Alistair Cooke reads 'Letter From America'
During her years as a BBC Governor, my mother fought the good fight on a number of issues which came up again and again in the boardroom. One was docu-dramas (she doesn't much like them); another was the commercialization of the Olympics (she doesn't care for that either); but the one issue which put her at odds with more producers than any other, was her cast iron conviction that extreme violence on television, fictionalized or real, is taken so far, so often that most of us accept it, and some of us copy it.
This is a passage from Alistair Cooke's Letter From America No.1816, from December 1983, entitled 'Hype':-
'Somebody – it may have been me – once said that a fire is easier to film than an idea. And this truth is, unfortunately, the first article of faith in the credo of all television news cameramen who are not afraid to move in for the first spurt of blood from a dying man, to remind us old film buffs of that ghastly shot of a body slumping out of a car in Bonnie and Clyde, which alas set the mode for a thousand subsequent blood baths.'
Great minds. 'Cookie' (not my nickname – I got that from John Cole) was born on this day in 1908.
