{"id":2468733,"date":"2026-06-20T21:13:41","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T21:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2468733"},"modified":"2026-06-20T21:13:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T21:13:41","slug":"jon-snow-a-last-big-story-review-the-finest-swan-song-you-could-hope-for-television-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/jon-snow-a-last-big-story-review-the-finest-swan-song-you-could-hope-for-television-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"Jon Snow: A Last Big Story review \u2013 the finest swan song you could hope for | Television & radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

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J<\/span>on Snow: A Last Big Story is a valediction that forbids mourning. The hour-long documentary follows the 78-year-old investigative journalist and former Channel 4 news anchor in the wake of his diagnosis with Alzheimer\u2019s disease. During the course of one of his visits with his wife, Dr Precious Lunga, to family in Zambia, he gets wind of a story about a nearby environmental catastrophe involving a Chinese mining company that has gone virtually unreported. And so the documentary opens outwards and we see the man in his element as well as in the grip of what 850,000 Alzheimer\u2019s sufferers in the UK alone, to say nothing of their carers, families and other loved ones, know to be an unforgiving, relentlessly worsening condition.<\/p>\n

Early on, Snow asks with interest and no disquiet what the people with cameras around him are doing. \u201cWe\u2019re making a film about your career,\u201d his interviewer, Laura, explains. \u201cAnd who you are now.\u201d \u201cLumme!\u201d says Snow, the son of a bishop. \u201cHow nice!\u201d As they travel in a car together a little later, he leans forward and says politely: \u201cI\u2019ve forgotten your name already \u2026 ?\u201d \u201cLaura,\u201d she tells him. \u201cLovely,\u201d he says, sitting back. \u201cI\u2019m Jon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Historical footage of Snow reporting from El Salvador, Manhattan after 9\/11 and Bhopal, and interviewing Mandela, Reagan and Gorbachev, is followed by his appointment with his doctor to measure his decline \u2013 he does not know the day\u2019s date and cannot remember three test words a few minutes after he has been told them \u2013 and see if there are any treatment trials he could take part in. \u201cI am your willing victim,\u201d he says, because dementia takes memory before it takes the man. But it is hard not to look at his painfully composed wife, also a neurologist, and not see a woman trying not to envisage the time when the man, too, will have left.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>Jon Snow with his wife, Dr Precious Lunga.<\/span> Photograph: Basement Films<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Zambia, he learns from a safari guide that a dam has collapsed at a copper mine owned by Sino-Metals Leach Zambia, spilling what will eventually be found to be 1.5m tonnes of toxic waste, including uranium, arsenic and cyanide, into great swathes of the surrounding lands and waterways that will carry it yet further. His nephew Charles Sibanda-Lunga takes him to visit the environmental activists Chepa Mahata and Sarah Sakani, who have more information. As they travel downriver he asks, again with interest and no disquiet, what the people with cameras are doing on the boat. They are making a film about him. He laughs. \u201cDid you know about this?\u201d he asks Precious. She did.<\/p>\n

He listens to everything the activists say, asking pertinent questions, getting a feel for the size of the story and accurately summarising it for Charles as \u201cthe whole nine yards of exploitation, suffering and failure\u201d. And then, in a rare moment of self-acknowledged vulnerability, asks him: \u201cAm I doing all right? You would say if I was not?\u201d A little further on, when Mahata is taking him round some of the appalling devastation, the team film them as Snow repeatedly \u2013 and repeatedly \u2013 asks him how many people are affected and how many have died. Eventually, Laura calls for Charles.<\/p>\n

But Snow\u2019s compassion, his outraged sense of justice (\u201cThe whole field is dead! And nothing has been done\u201d) remains undimmed. As does his courage when the team, now including his old editor Ben de Pear, attend a meeting between the affected community and their lawyer Brigadier Siachitema, and it is broken up by police and a representative of the mining company. \u201cHave we got everything we want?\u201d says Snow as De Pear bundles them into the car to retreat. As they drive home, we hear him thank them all \u201cfor being so supportive of me, given my condition\u201d. \u201cThe privilege is all ours,\u201d says Ben.<\/p>\n

Later the team gets hold of an explosive report on the dam collapse and leaks it to international news outlets, who seize with alacrity on the story of the worst environmental disaster in Africa for 30 years. It is not clear how much Snow remembers his part in breaking the story, but he seems happy that it is out there.<\/p>\n

Looking back on his career, he says: \u201cIt would be arrogant to claim that I have been excellent throughout. I haven\u2019t. But I feel I\u2019ve made an honourable contribution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Few would disagree with that, nor with the claim that the film-within-the-film here is part of it. The honourable contribution made by these documentary-makers should not be overlooked, either. This intelligent, gentle-but-unsentimental hour gives the journalist his laurels and the man his dignity, all while acknowledging the cruelty and grief behind the disease. If this is Snow\u2019s swan song, it is as fine a one as he could wish.<\/p>\n