America: A Personal History of the United States

January 30, 2010 10:25 AM

America: A Personal History of the United States (MLYT). Alistair Cooke's critically acclaimed series, originally released in 1972 to educational institutions in the US, but still unavailable on DVD in region 1 despite requests to the BBC. Synopsis here.
posted by Balonious Assault (13 comments total)

Or you could just buy it on R2.
posted by Artw at 11:23 AM on January 30, 2010

Alistaire Cooke is one of the most brilliant cultural critics of modern times; I remember really digging his Letter From America even when he was in his 80s. He was, after all, the guy who could remember World War I (!) on September 11. And he wasn't slow to see what it was doing to us; here he is less than four months after 9/11/01, on December 3:

In the second week of September the first suspicion that the Justice Department's inquiry into terrorism might violate the civil rights of legal immigrants "yearning to breathe free" was happily pacified by the attorney general's report that four people had been held, none yet charged, and one had been released... Now Attorney General Ashcroft is holding, without trial, well over a thousand suspects and until last Tuesday refused to release their names - a denial which everybody at once thought an abominable, un-American, undemocratic, violation of the liberty of the subject... Mr Ashcroft said that to identify them and the relevant charges would be of incalculable help to Bin Laden. Nevertheless the storm of public protest was so overwhelming that he released a list of names anyway.

But the tidal wave of protest has swept across the political landscape - from the farthest left of course, but through all moderate country to - this is important - to the most conservative right. At the moment it seems inconceivable that the president can maintain or legally sustain his executive order to deny non-citizens a jury trial and commit them to secret military tribunals. The president, I suspect, may well come to envy and to echo the unforgotten Fiorello La Guardia - the bounciest, most ruthless, of New York's reform mayors.

‘I seldom,’ said Mayor La Guardia, ‘I seldom make a mistake but when I do it's a beaut.’

There are a whole lot more great bits in the Letter From America archive, but I have to say that I'm really, really looking forward to this series. Thanks, Balonious Assault. I'm going to enjoy it.
posted by koeselitz at 11:42 AM on January 30, 2010

I'm shocked the BBC hasn't responded to the online petition to release the video in R1 format.
posted by birdherder at 12:12 PM on January 30, 2010

I found myself listening to him in his twilight-years series on NPR. He was a complete fool. His passing brought me no small amount of pleasure.
posted by clarknova at 1:05 PM on January 30, 2010

It's not just about region coding. The whole series will have to be converted from PAL to NTSC format, which is another process in and of itself.

(Yes, I know. I used to think that "digital video is digital video", but when it comes to DVD, there are actually differences in the encoding for PAL, NTSC, and SECAM. I'm as surprised as you are, believe me. Even more annoying -- PAL DVD players can mostly play NTSC DVDs, but not the other way around. It's led to many hours of annoyance and lots of number crunching in my Mac to get some of the wrong-format video I have turned into something I can burn onto a disc and play outside my computer.)
posted by hippybear at 1:43 PM on January 30, 2010

Nice find, Balonious Assault
posted by Cranberry at 3:24 PM on January 30, 2010

clarknova: “I found myself listening to him in his twilight-years series on NPR. He was a complete fool. His passing brought me no small amount of pleasure.”

Good god, do you realize the man was around 100 years old when he made those programs? Cut him some slack. And 'complete fool' – one wonders what on earth he could have said to inspire that kind of feeling in you. You're being a jerk about it – he was intelligent and thoughtful during his long, long stretch as a radio commentator who tried to show the UK what exactly was going on in America. Really, I get the feeling there must be some political sensibility of yours that he offended to make you wish death on him.
posted by koeselitz at 3:45 PM on January 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

I figured there would be some Alistair Cooke hate, from looking at the other threads in which he was discussed to see if this was going to be a double post. I find the series to be fascinating, and I really enjoy his perspective. The opening scene in the first episode, "The First Impact", which shows the not-yet-complete World Trade Center buildings in New York City, is particularly jarring. My parents used this series to plan destinations on our cross country car trips, which makes it even more interesting to me. I'm looking forward to exploring the Letter From America archive too. Thanks for that link, koeselitz.
posted by Balonious Assault at 7:38 PM on January 30, 2010

You're welcome - and now I notice that Letter From America was apparently the longest-running radio program of all time. Almost sixty years, from 1946 to 2004, and the guy was almost forty already when he started doing it. Wow.
posted by koeselitz at 7:48 PM on January 30, 2010

This is great. Thanks for posting it.
posted by Miko at 9:02 PM on January 30, 2010

Nick Clarke's biography talks about the problems with securing clearances, which were compounded to some degree by a disengagement at the BBC during the John Birt era with Cooke and the corporation's past triumphs.

Another grave -- and long-running -- source of irritation was the BBC's failure to produce a video version of America. If arrangements had been made at the time (in 1972), it might have been possible to sort out the relevant copyright problems. But il was only some years after the series first went out that the growth in the market for home video made the enterprise commercially viable. By then, it was a much more complex task to secure the necessary rights, particularly for the music. Cooke knew it wouldn't be easy, but never believed that the BBC had tried hard enough to make it happen. It became such a contentious issue that he put off for years his co-operation on an audio cassette of Letters from America that the BBC was desperate to release. Even when the Corporation suggested putting it out to coincide with his eightieth birthday in November 1988, Cooke simply declined to help - a point that was picked up by the media. The Sunday Times said baldly that Cooke had issued an ultimatum: no videos, no audio cassette: 'Cooke is not known for his false modesty,' the article continued, 'is aware of his worth and keen on monetary rewards and has every right to make this demand. But there are those in the BBC who regard it as being held to ransom and so it looks unlikely that the cassette will appear for a while yet.'

The rights issues don't get any easier with the passage of time and the extension of copyright terms in the US. (It took a while for Clark's Civilisation and Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, both of which got PBS showings in the 1970s, to make it onto R1.)

In his very late life, Cooke's small-c conservatism seemed to become more partisan and frankly cantankerous, and Letter from America became the stuff of parody on Radio 4's Dead Ringers. I remember being very annoyed with certain bits around the time of the Iraq war that seemed to owe more to Fox News than Cooke's lifetime of experience. I was prepared to cut him that slack, though.
posted by holgate at 9:40 AM on January 31, 2010

Thanks for cluing me in to this, I'd never heard of it. Luckily, it's available on my favorite probably-not-quite-legal download site; if I like it, I'll do what I usually do and grab it off Amazon UK (whose shipping to the US really isn't all that bad, considering).
posted by jtron at 11:50 AM on January 31, 2010

Thanks for posting this!
posted by mds35 at 7:14 PM on January 31, 2010