Letter From America

Picture: Alistair Cooke in 1969

The world's longest running speech radio programme, Letter From America, presented by the inimitable Alistair Cooke, began on 24 March 1946. The initial agreement was for a 13 week series, but Cooke's natural style proved such a success that it ran for 58 years and only ended with his death in 2004.

Letter From America was commissioned by Lindsay Wellington, the Controller of the Home Service, as a return to Cooke's pre-war work on American Half Hour. Wellington knew what Cooke could bring to a broadcast. "I had to offer", wrote Cooke in the Radio Times, "a direct impression of anything of America that took my fancy. Not a diatribe, not a composed essay, but the first impression of an accident, a person, a landscape on the nervous emulsion of A. Cooke". In this fashion Letter From America covered 11 Presidencies and events such as the death of Bobby Kennedy and the September 11 attacks.

In 1972 Cooke made the critically acclaimed television series America, which was an international success. Cooke remained popular on both sides of the Atlantic and it was said on his death that with Letter From America he did more than any other individual to maintain the "special relationship" between the US and Britain.