BRITAIN: The veteran BBC Radio 4 broadcaster, Alistair Cooke, died yesterday aged 95, four weeks after dispatching his final Letter From America. He was suffering from heart disease.
The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, led the tributes to Cooke's Letters. "I thought they were extraordinary essays and they brought an enormous amount of insight and understanding to the world. He was really one of the greatest broadcasters of all time, and we shall feel his loss very, very keenly indeed."
Cooke began broadcasting his Letter from America in 1946. It was scheduled to last 13 weeks but continued for 58 years and ran to 2,869 separate Letters.
A slightly patrician-looking man with a fondness for blazers, he was loved and admired equally in the United States, his adopted home, Britain and many other places besides where he became a household name thanks to the BBC World Service.
He began his journalistic career in print and for many years was a US-based correspondent for the Guardian newspaper. Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, said yesterday: "Alistair Cooke was a great reporter as well as a brilliant essayist. For 22 years he was an incomparable New York correspondent for the Guardian, writing in prose that even today feels modern in its vividness, informality and assurance."
His producer, Mr Tony Grant, said Cooke wanted to be remembered for his stories about ordinary people. "He rang my home late in the evening last week because he wanted to talk about the archive, which he knew we were going to play over the next few weeks.
"He wanted to know which of the letters we were going to play.
"I said that we hadn't got it worked out yet, but that Vietnam, Watergate and the first man in space were bound to all feature.
"He said 'No, no, no, no, people don't want to hear analysis. They want to hear stories about people, ordinary people doing extraordinary things'.
"He said that his stories were about people, and that was what he would like to be remembered for." - (PA)