''Letter from America'' was a weekly fifteen-minute speech

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series broadcast on

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC's ...

and its predecessor, the Home Service, and around the world through the

BBC World Service The BBC World Service is an international broadcaster owned and operated by the BBC, with funding from the British Government through the Foreign Secretary's office. It is the world's largest external broadcaster in terms of reception a ...

. From its first edition to its last, it was presented by Alistair Cooke, who would speak of a topical issue in the US, tying together different strands of observation and anecdote and often ending on a humorous or poignant note. The series ran from 24 March 1946 to 20 February 2004, making it the longest-running speech radio programme hosted by one individual.BBC News 31 October 2012: ''Alistair Cooke – Letter from America: Bringing two nations together
Retrieved 2012-11-03

History

''Letter from America'' had its origin in ''London Letter'', a 15-minute talk for American listeners on life in Britain that Cooke recorded during the 1930s while working as London correspondent for NBC. ''London Letter'' came to an end when Cooke emigrated to America in 1937, but it was not long before he suggested to the BBC the idea of continuing the idea in reverse. A prototype, ''Mainly About Manhattan'', was broadcast intermittently from October 1938, but the idea was shelved with the outbreak of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

in 1939. The first ''American Letter'' was broadcast on 24 March 1946, initially confirmed for only 13 installments, after Cooke had given a one-off talk under that title in the series ''Sunday Newsletter'' on 25 November 1945. The change of title to ''Letter from America'' came on 30 September 1949. The series lasted for 2,869 broadcasts over nearly 58 years and gathered an enormous audience, being broadcast not only in Britain and in many other Commonwealth countries, but throughout the world by the

. On 2 March 2004, at the age of 95, following advice from his doctors, Cooke announced his retirement from ''Letter from America''; he died less than a month later, on 30 March 2004, at his home in

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. Five years later, BBC Radio 4 premiered '' Americana'', touted as the successor to ''Letter from America'', however it lasted less than three years, ending in the autumn of 2011.

Availability

A compilation of the programme's transcripts was published in 2004. Scripts are available to the public via Boston University http://archives.bu.edu/web/alistair-cooke/. In 2012, the BBC made over 900 episodes freely available online in full. The BBC also broadcast a documentary by Alvin Hall about ''Letter from America''. In March 2014, the BBC announced it had recovered over 650 lost editions of the programme, recorded by two listeners, Roy Whittaker in

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and David Henderson in

Warwickshire Warwickshire (; abbreviated Warks) is a county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, and the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avo ...

.Letter from America rediscovered
bbc.co.uk, 28 March 2014

References

External links

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Episodes available for download
{{BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 programmes BBC World Service programmes Peabody Award-winning radio programs Works about the United States United Kingdom–United States relations British documentary radio programmes 1946 radio programme debuts 2004 radio programme endings