2025 Wrap Up: Moments of the Year

I will be on Virgin Media later this evening for the Tonight Show’s end of year review, and I thought I would share some of my speaking notes with you here. 

We’ve been asked to prep our “of the year”s; moment, story, villain and person. I only have time to get into “moments of the year” before I need to head to Ballymount, but I will cover the others over the coming days. 

Moment of the year - domestic 

I would bet money on us talking about Jim Gavin dropping out here. But to me the sleeper moment of the year - the one that in 15 years time we’ll look back on as an omen - is the catastrophic Blackwater river fish kill earlier this year due to a mass polluting event. 

Philip Boucher-Hayes and the rest of the Countrywide team dedicated their full programme to this story in early October, and it stopped me in my tracks. They have also done numerous followups - public service broadcasting at its finest - go listen if you missed it. 

He documents how this death of not just fish but a full ecosystem was down to the deadly combination of climate change, bad behaviour by industries bordering the river, and the abject failure of the state to invest in infrastructure to monitor the river and in doing so, enforce environmental laws. Then they go and fight for the right of 7000 farmers to be the only ones in Europe to not have to follow pollution guidelines. 

This cocktail is something that I believe we will look back on in 10-20 years time with a kind of regret that we can’t yet understand. 

Moment of the year - international 

Internationally the moment that sits with me is the image of the skeletal child being held by his mother in Gaza, that was captured by photographer Ahmed al-Arini and that made the front page of the New York Times. I get emotional just thinking about his little spine poking out, and the black plastic bag he is wearing instead of nappy. The image broke through in a way that others of the humanitarian crisis did not - even affecting Trump and causing him to push for more aid to be allowed into the strip. 

What happened after that photo was published also feels emblematic to me of the year and the moment we are in - accusations that the boy was only thin because of a medical condition, that the photo was propaganda. 

The boy did have a medical condition, but not one that doctors say was sufficient reason for his skeletal appearance. 

The NYT printed a correction saying if they’d known they would have included that information, but not that they wouldn’t have run the photo. NPR did a thoughtful follow up, and The Guardian wrote a lengthy reflection on it, which I will quote here: 

Editors say reference to Muhammad’s existing health issues would have been included if known – and the picture captions have now been amended – but they consider that the images still stand, saying a sick child who is starving is “not any less deserving of our attention than any other child”, as previous reporting featuring malnourished infants with underlying feeding conditions has demonstrated. In other words, the face of malnourishment is most often the face of the already vulnerable.

The overall impression I am left with is one of confusion, frustration, and a deep sadness, which is very much the theme of 2025.