This British-born journalist is well known for his weekly radio talk series Letter from America, which at the time of writing has been broadcast continually by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) since 1946, when it was originally titled American Letter. The weekly 15-minute journalistic talk on life in the United States became a unique institution in the history of radio journalism; it has been heard in 52 countries, and there have been more than 2,600 programs. Cooke's elegant style of writing and presentation gained huge popularity with listeners throughout the English-speaking world. Various critics have praised his ability to capture the human atmosphere of significant news events and, through anecdotes and concrete storytelling, to explain the importance of social, cultural, technological, and political changes. Essayist Harold Nicolson described him as "the best broadcaster on five continents." He has maintained a consistency that has ensured an almost uninterrupted delivery of his talks even when rare illness has meant confinement in the hospital or at his home. The first time the BBC had to use an old edition of the show because Cooke was incapacitated by illness was 17 December 1999.

     Letter from America is very much in the genre of the com­mentaries of American radio network broadcasters of the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, Cooke's first journalistic success was with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) network in 1936, when in live transmissions from London he provided daily radio reports on the abdication crisis involving Edward VIII and American divorcee Wallis Simpson. He continued to work as the network's London commentator until 1937, presenting a weekly broadcast called London Letter that had many similarities to the style and content of the later Letter from America BBC series. His journalism has spanned most of the significant events of the 20th century and early 21st cen­tury, including World War II, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings, and the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

     Cooke's success can be traced back through his scholarship at Cambridge to his relatively humble origins in Blackpool, Lancashire, in northwest England. He left behind a brother who worked as an assistant in a butcher's shop. The "Oxbridge" environment enabled Cooke to establish contacts and use opportunities that took him to Yale, Harvard, and even to a collaboration in Hollywood with Charlie Chaplin. His career has been marked by the ability to reinvent himself, to transcend the British class system, and to eventually change nationality (he became an American citizen in 1941 ). Cooke had no formal training as a journalist and entered the trade via review writing for Granta, the Nation and Athenaeum, and the Manchester Guardian rather than by honing his reporting skills on local and regional newspapers and small town/university radio stations. He was fortunate that the insecurity of freelance life was subsidized by the wealth of his first wife's family.

     Once in front of a microphone, his broadcasting talent and professionalism became self-evident. A similar blossoming of ability occurred in print journalism when he began writing articles for the London Times, Daily Herald, and the Manchester Guardian. Although Kenneth Tynan described him as "one of the great reporters," there is no evidence that his journalism had any scoop value or political and social impact, because he was more of a chronicler and storyteller. It could be argued that Cooke became the most intelligent interpreter of American society and history for English-speaking people abroad. This was especially true of his memorable BBC television series America-A Personal History, first broadcast 1972-73, which has been compared to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. During the 1950s, Cooke's popularity in America was also elevated through his hosting of the pioneer cultural television program Omnibus, which paralleled his later role on Masterpiece Theatre in the 1970s and 1980s on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

     He changed his Christian name from Alfred to Alistair in 1930, and he abandoned British citizenship in 1941 when he was young enough to enlist for Britain's war effort. His biographer argues that he had applied for American citizenship some years before, and the eventual granting of citizenship in 1941 was the result of a delay and not an unwillingness to enlist in the British forces. His collaboration with Charlie Chaplin on a film project about Napoleon was not a success, although Chaplin did invite Cooke to be assistant director on Modern Times. Cooke turned down the opportunity and instead returned to Britain as the BBC's film critic. It has been suggested that he obtained his first radio job as the BBC's film critic in 1934 after he had spotted on a newspaper billboard in Boston that his predecessor, the then prime minister's son Nigel Baldwin, had been fired. In fact Cooke started lobbying the BBC for the job two months before Baldwin had somewhat courageously launched a public attack on BBC bureaucracy and philistinism. He had gone so far as to allege "Prussianism in the BBC." Cooke's self-confident assertion that cinema was in urgent need of "serious, unsolemn propaganda rather than analysis" was looked at rather favorably after Baldwin's attack. BBC historian Asa Briggs unearthed a telegram Cooke had sent the BBC in 1936 that read, "Script today would have to be about two good books and game of ice hockey, for in 23 general releases and 6 new films nowhere to go for a laugh or a cry."

     Cooke's radio debut was at Broadcasting House at 6:45 P.M. on 8 October 1934; his sympathetic (and official) biographer states that the surviving script of his first cinema talk suggests he had arrived "almost fully formed." After settling in America in 1937, he began producing short series of talks such as Mainly about Manhattan until a substantial investment by the BBC in wartime broadcasting to and from the United States led to a more regular commission for American Commentary.

Cooke has made a major contribution to musical and cul­tural programming in radio. His first series for BBC Radio was The American Half Hour, which ran for 13 episodes in 1935 and sought to dramatize various aspects of American life using actors and music. Cooke researched, wrote, and presented a 1938 series for the BBC titled I Hear America Listening, in which he traced the history of American folk music. It was the first serious attempt to mark the contribution of African Amer­icans in the foundation of jazz music and involved acquiring rare recordings of workers on cotton fields and citrus plantations. In 1938 he was responsible for producing and commenting on a live performance of a jazz jam session from the roof garden of the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, New York, to BBC listeners in Britain.

     His creative collaboration with the BBC producer Alan Owen between 1974 and 1987 resulted in several series investigating the origins and development of American popular music. A series for BBC Radio in 1986 and 1987 celebrated five significant American composers. The Life and Music of George Gershwin achieved considerable critical acclaim. In the six programs, Cooke argued that Gershwin deserved greater prominence as an original and important composer of American music.

     By 2003 Cooke, at age 94, was still broadcasting with assurance. He took part in an end-of-millennium reflection on his series with his biographer Nick Clarke on BBC Radio 4.