Capturing what Alistair Cooke saw

A master of multiple media, Alistair Cooke is best-known to US audiences for television, as host of "Omnibus," in the '50s, and "Masterpiece Theatre" from 1971-1993. British audiences know Cooke for radio. His "Letter From America" ran weekly on the BBC from 1946 until just four weeks before his death, in 2004. He also wrote several books and was for many years chief US correspondent for Britain's Guardian newspaper.

Now we learn that Cooke had a mastery, however rudimentary, of film, too.

The most interesting element in "The Unseen Alistair Cooke," the documentary which runs in the "Masterpiece" slot on Channel 2 tomorrow night, is footage drawn from the 150 reels of 8mm home movies Cooke took during his many US travels. We see him on a boat with Charlie Chaplin and beside a bus with Adlai Stevenson, for example, as well as swimming, golfing, and sightseeing at Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.

"Unseen" manages to squeeze a lot into its hour. It has to. Cooke, whose centenary was Thursday, lived a long life. The film takes Cooke from the strict Methodism of his boyhood in the English seaside resort of Blackpool to Cambridge University, where he flourished, to America, where he really flourished, on a post-graduate fellowship.

At Cambridge, Cooke had changed his name from the somewhat dowdy Alfred to the far suaver Alistair. And that suavity would stand him in good stead over here. The plumminess of Cooke's accent and manner made his enduring fascination with the New World all the more appealing to his fellow Americans (he became a citizen in 1941).

During the broadcast, we hear from colleagues, friends, and family. The most notable friend is Lauren Bacall. Family members include Cooke's widow and first wife, daughter, stepdaughter, and son.

John Byrne Cooke's resemblance to his father is quite startling. Even more startling is the sense we get of Cooke's half-hearted interest in his offspring. Filming his son's electric trains, he took the trouble to lie on the floor to get the angle right (the man really did have a good eye). He just didn't bother to include his son in any of the footage.

It was a characteristic oversight. So was something else "Unseen" alludes to, Cooke's surprisingly obtuse view of the civil rights movement. His eyewitness account of the assassination of Robert Kennedy is justly famous (we hear an excerpt in "Unseen"), but Cooke was never able to bring a comparable sense of empathy or passion to his coverage of race. Which is all the stranger in that no small part of what drew him to America was jazz.

For all Cooke's embrace of America, he retained a very British taste for the tidy. Tidiness tends to be equally alien in the nursery and on the barricades. Conversely, it served Cooke superbly in explaining complicated plots for PBS viewers or assaying a week's-worth of US events for BBC listeners.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.