Tributes are starting to come in for broadcaster, Alistair Cooke, a legend in Britain and his adopted United States, who has died at the age of 95, less than a month after recording his final Letter from America for the BBC.
True to Cooke’s erudite nature, the Letter from America radio series ran the gamut from high intrigue in the corridors of power in Washington to the significance to Americans of serving cranberry sauce with turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
Only three times did Cooke miss filing a Letter but, in recent months, regular listeners could sense his flagging health in his voice. Many wondered how he could ever finish a broadcast.
Cooke’s mellifluous voice belied his origins as an iron-fitter’s son from the working class English seaside resort of Blackpool, his university years at Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, and the US citizenship he took in 1941.
British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has paid warm tribute to the broadcaster: “He was really one of the greatest broadcasters of all time.”
Generations have grown up, married and raised their own families to the sound of Cooke’s genteel account of life in the US. What he said was never as important as the way he said it.
The show was supposed to run for only 13 weeks, but Cooke’s honeyed tones, as he murmured “Good evening” across the airwaves, captivated his audience and he became a permanent fixture.
The BBC believes it was the longest running radio show in history. Certainly, it established Cooke as Britain’s pre-eminent observer of American life.
Born in Salford in 1908, Cooke went on to receive four Emmys, the 1972 Peabody Award for meritorious services to broadcasting, the 1972 Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award for best documentary and, in 1973, the Dimbleby Award from the Society of Film and TV Arts.
His standing in America was such that in 1972, he addressed a joint session of the US Congress on its 200th anniversary.
In his 90s, Cooke was acutely conscious – and highly critical – of changes in the modern media: “The big change in journalism is that even the serious papers are going tabloid. If the old traditions had been kept up, we would never have heard of Bill Clintons’, well … Just as we never knew about John Kennedy. At some point, the taboo broke.”
A BBC obituary program on Alistair Cooke will be broadcast on Radio National in
place of Correspondents’ Report this Sunday, 4 April, at 8am and will
be introduced by Hamish Robertson.