DOHA: Presidential Room 5, Sheraton Hotel, Doha. The doyen of chatshow hosts has just flown in to Qatar and for once it is his turn to face the interviewers’ questions. Hello and welcome to Sir David Frost.

When Al Jazeera, the Arabic station famous for broadcasting Osama Bin Laden tapes, launches its English-language sister channel this spring, Sir David will be hosting a one-hour show loosely modelled on Breakfast With Frost.

“It’s a real adventure,” he says, lighting an inch-thick cigar. “I’ve always liked to be where the new frontiers are, and this is very much a new frontier. It’s probably the last great 24-hour news network that will be set up, and so the challenge was immediately of interest to me.

“Obviously I wanted to check with Whitehall and Washington that there were no links at all between Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Qaeda and terror. Al Jazeera got an instant clean bill of health, both in London and in Washington.”

Frost will not be presenting his show from Qatar, the super-rich Gulf state where Al Jazeera is based and funded by the Amir, but from its British outpost at one of the most impressive addresses in London: No 1 Knightsbridge. “In London [almost] everyone builds their studios on the outskirts of town,” he said. “When you say ‘No 1 Knightsbridge’ people are amazed. The thought of the Lanesborough [the exclusive hotel next door] as your canteen ... it can’t be bad, can it?”

Life at Al Jazeera was not always so comfortable. During the Afghan war in 2001 two American ‘smart’ bombs — accidentally or deliberately — destroyed its office in Kabul. In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, the US hit its office in Baghdad, killing a journalist. And, according to reports last year, it was only the efforts of Tony Blair — and perhaps the fact that Qatar is a US ally — that dissuaded President Bush from obliterating the station’s Doha headquarters.

Long before Washington hawks denounced it as a ‘terror channel’, though, Al Jazeera had been rankling Arab governments. Launched in 1996, it brought a new style of journalism to the Middle East, breaking taboos and reporting opposing views instead of just the official line. Before Al Jazeera, presenter Faisal Al Qassem once remarked, “you couldn’t even talk about the price of fish, because that might endanger national security”.

It is this ground-breaking spirit, not the fascination with Al Qaeda, that Al Jazeera International (AJI) hopes to recapture with its English broadcasts. “How you see something depends very much on where you’re sitting,” managing director Nigel Parsons told a Doha press conference last week.

“We’ll be looking at events through different spectacles.” With 30 nationalities in a news team of more than 200, the aim is to ‘let Africans tell us about Africa, and so on’, he said. During the course of a day, AJI will follow the sun around the globe, broadcasting for four hours from Kuala Lumpur, 11 hours from Doha, five hours from London and four from Washington. Each team, more or less, will determine its own news agenda.

“In each centre you’re getting a different perspective,” says Steve Clark, director of news, who spent 19 years at ITV. He promises ‘exclusive stories from parts of the world that people aren’t getting access to’, and to cover developing countries in a completely different way. “There’s more to Africa than Aids, famine and war.”

Veronica Pedrosa, the news anchor in Kuala Lumpur, talks of focusing on ‘stories that CNN wouldn’t touch’. Having previously worked for CNN, she recalled her battle to persuade them that a surprise victory for the Congress party in an Indian general election was actually an important story.

These are high ideals, but it is the sort of coverage that many channels shy away from on the grounds of cost, difficulty or lack of viewer interest. AJI chiefs insist they can both deliver the goods and pull in the viewers. Asked for examples of ‘different’ news, they decline to talk about specifics ahead of the launch. However a couple of their journalists, after being promised strict confidentiality, did describe stories they are working on that seem to fit the bill. The AJI will also announce it has signed award-winning broadcaster Rageh Omaar to present Witness, a daily programme ‘featuring human stories made by storytellers from all walks of life’. It promises ‘no academics, no commentators’ — just first-hand accounts.

The big question, though, is who will watch. “There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, of whom only 240 million speak Arabic,” Frost explains. “The educated Muslims who speak English are very much part of the audience but the aim is to reach out beyond those areas to people who are interested in the best of international news and are not particularly Muslim. One of the most interesting things is how you create a programme that appeals to the whole world. Can you actually have 100 per cent of a programme that appeals to 100 per cent of the world, or do you do it at 80 per cent or whatever?”

To reach a global audience, AJI is planning to be distributed on a mixture of cable and satellite, though it is also exploring other options, such as broadband streaming on the internet. “We’re looking at every distribution medium that is available,” says commercial director Lindsey Oliver, who previously worked for CNBC. Initially this will be free.

“Certainly for the first year the emphasis is on creating a product of excellence, creating credibility, building viewership, building a reputation that we’re proud of,” she continues. “Once we’ve done that I think we’ll concentrate much more on the advertising revenue. This is not to say we won’t have advertising from day one — we will. The model is for this to be a subscription and advertising revenue business. We have a long-term plan and we have very realistic targets and expectations.”

Her target for expected launch in late April or May is to reach 40m households, which she describes as a ‘real’ figure, excluding people who just happen to have a dish that is capable of receiving the signal.

Eight million of these households will come via Sky, AJI’s main distribution vehicle in Britain. But Britain is exceptional. “The UK is a very consolidated market,” Oliver says. “Normally there isn’t a very big number of households available from one source — it’s usually much more fragmented. There are 50,000 cable operators in India, for instance.”

At the Sheraton, meanwhile, Sir David is mulling over the people he would like to interview. “Fidel Castro has always eluded me,” he says. “It was 30 years ago that I started trying to get him ... we must go for Castro. He’s not going to remain head of Cuba for much longer.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service