Jon Snow: The Last Big Review – the best soundtrack you could ever hope for | TV & radio

Jon Snow: The Last Big Story is a joy that keeps you from crying. The one-hour documentary follows the 78-year-old investigative reporter and former Channel 4 news anchor after he is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. During his visit with his wife, Dr Precious Lunga, to a family in Zambia, he heard a story about an unexplained near-environmental disaster involving a Chinese mining company. And so the documents are opened outside and we see a man in his possessions and caught by what 850,000 Alzheimer’s patients in the UK alone, to say nothing of their carers, families and other loved ones, know that it is an unforgiving, unrelenting condition.

At the beginning, Snow asks curiously and nonchalantly what the people with cameras around him are doing. “We are making a film about your work,” explains Laura who interviewed her. “And who are you now?” “The blade!” says Snow, the bishop’s son. “How wonderful!” When they were walking together in the car a little while later, he bowed and said politely: “I forgot your name already…​​?” “Laura,” he tells her. “Honey,” he says, sitting back. “I’m Jon.”

The old history of Chile speaking from El Salvador, Manhattan after 9/11 and Bhopal, and asking Mr. Mandela, Reagan and Gorbachev, is followed by his appointment with the doctor to measure his descent – he does not know the day of the day and he cannot remember three test words in a few minutes after being told – and see if there are any medical tests that he can participate in, because the person concerned participates. But it’s hard not to look at his hurt wife, who is also a psychologist, and not see a woman trying not to think about when her husband will leave.

In Zambia, he heard from a safari guide that a dam had collapsed at the Sino-Metals Leach Zambia copper mine, dumping what would be found to be 1.5 tons of toxic waste, including uranium, arsenic and cyanide, into surrounding areas and waterways that will continue to flow. His nephew Charles Sibanda-Lunga takes him to see environmental activists Chepa Mahata and Sarah Sakani, who have a lot of information. As they walk down the river they ask again, cheerfully and nonchalantly, what the people with the cameras are doing on the boat. They are making a film about him. He is laughing. “Do you know about this?” Precious asked. He said.

He listens to everything the activists have to say, asks the right questions, hears the scope of the story and sums it up to Charles as “the whole nine yards of torture, suffering and failure”. And then, in a brief moment of self-admission, she asks him: “Am I doing well? A little further, Mahata is taking her to a dangerous wreck, the group filming them as Snow repeatedly – and over and over – asks her how many people have been affected and how many have died. In the end, Laura calls Charles.

But Snow’s compassion, his angry sense of justice (“The whole farm is dead! And nothing has been done”) has not changed. Likewise his courage when the group, which now includes his former editor Ben de Pear, attended a meeting between the people affected by their lawyer Brigadier Siachitema, and was broken by the police and a representative of the mining company. “Have we got everything we need?” says Snow as De Pear bundles them into the car to go back. As he returns home, we hear him thanking them all “for helping me so much, considering my nature”. Ben said: “Our chance is ours.

Later the team receives an explosive report of a dam collapse and sends it to international news agencies, who are eagerly covering the story of Africa’s worst natural disaster for 30 years. It is unclear how Snow remembers his part in breaking the story, but he seems happy to be out there.

Remembering his work, he said: “It would be arrogant to say that I have done very well in all this time.”

Few would argue that, or say that the film-within-a-film is now part of it. The honorable contributions made by these documentaries should not be overlooked, either. A smart, gentle-but-sentimental hour gives the reporter her dignity and the man her dignity, as they acknowledge the brutality and sadness that this disease causes. If this is Snow’s song, it’s as good as it gets.