I can't believe that I didn't notice this when it happened, but Alistair Cooke has retired.

He is 94 years old, and had since he started broadcasting Letter from America in 1946 done 2,869 shows. It's hard to imagine anyone else ever coming close to such longevity and endurance.

What's particularly interesting to me is the dual-identity that this grand old man has. Over here in America, we continue to think of him as British. In fact, I think his time as host of Omnibus and then Masterpiece Theater kept alive an American perception of Britain as still honey for tea, alongside of those delightful cucumber sandwiches. But in Britain he was thought of as a Brit who had gone over the Yanks (he had become an American citizen in the late 1930's, after all), and who was thus both questionable and exotic. The two still go together in some parts of the British imagination.

I valued his marvelous ability to speak common sense about American habits and mores to the British audience. It isn't there isn't lots of information about the United States in Britain; but he was the only person to actually give historical perspective, to speak of attitudes and manners from a long, long experience of both Britain and America. He did what ambassadors are supposed to do, and most American ambassadors to Britain have been too unwilling to do.

Beyond that, he wrote brilliant scripts. Everything was carefully written to give you the impression that he was having a chat with you. But everything...pauses, heavy emphasis, jaunty use of commas...was there in the scripts when you read them on the BBC website. This was a style that he had developed on his very first test for the BBC in 1946, and he made it into a level of literary art. You cannot fail to learn something about writing and speaking if you listen to one of his broadcasts (all on the Radio 4 section of the BBC website) while reading along in the associated script.

Ave atque vale.