This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Who remembers Alistair Cooke? The transatlantic Salfordian was a regular presence in British lives for more than half a century, before his death in 2004 at the age of 95. His weekly Letters from America, which ran for 58 years, were masterpieces of observation. Few witnesses have spoken so clearly, so personally, to the listener.
Would he prosper now? The expertise Cooke acquired over seven decades of reporting, for the BBC and the old Manchester Guardian, does not always convince modern producers, who favour rougher, more demotic qualities. Cooke’s art was the kind which concealed art, and he carried it off with the dignity of a prince.
Every year, to remind himself of who he was talking to in those Letters, he came back to the UK. On one break he was enjoying a cocktail in the Midland Hotel, Manchester, with Brian “Bighead” Redhead, presenter of the Today programme, and a man known to be his own biggest fan.
When an admirer approached the bar, seeking Cooke’s autograph, Bighead swooped to supply his own signature. No wonder the teenage Nick Robinson was a devotee.
Plenty of listeners remember Cooke, of course, but they are a diminishing number, for whom the wireless was a comforting companion. Although Cooke revealed a fair amount about his tastes and habits, although he knew everybody in the States worth knowing, the programme was never about himself. The subject was always America, his adopted land.
Oldies miss the apparently casual way he would introduce each “Letter” with an item from the week’s news list, often overlooked, and embroider the tale so skilfully that our understanding of American life was subtly enhanced. Has anybody explained one people to another more thoroughly, or entertainingly?
It’s a gift, speaking from a script for 15 minutes whilst trying to sound natural. Cooke moulded every phrase pleasingly, so the sentences rolled along, as Churchill said of Anglo-American relations, like the Mississippi. Fifty-eight years he managed! What a feat.
A different kind of talk now goes out on Radio 4 every Friday evening, in Cooke’s old berth. A Point of View, five minutes shorter, is, it’s fair to say, a mixed bag. Will Self, the bores’ bore, has long been a contributor, and an odd Anglo-American called Zoe Strimpel clearly hankers to be his successor. To lift a line from Karl Kraus, the scourge of old Vienna, she has nothing to say and is determined to say it.
But Strimpel is a radio titan compared with Megan Nolan, a young Irish writer resident in Manhattan. What feathers she flutters, what nonsense she utters! A talk on New Year resolutions (me me me!) proved unendurable. We can turn off, certainly, but Radio 4 should be trying to draw listeners in, not drive them to the snug bar.
John Gray, who swims against the tide of approved views, brings a different perspective to this slot. Howard Jacobson also offers a bracing voice, and Rebecca Stott came up trumps with a talk on clearing her mother’s house. Sara Wheeler, the travel writer, got the year off to a good start by explaining her love of two paintings in the National Gallery. Throughout her adult life she has trotted off each week to look at Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man and Van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man, and she continues to trot, without really knowing what she is looking for or at.
That’s not as odd as it sounds. Thousands of art-lovers, as opposed to gallery-clogging exhibition addicts, are guided by the same impulse. They don’t have a specialist knowledge, and perhaps it’s just as well. They find their own way in.
Enthusiasts, drawn to paintings by the great and the very good, long for beauty and, if possible, serenity. They want their souls to be restored, and there are few restoratives more profound than an hour spent in the presence of paintings which, as Wheeler intimated, belong to them.
Paintings are put on the walls of galleries for the benefit of all. Yet, as Wheeler’s talk made plain, they can only be looked at properly through one pair of eyes, and every response is different. Perhaps Adele Armstrong, producer of this excellent programme, can invite Wheeler back to tell us how ghastly the modern “blockbuster” experience has become, and why people with smartphones should be kept out, by halberdiers if necessary.
This was a talk worthy of Cooke. By telling her own story, of two much-loved works, Wheeler caught the ear of thousands like her, who love to lose themselves in the misty, uncontrollable world of the imagination. More, please.
We need to hear all kinds of voices, female and male, young and old, silly and solemn. A Point of View is usually a good listen, though it can be a shade too precious. At least — phew! — there are no faux-northern voices. Gray and Jacobson are northern men, but feel no need to gild the lily. On Radio 3, meanwhile …
