Roger Cook, the Antipodean inquisitor who turned the doorstep into a theatre of ritual humiliation, has filed his final report at the age of 83, peacefully, which must have come as something of a surprise to a man who spent half his working life being punched, kicked, bitten by dogs and occasionally hospitalised by people who preferred their secrets unminced.
Born in Auckland in 1943 and raised in Australia, Cook arrived in Britain in the late Sixties with the air of a man who had already decided that the world was full of villains and that it was his job to introduce them to the concept of accountability, usually at close range with a microphone. He invented the doorstep interview the way other people invent excuses: it just seemed the natural thing to do. Where lesser reporters sent letters or waited for press releases, Cook preferred the ambush, preferably with cameras rolling and a film crew trying not to trip over their own ethical qualms.
The Cook Report, which ran for sixteen series and attracted audiences of up to twelve million, was less current affairs than medieval morality play with better lighting. Villains, con-men, protection racketeers, baby-traders and the occasional Balkan war criminal were lured into the open, only to discover that the small, determined New Zealander in the leisure shirt was not there to exchange pleasantries. Cook took his bruises like medals. Broken ribs, dog attacks, the occasional threat to his life—he collected them the way other men collect wine. One almost expected him to produce a vintage fracture and offer tasting notes.
His genius lay in making the pursuit of justice look like an extreme sport. Other journalists might expose corruption; Cook preferred to ring the doorbell and ask the corrupt gentleman why he was such a swine, ideally while the gentleman’s neighbours were watching. It was tabloid in method, Reithian in intent, and endlessly watchable. He won a BAFTA special award for a quarter-century of outstanding investigative reporting, an honour that probably felt inadequate to a man who had once been hospitalised nearly thirty times in the name of public service broadcasting.
In private he was, by all accounts, rather more civilised than the average episode of his programme suggested. He leaves a wife, Frances, a daughter, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that a generation of journalists grew up thinking that real reporting involved getting shouted at in several languages while trying not to drop the recording equipment.