Jon Snow has fearlessly put his Alzheimer’s on brutal display

Who on Earth would wear a jaunty, multicoloured necktie to the scene of a deadly mining disaster? Why, Jon Snow, of course. For over three decades, the Channel 4 News anchor was renowned not only for his colourful accessories, but also his ability to mix serious broadcasting with grace and humour. “Twinkly yet firm, tenacious yet human,” as one admiring fellow journo summarised. “[Snow] should be required viewing for those reporters who treat the medium as a gym for their egos.” Snow left Channel 4 in 2021 and, last month, he revealed his Alzheimer’s diagnosis while promoting a new feature-length documentary, Jon Snow: A Last Big Story – and now the documentary is out. The film was originally intended as a dementia-awareness-raising travelogue following Snow and his wife, Precious Lunga, on safari near Victoria Falls. While in Zambia, however, Snow was alerted to a huge ecological disaster at a Chinese-owned copper mine; a dam had burst, devastating local communities and poisoning rivers with a cocktail of lethal chemicals. The disaster hadn’t made the news, and Snow was determined to investigate. Not an easy job for a man we had just witnessed being unable to recall the three words that a neurosurgeon had asked him to recall a minute earlier. Lunga, a neuroscientist, is fully on board with her husband’s desire to investigate this mining outrage; she knows that it’s vital for him to keep active. Indeed, having interviewed various whistle-blowers and scented a cover-up by Zambian authorities, the now 78-year-old and visibly physically diminished Snow declares that he feels “50 years younger”. Jon Snow spent 32 years at Channel 4, after reporting for ITN as Washington correspondent and diplomatic editor (Photo: Jack Taylor/Getty for Altitude Film) 50 years ago, he was reporting on the plight of the boat people fleeing Vietnam, before becoming ITN’s Washington correspondent and diplomatic editor. Then, in 1989, he found his ideal home as the main presenter of Channel 4 News, with its founding ethos of “no sport, no royal stories, no plane crashes and lashings of foreign news”. Over the next 32 years, he reported from the Berlin Wall and from Ground Zero and interviewed the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela – the latter a personal high point for a man who was expelled from Liverpool University in 1970 for his part in an anti-apartheid protest. That student radicalism never really left this confessed “bloody public-school pinko liberal”, who declined an OBE and refused to wear a Remembrance Day poppy. It also led to accusations of bias when, in March 2019, while reporting at a pro-Brexit protest, Snow said that he had “never seen so many white people in one place”. Channel 4 responded that it was “an unscripted observation”, while Ofcom cleared him over his remarks. Either way, the writing was arguably on the wall, and Snow’s retirement allowed him a gentler remit, travelling to Greece, Japan and California for a Channel 4 series, How to Live to 100. A series seeking answers on how to live a long, happy and healthy life looks cruelly ironic in the light of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. And yet Jon Snow: A Last Big Story could turn out to be one of his greatest achievements, as both a poignant insight into this particular form of dementia, and in hopefully bringing some redress for those Zambians whose lives and lands have been blighted. Not that the documentary skirts around the practical problems of his Alzheimer’s – he asks bemused witnesses the same question multiple times, for example. One quietly devastating sequence in particular underlines the severity of his condition: he fails to recognise the accompanying camera crew and why they are filming him. But as he says: “Worrying about getting old is absurd… stop worrying and get on with it.” ‘Jon Snow: A Last Big Story’ is available to stream on Channel 4