No More Alistair Cooke

[muninnhuginn]

Just caught news of Alistair Cooke's retirement on the news. There's more on BBC Online (in the entertainment pages: what a miscategorisation!). We had wondered for quite a while, there've been a couple of absences due to illness in the last few years, whether he was planning to die with his boots on. Evidently not.

It feels almost as bad as losing a parent, or maybe a grandparent. Like The Archers, Letter from America has always been a part of my life. Like The Archers, there have been times where I've mentally switched off or left the room, or physically switched off. I'll admit even falling asleep through some of AC's broadcasts. But that's what you do to parents and grandparents too. Unlike family, he's moved with me too. And when he's been compelling, we've listened twice on Radio 4 and then tracked down the broadcasts on the World Service.

One of the reasons, apart from the habit of living with wall-to-wall Radio 4, for listening was the connection my maternal grandfather felt he had with AC. Precisely why, I'm not sure (and there're precious few people to ask). They must have been roughly of an age: Grandad was born around about the turn of the last century (I suppose I could check when precisely). Many of Grandad's siblings emigrated (to the States or Canada or New Zealand)--the Irish diaspora, part of which ended up in the North-West fringes of England (not just Liverpool, but the Furness peninsula and the Cumberland coast). Grandad, after his retirement, visited his relatives in Philadelphia and they visited him, and us, in the early seventies. Many of the family papers went to the other side of the Atlantic, making tracking things down a little difficult. I'm not sure whether heever got to visit the near-mythic "Uncle George" in Canada.

The crucial factor is that these visits happened about the time that AC broadcast his TV series "America". We bought Grandad a copy the tie-in book when it came out. Very few years later we got it back after he died.

That's the, not very great, extent of the connection. Grandad almost certainly didn't listen much to Letter from America: he was almost completely deaf for much of his life. But that TV series really did have an impact on him.

I didn't, mainly because of his deafness, have much of a relationship with Grandad and was just eleven when he died. But AC has been a substitute: a better educated, more erudite, probably more interesting substitute. One I'll miss.

Comments

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Sunday mornings will never be the same again. For years now I've woken myself to Letter From America on a Sunday. Sometimes AC lulled me back to sleep, other times he came up with something so interesting that it brought me awake - last Sunday's repeat being a case in point.

He was very much appreciated, and will be sorely missed.

I hope he has a long and happy retirement, but at his age, 96, that can't be very likely.

[muninnhuginn]

I'd like to think his retirement would be long and happy too, but I wonder what he'd want. There's been an elegiac quality to his letters over several years now, often commemorating folk he'd known who'd died, or, increasingly, anniversaries of their deaths. It's felt like a long goodbye on his part.

I'm far sadder about this than I expected.