Three Days of Frost | Before David Jason, There Was Leslie Sands

Three days before Christmas. Bitter cold. A missing child. And an untidy, irreverent detective named Jack Frost.

This Deep Dive includes spoilers. We invite you to listen to the original play then come back and join us.

Long before David Jason made Inspector Frost one of British television’s most familiar detectives in A Touch of Frost, R. D. Wingfield’s wonderfully unconventional policeman had already come to life on radio.

In this episode of The Common Room, broadcasting from the Little Station on Commercial Street, we return to Three Days of Frost, the 1977 BBC Radio 4 Saturday-Night Theatre production starring Leslie Sands as Detective Inspector Frost.

And behind the play lies an extraordinary story.

We explore how a rejected crime novel became a BBC radio drama; why Ronnie Barker was originally envisioned as Frost; what Leslie Sands brought to the character; and how Wingfield created a detective almost perfectly opposed to Sherlock Holmes—disorganized, overworked, cheeky, impatient with authority, but stubbornly compassionate when it matters.

We also look at Frost’s perpetual battle with Superintendent Mullett, the play’s wonderfully bleak Christmas setting, Wingfield’s remarkable career in radio drama, and the long journey from this 1977 broadcast to the novels and eventually David Jason’s enormously successful television Frost.

And that raises the question at the heart of our conversation:

Was radio actually the perfect medium for Jack Frost?

Pull up a chair in The Common Room. The fire is going, the weather outside is dreadful, and somewhere in the fog Inspector Frost has another problem on his hands.

Who is your Jack Frost—Leslie Sands or David Jason?

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