How to Live to 100, review: Jon Snow gets the scoop – no stress, oily fish and... Communism

Jon Snow is not coping well with retirement. It happens to a lot of people who have left jobs which kept them busy and whose sense of self was tied up with their careers. The prospect of unlimited leisure time does not fill them with joy.

“Suddenly there’s the rest of my life ahead of me,” said Snow in How to Live to 100 (Channel 4), in a tone of some alarm. Actually, it’s only semi-retirement, because Snow, now 75, still gets to make programmes such as this one. But he no longer has the daily buzz of the Channel 4 newsroom (you would think that having a toddler at home – Snow and his wife welcomed a baby in 2021 – might keep him busy, but hey ho). 

In a bid to find out how to live contentedly into old age, he has ventured to three communities where life expectancy is uncommonly high: the Greek island of Ikaria, Loma Linda in California, and Japan. This is not a new idea; Miriam Margolyes visited Loma Linda for her own show a couple of years back, and you surely don’t need anyone to tell you that following a Mediterranean diet and eating oily fish is good for your health. 

But his visit to Ikaria went deeper than tips about diet and the benefits of walking. The people he met on this tiny island (population: 8,500) seemed remarkably free of stress. Some had lived there all of their lives, while others had returned after years away. They enjoyed the simple things in life, away from the rat race, and they took their time about it. Snow went to meet an octogenarian retired doctor who had taken up sailing and arranged to meet the presenter by the water. 

Rather than give a specific time, the doctor said he’d be there “in the morning”. “We have three times: from sunrise to noon, from noon to sunset, and then from sunset to the next sunrise,” he explained. “This is our time, not the clock.” The elderly are looked after by their families, not placed in care homes, although that's true of plenty of other countries. And did the island’s communist past have something to do with the residents’ happiness? One elderly local said that islanders consider themselves equal, and care little for money, which took away stress. None of this was terribly scientific, but it did provide food for thought.