Over 2,869 broadcasts and 58 years, Cooke offered wry, piercing observations of American society to Britons via the BBC. Horrific video shows subway carriage chanting 'F*** the Jews, long live Palestine, we are Nazis and proud'. Webb describes how Gloria had thought of joining the Labour Party, but the representative who comes to their home ‘was overweight and had a Birmingham accent.

Prior to joining Radio 4's Today programme in 2009, Justin Webb secured the only British TV interview with President Obama in The White House. The Quakers paid for my entire education, so I shouldn’t really be too upset at them; on the other hand what they paid for was abysmal. That lack of a relationship with his father led my father to have personal problems in his life, and I’m pretty sure affected the way he brought me and my siblings up. He raised eyebrows within the BBC in 2006 when, at a seminar on impartiality, he said the corporation was anti-American and treated the US with "scorn and derision", according it "no moral weight". In his Guardian days he was taken to task by the then editor, Alastair Hetherington, for underplaying race in the south.

Without you,’ he wrote, ‘without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.

Brought up by his Quaker mother Gloria and stepfather, Charles, who she married two years after he was born, Justin Webb introduces us to his real father just seventeen pages in to The Gift Of A Radio. Although Cooke became a US citizen in 1941, critics of his book may regard it as a vintage case of the white male journalist as anthropologist explaining weird and wonderful foreigners to the homeland.They still all go on family holidays and they watch rugby, about which the whole family is passionate.