My name is Roger Cook. Leave the microphone alone.

The sound of Roger Cook confronting yet another cowboy builder who lunges towards him to grab his microphone and stop the recording seems to be the abiding memory of Checkpoint. I’m not sure just how many cowboy builders the intrepid Cook did encounter but his pioneering investigative programme exposing con-men, injustice and cock-ups was a BBC Radio 4 fixture for twelve years. Roger Cook's death was announced today. 

The genesis of Checkpoint was a report that Cook had made for The World this Weekend about the activities of a loan-sharking company. It was the story that set him on ‘the uninsurable path’ that he subsequently followed. But first, how did Roger Cook come to be working for the BBC?

Roger Cook was born in 1943 in New Zealand but raised in Sydney, Australia, his father reckoning that “we’ll be safer in Australia because their armed forces are much bigger than ours”. He had ambitions to be a vet and enrolled at the agricultural college in Wagga Wagga followed by veterinary medicine at Sydney University. To help pay for his studies he answered an advert for a job as a cadet announcer at the commercial radio station 2GB. Within weeks he’d abandoned university and was working full-time for the station. He briefly left radio to work at an animation studio for a couple of years before taking up a reporting job with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Australia’s version of the BBC. In time he was shipped out to the ABC outpost in Perth where he worked on both the radio and television service as a newsreader and continuity announcer. Feeling stifled by the work he was given at ABC, and being something of a self-confessed loose cannon, Roger saved-up to make the journey back to ‘the old country’ and, in May 1968, was working for the BBC at Broadcasting House. He’d been given the name of Andrew Boyle, the editor of The World at One (known within the BBC as WATO), and he joined the team of reporters that included Nick Ross, Jonathan Dimbleby and David Jessel. Also on the team with Cook was Sue McGregor, who’d worked in South Africa, and New Zealand-born Nancy Wise, leading to Boyle nick-naming them the Colonial Contingent. He loved the ‘brisk, challenging style of The World at One’ which at the time was presented by the formidable William Hardcastle.

Bill Hardcastle and WATO producer Andrew Boyle

Cook recalled the WATO production meetings: ‘Every morning we reporters would sit around that big, untidy editorial table, which was usually covered in a layer of newspapers, scripts, coffee cups and overflowing Bakelite ashtrays. We would tentatively offer out own story ideas or compete for those already decided upon if what we proposed wasn’t considered interesting enough. If the latter was the verdict, Bill (Hardcastle) would usually announce it by muttering WGAS. I later leant that WGAS was an acronym ... it was short for who give a shit?’

As well as reporting for WATO he worked on The World this Weekend and PM and, throughout 1971, was a regular co-presenter on PM.

The World this Weekend enabled reporters to prepare longer, more in-depth reports and one story that came his way were the activities of the Turret Mortgage Company in Bristol. Cook decided to challenge the boss of the company, taking along his Uher tape recorder. Questioning his qualifications to run a finance company, apart from being a former heavyweight wrestler, did not go down well and Cook was thrown down the stairs. Retrieving his battered recorder and tape spool the whole encounter went out on air. The public response was very favourable and listeners started to send in letters about other crooked businesses and inefficient government departments which led to a number of WATO reports.  

Together with Andrew Boyle, Cook put together a pilot programme examining ‘injustice, criminality and bureaucratic bungling’. Eventually Radio 4 Controller Tony Whitby gave it the go-ahead, though it was to be produced by the Current Affairs Magazines Programme unit, also responsible for You and Yours, rather than News. They chose the title Checkpoint and, at first, the meagre budget didn’t provide for a researcher or secretary. Cook recalls he wasn’t given an office, “just the corner of someone else’s desk.”

In the first series the programme tackled exploited au pairs, cowboy estate agents, toxic waste, fairground safety, pyramid selling, computer crime and, in the first edition, opticians over-pricing spectacles. He would also continue to work for The World at One for another five years and in 1973 and 1974 was a regular presenter on You and Yours.   

