#alistair cooke

[newyorkthegoldenage]

This great, plunging, dramatic, ferocious, swift, and terrible big city is the most folksy and provincial place I have lived in. New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

     —Alistair Cooke, 1952

Photo: Queens, 1953. Ernst Haas via Design You Trust

[muppet-facts]

Muppet Fact #479

Originally, Cookie Monster's Alistair Cookie persona from "Monsterpiece Theater" was depicted as smoking a pipe, as to mimic the original host of Masterpiece Theater- Alistair Cooke.

The pipe was removed as to not promote smoking. So, those segments with the pipe were re-taped.

Source:

"Sweeping the Clouds Away." Virginia Heffernan. New York Times. November 18, 2007

[letterboxd-loggd]

The Three Faces of Eve (1957) Nunnally Johnson

July 2nd 2023

[blackswaneuroparedux]

In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.

- Alistair Cooke KBE

For 58 years, BBC radio host Alistair Cooke hosted "Letter from America" on the BBC. The show broadcast weekly from 1946 to 2004, and became a singular and unique source of information for Britons on their American neighbours across the pond. "Letter from America" remains the longest running personal commentary in British radio history. 

Cooke's iconic programme chronicled Americans' daily lives and how they changed over time. On January 19, 1951, in an episode titled "Television in America," Cooke explained "how a new daily diet of television in America is changing people's lives."

"Letter from America" also covered every major news event in the United States since between 1946 and 2004, including the JFK assassination, RFK’s murder (he was yards away), Rosa Parks and the bus boycott, the Challenger explosion, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and many more. Whatever he reported on he did so with reassuring empathy and profound wisdom. He had a patrician air but it never hid a deeply humane nature towards others regardless of their backgrounds and beliefs.

He died in 2004 at the grand age old age of 95 at his home in New York.

I wonder what he would have made of the state of his beloved America after 2004 to the present day.

[dk-thrive]

it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly

In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.

— Alistair Cooke, One Man's America An Informal Exploration Of The Ways And Byways Of Life In The United States (Alfred A. Knopf Inc; January 1, 1952)

[oskarlevant]

Alistair Cooke looks at America in 1972. His judgments seem quite applicable today

[oldshowbiz]

[kuzi-the-hunturr]

In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.

 Alistair Cooke