Pizzas galore!

From the early 1950s to the early 1960s when he presented Omnibus - a kind of Panorama of the arts - for the CBS network, to the 22 years from 1971 to 1993 when he topped and tailed Masterpiece Theatre for PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service), Cooke was a familiar face to generations of cultivated Americans.

He was the prototype mid-Atlantic man: perceived in Britain as the best sort of sophisticated American and in the United States as the very model of an English gentleman (only the more quizzical of his friends occasionally wondered whether this constituted something of an identity crisis).

Alfred Alistair Cooke - as he became when he added "Alistair" to his formerly single Christian name, by deed poll on his 22nd birthday - was the son of a Lancashire Methodist lay preacher and an Irish mother and, although born in Salford, was brought up largely in Blackpool, whither his parents (both of whom suffered from lung trouble) had moved to take advantage of the bracing sea breezes.

He broke free of the strict Nonconformist constraints of his family background - no alcoholic drink was permitted in the house and no games were to be played on Sundays - by winning a scholarship to what became Blackpool Grammar School.

The headmaster there was a tremendous snob but also had a genuine regard for English literature. It was largely thanks to his influence and inspiration that the young Cooke won an exhibition to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he came under the competing influences of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and I. A. Richards.

On one occasion Cooke read an essay on the Romantic poets as Quiller-Couch was dressing for dinner. He was proud of the piece, and slightly disconcerted to have Q walking in and out in search of his clothes.

When he had finished, Q pronounced in his too-contrived style: "Cooke, you must learn to murder your darlings."

After a while he did, so that although his undergraduate writing often tried too hard to keep up with William Empson, who also wrote theatre, book and film reviews in Cambridge, Cooke's later writing was admirably straightforward.

He took a first in Part I of the English Tripos and a second in Part II, a disparity perhaps to be explained by his editorship in his last year of Granta - where he worked with William Empson, Jacob Bronowski and Michael Redgrave - and his part in founding a university drama company, the Mummers.

He got an early foothold, too, in professional journalism when in 1929 he was appointed Cambridge drama critic of The Manchester Guardian. He also wrote for both The Nation and The Athenaeum (both of them later incorporated into The New Statesman).

In 1931 he organised a visit to Germany by a group of friends calling themselves the Oxford and Cambridge Players, and saw Hitler in full spate outside the Braunhaus.

But Cooke was so politically naive that he was more interested in Hitler's rhetorical devices than in his message.