The Radio Times heralds the start of 
Checkpoint on Friday 6 July 1973

The first edition of Checkpoint was broadcast on Radio 4 on 6 July 1973 and it continued pretty much every week until March 1980 apart from small breaks in the summer and over Christmas. From May 1980 onwards there were more distinct series which eventually settled down to blocks of nine programmes. Cook presented virtually every edition but in the early days Nigel Murphy (in 1974), Dick Tracey (1975) and Gordon Clough (1976) occasionally took the reins. Between May 1979 and December 1980 Vincent Kane would present a monthly ‘Action Desk Edition’ with the team taking on ‘bureaucracy and business to solve listeners’ problem.’

Programme ideas were usually sparked by listener’s letters; there was a weekly postbag of 400, of which 40% might offer potential stories. Cook and the team saw the broad aims of the programme as illustrating ‘how a system fails to provide redress’ and a way of ‘teaching how people are caught in traps or unpleasant situations of various kinds...to bring out reasons why the problems have arisen and warn the public at large of the dangers.’ They were, to quote one of the producers “the department of last resort.”

Of course this kind of campaigning journalism was not without its risks. Cook was assaulted 16 times during the run suffering broken ribs, concussion, fractures, lacerations and bruises. On one occasion, in August 1975, whilst investigating property shark Robert Miller, he was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver in Frome, Somerset and ended up in hospital. Cook remembers an Australian doctor who attended to him remarking that “Jeez mate, put it this way, if you weren’t built like a brick privy, you’d probably be dead.”  

Added to these physical dangers were the internal battles within the BBC as nervous managers and governors feared legal reprisals and lawsuits. The production team developed new practices to ensure they were fire-proof such as retaining unedited master tapes of interviews and offering the accused to make written statements before door-stepping them. Scripts and interviews were vetted by BBC lawyers prior to transmission. In the first ten years there were just three successful challenges, two settled out of court and one going to the Broadcasting Complaints Committee (this was not upheld, see BBC Handbook 1984).

Checkpoint returns for its ninth series on
14 May 1980

Over the years the Checkpoint team included producer John Smithson, an award-winning reporter from Piccadilly Radio who went on to producer BBC tv’s Rough Justice series, John Stoneborough, who then became Head of Features at Capital Radio and presented their Checkpoint-like show PDQ, and ex-Sunday Times Insight team member Andrew Jennings who would later work for World in Action and Panorama. There was also Dina Gold, who’d come from Investors’ Chronicle, former press journalist Malcolm Stacey who’d also worked at Radio Leeds, BBC tv in Bristol and the Today programme as well as Paul Calverley and Tim Tate who joined Cook when he moved to Central TV. The programme won a Broadcasting Press Guild award in 1979 whilst the same year Cook won the Radio Personality of the Year Award at the Pye Radio Awards. 

Of course Checkpoint wasn’t the only programme fighting the consumer’s corner. That’s Life with Esther and her boys and its bizarre mix of journalism and light entertainment had started just a couple of months before, in May 1973. That had been born out of Braden’s Week (1968-72) which launched the careers of Esther Rantzen and John Pitman. Channel 4 offered 4 What’s It’s Worth (1982-89) fronted by Penny Junor with a team that included John Stoneborough, ex-You and Yours presenter Bill Breckon and David Stafford.  

Checkpoint artwork by Bill Prosser for 
Radio Times 12 November 1980

Here’s a typical example of Checkpoint from 27 August 1980 with the “continuing saga of the brothers Hedmanski, kings of the cowboy plumbers”. After the usual litany of missed appointments, shoddy work and general fobbing-off Cook introduces a segment in which a hidden microphone records a plumber over-charging for a job that anyone could fix for themselves for a matter of a few pence. He then returns to Brixton to confront the Leon Hedmanski about the business. “Mr Hedmanski my name is Roger Cook from the BBC Checkpoint programme. I am here to record an interview with you now about your plumbing activities. Ah, ah, leave the microphone alone...there are a lot of unanswered questions about people who have had really appalling service...leave the microphone alone”. Hedmanski proceeds to hit the microphone with Cook responding “technically that was an assault”. The face-off ends with twin brother Stanley and office manager Mike approaching with “a length of four by two timber and a cosh”.

