprisingly Frostie denies the parallel, insisting that being a Methodist minister's son wasn't that bad when he went to Cambridge, and then on to TV stardom in That Was The Week That Was with Peter Cook. Cook died young, his huge talent gone to seed. But Frost looked after his lesser one and stayed near the top of the tree, despite being written off countless times, as he was by heavyweight US pundits in Frost/Nixon, as a mere "chat show host".
Having sat on Frost's Sunday morning sofa on and off for 20 years, I long ago concluded that the key to his survival is that he likes people and they like him. Ordinary folk, film stars, politicians, saints. His amiable style has taken as many wickets as the Torquemada school of interview. In the end, might it all be about respect?
