Distinguished life ends after 2869 'Letters from America' OBITUARY.

(From Canberra Times)

A LISTAIR COOKE delivered his last Letter from America after 58 years on Friday, February 20, (repeated, as ever, on Saturday and Sunday) and, having unusually missed the following week through illness, retired only this month. It was the 2869th of his series of radio despatches for the BBC.

In Britain, Cooke was renowned for the radio Letter from America, in America he was renowned for the television Masterpiece Theatre. He was also a newspaper reporter of distinction and the author of many successful books - from Douglas Fairbanks: the making of a screen character (1940) and A Generation on Trial: U.S.A. v Alger Hiss (1950) to Around the World in Fifty Years: a political travelogue (1966), Alistair Cooke's America (1973), Six Men: [Charles Chaplin, Edward VIII, H.L.Mencken, Adlai Stevenson, Bertrand Russell, Humphrey Bogart] (1977), America Observed: the newspaper years of Alistair Cooke (1988) and Memories of the Great & the Good (1999).

Thirty-four years ago WGBH, the Boston station of the new American public-television network, wanted to buy a huge backlog of assorted BBC classic serials to form a continuous weekly Sunday night showcase of British drama to be called Masterpiece Theatre. But each program was 50 minutes long, designed to occupy an hour with the insertion of commercials, and the non-commercial WGBH wanted Alistair Cooke to fill that gap with a personal introduction.

Cooke had refused. He was in the last stages of filming America, his 1972-73 television history of the United States produced by the BBC which later earned him seven major Anglo-American documentary awards and, in book form, turned him into a rich man.

He was damned, he said, if he was going to act as a barker for someone else's drama programs just before his own America was to be shown in the US.

WGBH had warned the BBC that without Alistair Cooke as host the whole lucrative deal was off.