The Alistair Cooke memorial lecture 2008

Alistair Cooke would have been 100 years old this year.

An historic ‘meeting of minds' between two great wordsmiths: David Mamet, the American playwright, screenwriter and film director, and Alistair Cooke, the British writer, broadcaster and BBC icon who lived most of his life in the USA.

Alistair Cooke would have been one hundred years old this November. As part of the BBC's centenary celebrations, David Mamet has been invited to deliver this year's prestigious "Alistair Cooke Memorial Lecture". Established in Alistair's honour after his death in 2004, the first Memorial Lecturer was Senator John McCain.

David Mamet and Justin Webb during the lecture.

David Mamet will give his lecture before an invited audience at the newly opened Broad Stage in Santa Monica, California. It will be broadcast round the world on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service to up to 60 million people. And the subject of the lecture, fittingly, is "language" - a passion for both David Mamet and Alistair Cooke.

The event is hosted by the BBC's North America Editor, Justin Webb.

Alistair Cooke was an outstanding writer and broadcaster for radio, print and television. His subjects embraced language, politics, jazz, films and golf. And his "Letters From America" covered 50 years of American life, from the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Watergate to the tragedy of the Twin Towers.

David Mamet is one of his country's most famous living writers, an astute - and often controversial - observer of American life. His books, plays, films and TV series range in subject from politics to personal morality, from violence to celebrity, religion to ethnicity, the craft of acting to martial arts.

His ground-breaking plays Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna shook up the theatre world; his films and screenplays such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Wag The Dog and American Buffalo are now Hollywood classics.