Cooke's Letters in public archive

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/entertainment/7738878.stm

Version 0 of 1.

Nearly 3,000 scripts from Alistair Cooke's Letter From America broadcasts are to be made available to the public in an electronic archive.

The scripts from the long-running BBC radio series will be published by the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Cooke's literary executor Colin Webb is a former student of the university.

Letter From America was broadcast every week from March 1946 until Cooke's retirement in March 2004. He died just a few weeks after his final programme.

In his Letters, Cooke chronicled every aspect of American life including the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the assassination of JFK.

The series was the longest-running in history to be presented by a single person.

The searchable archive will be open to academics at the university as well as visiting members of the public.

Its announcement on Thursday comes on the centenary of Cooke's birth.

His scripts are currently held by the BBC and Boston University in Massachusetts.