Letter From America

HARD to imagine isn’t it? Fifty eight years of doing the same thing. Alistair Cooke should be highly commended for sheer endurance. He retires from writing and presenting Letter From America for nearly six decades. Amazingly he succeeded where many politicians and teachers fail miserably … he broke down barriers, removed the stuffiness from a notoriously difficult subject and made American history and politics accessible and interesting to people across the whole social and cultural spectrum.

Much of his success was due to the way he spoke. In measured patient tones he approached the topics he talked about as though he was explaining them to a friend, quietly taking the mystic out of complex issues without being patronising. He was able to convey his passion to the listener and the reader, drawing them in, making them curious and wanting to understand what Cooke was discussing. A very rare quality indeed.

From my mid teens onwards Alistair Cooke’s broadcasts have been a feature of my life and I shall miss hearing the familiar notes of his voice float across the airways. During my final year at school and all during college Sunday mornings became synonymous with an hour of intelligent ‘conversation’, providing a brief respite from exam pressures and the stresses of a sometimes difficult home life. This was ‘my’ time when no one was allowed to interrupt me, put me down, tell me I was useless, hopeless, whatever, or reprimand me for not having done this or that. For sixty minutes each week I was in the company of a ‘friend’ who was never moody or unpredictable and who informed me of things I was intrigued by and which adults discussed as if I wasn’t there, in a way I was able to comprehend.

Letter From America has been an institution on our radios for so long now that it seems incredible that Cooke had initially been commissioned to present the programme for a mere thirteen weeks. It was shortly after joining the BBC as a film critic in 1934 that he made his first trip to America and decided to dedicate the rest of his life to telling the world about that vast continent and what made it and its people ‘tick’. During his extensive career in broadcasting and the media Alistair Cooke also spent twenty years with the Manchester Guardian as its correspondent in America and headed several television shows. The documentary programme, Alistair Cooke's America, was immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic and generated a best-selling book of the same title.

Ironically the book quite recently came into my hand when I finally came to unpacking boxes of my books which I’d had sent up from my parents when they had moved house last December. I remember the book had been given to me by an elderly lady I’d met on my first ever holiday to Scotland. We had been staying at the same hotel and had got talking over dinner. She had bought the book in the ‘wee’ bookshop nearby to take back to her son in London. When she realised that I was a huge fan of Mr. Cooke’s programmes she insisted on giving me the book, telling me her son was “a grown man with a good job who was perfectly able to buy his own copy”. The lady’s random act of kindness and generosity to a young girl she’d only just met touched me deeply. Discovering it again in amongst the treasured collection of books I had been parted from for almost nine years was like being reunited with an almost forgotten friend.

06/03/04