My friend George Negus was the same generous guy on and off screen – whether interviewing leaders or grabbing a beer

George Negus (left) and Kerry O'Brien. The pair met while working on This Day Tonight in the 1970s. ‘George was happy to work through any medium to reach the maximum audience – the stories that would make sense to people,’ O’Brien writes of his late friend Photograph: Supplied by Kerry O'Brien

I met George when I was working on This Day Tonight. I’d been there a couple of years when George joined the Sydney office and he was new to television. He, the late Paul Murphy and I went to Canberra in mid-1975 for the extraordinary sitting of the parliament around the loans affair in the Whitlam government.

We sent George to the ABC studio in Canberra to interview an academic about the constitutional issues around the loans affair. It was rough around the edges, but Paul and I just looked at each other and said, “This guy’s a natural, we’re not going to have to teach him much.”