Despite the impression given, Cook wasn’t alone during these encounters. As Dina Gold explained “one of us must always be there to bear witness when Roger accosts a villain, to be able to swear on oath, if need be, what actually happened. “

Aside from Checkpoint, Roger Cook presented some other programme for Radio 4 such as Time for Action (1977-78) in which Cook and Nick Ross would champion opposite sides of an issue on behalf of those involved. A second series followed in 1978-79 co-presented with Moyra Bremner and Bill Breckon. A series of eight programmes called Roger Cook Reports aired in 1979, one episode of which, Rock Bottom, investigated the so-called Al Capone of Pop, Don Arden. This expose of exploitation in the pop world was repeated on Radio 1 and the transcript of the programme reprinted in the New Musical Express. In 1980 there was Reel Evidence which took a deeper look at national and international matters such as the collapsing sewage system, immigration controls and the holding of personal data by government and commercial institutions.

In January 1984 Checkpoint finally made it to the cover of the Radio Times. But what listeners didn’t know is that the programme had only just over a year to run. Roger Cook was wooed by commercial television companies who wanted to put a version of Checkpoint on screen for about a year before he quit Radio 4. In fact he’d already been making some appearances on the BBC television including reports on Nationwide in the mid-70s as part of what they called the ‘Cause for Concern Unit’ and later making investigative reports for Newsnight. Eventually, in the autumn of 1984, BBC1 did offer him and his team a four-week trial run of Checkpoint. With audiences of 8 million it was judged a success but not extended to a full series. The reason was probably that BBC1 already had the Watchdog Unit which had been part of Nationwide and then Sixty Minutes since 1980. Sure enough the following July, just a couple of months after the final radio edition of Checkpoint, Watchdog became a stand-alone programme with Nick Ross, and later, of course, with Lynn Faulds Wood and John Stapleton.   

Cook's style was spoofed in the Radio 4 comedy series Delve Special (1984-87, all available on BBC Sounds) with Stephen Fry as the investigative reporter David Lander. These led to a couple of follow-up television versions: This is David Lander (1988) with Stephen Fry and This is David Harper (1990) with Tony Slattery, both on Channel 4.     

The last edition of Checkpoint went out on 29 May 1985. Roger was leaving the BBC to join Central Television to present the live Friday night debate show Central Weekend. But the plan had been to put together a Checkpoint-inspired show and this became The Cook Report, which started in July 1987 and would run for 12 years.  Roger at least acknowledges his move to Central in the opening of the programme. He also says it’s not the last you’ll hear of him on Radio 4, which was true as he was back for a one-off investigation into drug companies, Kill or Cure?, that September, but after that he didn’t return. He also says that another investigative programme will be along later. That actually was a year away when Face the Facts started in June 1986, initially presented by Margo MacDonald but mostly associated with John Waite who presented it from 1987 until it was axed in 2015.    

When The Cook Report ended Roger pretty much bowed out of regular broadcasting. In 2007 he returned for a one-off Roger Cook’s Greatest Hits on ITV1 and in 2011 he revisted a case he’d first investigated some 30 years earlier, that of serial child abuser Derek Slade, in BBC One’s An Abuse of Trust. Finally in 2016 he was on the case of the murder of notorious gangster, John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, for the regional documentary strand Inside Out West. Palmer, who was part of the Brink’s-Mat robbery operation that inspired the BBC drama series The Gold, had previously been investigated by Cook in a 1994 edition of The Cook Report.    

When a leaving party was thrown for Roger as he left The World at One he was presented with a T-shirt with the legend ‘Stand clear. I’m an accident waiting to happen. The engineers, who had repaired many a piece of recording equipment gave him a Uher microphone bent in half and mounted on a mahogany presentation plinth.  

Roger Cook 1943-2026