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 "Alistair
Cooke at his most regal best." "A perfect
Christmas present" "At Last - Cooke's
Superb Series" "an absolute expert on his subject
- an encyclopedia of knowledge" |
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First transmitted in 1972, 'Alistair Cooke's
America' is a series of thirteen films documenting his personal views of
the history of the USA from the early settlers, to the present day.
Review
A classic from what now seems like the Golden Age of TV
documentaries, Alistair Cooke’s America was first broadcast in
1972-3 and it remains, along with the contemporary The World at
War, an example of how documentaries should be made: there’s
none of the flashy editing, wobbly camera-work, over-intrusive
music or costumed actors prancing around in the mode of Simon
Schama’s fussy History of Britain for example. Here there is
just scenery, the odd map or illustration and—most
importantly—Cooke himself talking directly and unhurriedly to
camera. Over 13 leisurely hours, he narrates a "personal
history" of his adopted country, beginning with his own arrival
as a fresh young Cambridge graduate in the 1930s before taking
us back to the very foundations of America, its colonisation,
the war of Independence (told in an admirably non-partisan way)
and so on through momentous and turbulent decades right up to
the early 1970s, where Civil Rights and protest movements are
high on the agenda.
Throughout, Cooke interweaves anecdotes and digressions into
the main narrative, charming the viewer with his storytelling
precisely in the manner so beloved of listeners to his admirable
Letter from America. By the end he has a warning that, although
delivered in 1973, remains as telling today as it did then:
America, like Ancient Rome as depicted by Gibbon in his Decline
and Fall, stands poised between its remarkable vitality and its
equally remarkable capacity for decadence. Whether, like Rome,
the USA becomes a victim of its own internal divisions or
somehow manages to pull back from the brink still remains to be
seen.
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