25 years of Jon Snow on Channel 4 News

Since gay marriage is enshrined, I think it’s time J Snow and I finally came out. This year marks our blissful mutual union of 25 years on Channel 4 News. Yes, a quarter of a century of wearing out successive editors with our inability to stop screwing up.

You see, Jon is the living journalistic embodiment of a (young) golden labrador, shut up in the car for far too long until finally released into the open fields on a long, hot, July day.

He bounds out all energy, drive, dynamism, noise, excitement, enthusing all around him, leaving others to deal with the minor details like focus or fact.

Just this week his oratorio in the morning news conference ranged from exuberant to absurd, but uber-energising to all around facing another day’s toil at the coalface of Channel 4 News.

Years ago, I watched in mounting horror as Jon, arriving late into the Kosovo war, bounded over to bedraggled refugees, bursting with energy at finally being on the ground.

His question was typically objective, along the lines of: “Tell me – have the evil Serb Nazi war criminals been ever so beastly towards you, sir?”

Fine – except these were Serbs, kicked out by Albanians. I recall hustling Jon into his car sharpish, as the first rocks and stones came in.

Jon is forever just coming or going from somewhere as if in terror of a night in with himself – but he simply loves people and they love him back the length and breadth of the land.

Our Jon has fought and won great battles down the years with the most powerful forces and all for Channel 4 News.

I refer, obviously to the epic battles over whether Trevor McDonald or J Snow would finally get that first interview with Nelson Mandela.

Who can erase the image of President Ahmadinejad in Tehran and the genuine fear etched into his face? Here was a man who thought he knew about loathing and ambition in his drive to wipe Israel from the face of the earth – then the man saw, up close, Jon against ITV News and the no-prisoners fight for the interview.

Many enthuse, rightly, about Jon’s warmth, humanity and passion and his passport to National Treasure status in recent years.

While his on-air clangers long ago passed into national legend and, as I write, are doubtless being archived at a museum near you: “Over to our correspondent now Kylie Minogue…”

Kylie Morris’s arrival in Washington opens up a whole new vista for a reprise, I guess.

Or this, years ago, faced with the TV gold of a live guest in Düsseldorf who did not, in fact, speak English: “Ah – sprechen Sie English?”

Followed by Pythonesque turn to camera and grimace of horror.

Jon is forever just coming or going from somewhere as if in terror of a night in with himself – but he simply loves people and they love him back the length and breadth of the land.

Yes, he is loud. Yes he seldom, if ever, listens to anyone trying to brief him about a coming interview. Yes, he can kebab guests in interviews, and yes, he can generally drive us all bonkers on any given day.

But that warmth, commitment, extraordinary energy and the driving emotion that journalism can and should change things for the better has rightly kept him at the epicentre of a news show that achieves that better than any other I know.

The anger of youth to make it better, to stop it being the way it is, has never left him. For that alone he has rightly come to embody in the studio, all that Channel 4 News should aspire to.

Jon Snow reports from Haiti following the earthquake in 2010