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 neighbors across the pond.
Cooke’s program 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, the Challenger explosion, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and many more.
The BBC and Boston University recently compiled an archive of Cooke’s shows and scripts, and broadcaster Alvin Hall explored “Letter from America” in a series of programs, looking at American culture (through British eyes) in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.