Channel 4 News at 25: Nick Paton Walsh

Last Modified: 01 Nov 2007
By: Nick Paton Walsh

Foreign correspondent Nick Paton Walsh picks his favourite Channel 4 News moment - an interview earlier this year that opened up Iranian-UK diplomatic channels...

I've only been back in the UK for just over a year. Before that I lived in Russia, where 'real' news like Channel 4 News is hard to come by.

Since I've been back one moment has stood out, in which the immediate impact of television news was clearest to me.

It came11 days into the capture of 15 British sailors by Iran.

Jon Snow spent the weekend bugging various Iranian contacts and came in on the Monday pretty chuffed at having skewered - for want of a better word - an exclusive interview with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator.

Patrolling the border with Iraq, the sailors had been accused of straying in to Iranian waters, and a huge amount of time had passed in which it became palpably clear that - partly due to the holiday at that time in Iran, and partly due to Britain's not all that great contacts with Tehran - the Blair administration really didn't know what was going on in the Iranian political elite's mindset.

It was more than evident in all the conversations we were having that there simply wasn't anyone important for our diplomats in Iran to speak to.

There was nobody home.

At the start of the crisis, one of the relatives of a senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps told me it would take about 10 days for the sailors to be released. He was right.

The holidays had to end before Tehran woke up to what they were doing, and the fuss it had caused.

But in the meantime, they managed to get their message out.

Jon Snow spent the weekend bugging various Iranian contacts and came in on the Monday pretty chuffed at having skewered - for want of a better word - an exclusive interview with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator.

After Iran's diminutive president (with whom he was bitterly feuding) Larijani was perhaps the only voice on the matter you'd want to hear.

Despite the nightmare of cables and Farsi that the programme fought through, we were left broadcasting the most senior comments on the crisis yet, live, just after seven o'clock.

The Foreign Office, for all its diplomatic excellence, clearly hadn't had exchanges at that level, and perhaps the Iranians were trying to remind us of how poorly our diplomatic relations had deteriorated.

Still, watching the solution to a crisis begin to present itself live, just on the other side of the door into Studio 6, was to watch the major impact TV news can have at the closest possible quarters.