‘How’s life in the Cotswolds?’ Mark Steel asks over Zoom.
I know what he’s hoping for.
For me to relay that I’ve just had my house cleaned by Kate Winslet (currently ‘resting’ between jobs), before I head out to meet Stella McCartney at Daylesford, where she’s agreed to turn up the hem on my Miguelina silk sundress.
(Ref: Radio 4 Mark Steel’s in Town, where he imagines typical Chipping Norton gossip to be along the lines of: ‘I see our new postman is Salman Rushdie. And guess who I bumped into at the laundrette? Hillary Clinton!’)
‘Damp,’ I say.
‘Have you been horse-riding this morning? Have you heard the town crier of Cirencester telling news of the Cotswolds? Does he come round every day?’
Ah — OK. Probably worth explaining that not absolutely all 90,800 (NB 2021 figures; could be even more now) of us Cotswoldians live in Cirencester.
‘I’m in Nailsworth,’ I say, trying to let him down gently.
And, ha! Another Cotswold stereotype. Like: we all live in towns with a crier!
(…Oh, hang on a mo. I do.)
‘The Nailsworth town crier,’ I confide, ‘is astonishingly grand-looking. Even dressed in your best ball gown, you’d look scruffy in comparison.’
‘I’m not familiar with Nailsworth.’
‘You need to come! It’s lovely. Do a programme and I’ll show you round…
‘It’s quite tiny,’ I add, forced into panicky honesty in case he genuinely turns up thinking it’s a rival to Stoke. ‘It’s near Stroud. As in, the famous farmers’ market.’
‘That’s not part of the Cotswolds, is it?’
‘You’ve just pushed my house-price down by 50k!’
‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry. That’s like doing an interview with the Glasgow Herald and going, ‘Glasgow isn’t anything to do with Scotland, is it?’’
Except that, in Nailsworth, you wouldn’t then end up dead. Necessarily.
(OK. I’m going for a new set of paragraphs now before one of us is cancelled.)
YOU WOULDN’T THINK a book about cancer would be chortlingly funny.
Would you?
You might think it could be moving, inspirational, even filled with fury against the unfairness of it all.
And Mark Steel does feel fury. ‘I got into a frothing, steaming, apoplectic rage this morning in which I could quite easily have committed arson because I was trying to deal with the bureaucracy of paying my car tax. An episode in which, I would venture, I suffered far more than I did during the cancer.’
Fury at government inefficiency, yes. About his throat cancer diagnosis? Not a jot.
It’s a story that begins in June 2023 when he’s shaving and casually notices a discrepancy in the neck area.
‘Is there supposed to be a large, solid, visible lump on one side of my neck?’ he ponders.
And then — because (as he notes) he’s a bloke of a certain age — does his level best to ignore. Except that…
He Googles it. (Of course he does!) And Google for once doesn’t scream, ‘BRAIN TUMOUR!’ It calmly tells him to wait two weeks to see if the lump goes down.
It doesn’t go down.
The journey that follows veers (as all journeys do) between:
The mundane:
Perhaps (Mark and his son muse) that patch of damp under the bath caused the lump. I wondered if I should cancel the biopsy and call a plumber instead.
The dramatic:
When he notes that the radiologist examining his neck has suddenly stopped chatting about traffic — ‘Shouldn’t be too bad on a Sunday’ — and adopted a still, stern expression instead: ‘…like the face you see on an actor at the end of a soap opera episode: the one that says, ‘Someone’s in a LOT of trouble’.
And the terrifyingly absurd:
‘I’m afraid it’s not good news, Mr Steel’, the consultant says.
‘Is this deadly?’ I asked.
‘Touch wood,’ he said. And then he touches wood…
‘Yeah,’ Mark Steel agrees, as I remind him of this. ‘That was the grimmest moment because, at that point, I thought…’ He understandably trails off.
I mean, I get it. You don’t particularly want your NHS specialist to look at your scan before advising against walking under ladders or crossing paths with black cats.
That’s not what the consultant did, of course. Instead, he recommended an operation to remove the lump, followed by a regime of radio- and chemotherapy that left Mark (temporarily) unable to eat; unable to swallow; unable even to speak. Effective, but brutal.
‘Doctor Vaz — splendid man; always very happy, smiley, brilliant — was talking to me about the first meeting you have with the team: eight or nine of them there. I assumed this was a meeting where they told me stuff. What I didn’t realise until afterwards is that they’re actually assessing your mental state.
‘Because what they are going to suggest — and the way they deal with you — depends on the sort of person you are.’
Show signs of extreme nervousness (‘I’m only guessing this; I think you’d have to be really bad’) or stroppiness, then maybe you would have to rely on dodging black cats.
‘[Dr Vaz] said, ‘We have to assess whether you can even have this treatment because, if you’re someone who’s not going to be able to get through it, we’re not going to start it.’
‘And I said, ‘Wow! What happens to those people?’
‘And he said, ‘Well, unfortunately, they often die from the disease’.’
Luckily — unlike stroppy timorousness — extreme pretentiousness isn’t a bar to treatment.
Because not only did Mark Steel wake up from the operation inexplicably speaking French. (‘I’ve got a vague memory of them all looking at each other… ‘Pourquoi? N’est-ce pas?’ One of them said, ‘I think he’s talking French!’ And they did try to get one of the African nurses over… Imagine if I’d just carried on like that forever!’)
But — even worse — wheeled into theatre, his attempts to put staff at ease by engaging in light-hearted banter were cut off mid-joke. ‘I thought I was famous!’ he begins.
And passes out before he can get to the self-deprecating punchline.
It troubles me now that those surgeons have every legitimate reason to think, What a wanker.
Or, in this case, on the shoulders of comics who’ve also had cancer.
Such as Linda Smith, who died of the ovarian-type, aged 48, in February 2006. She looms large in early chapters of The Leopard in My House. I was a huge fan. But I really love — I tell Mark Steel — the way he brings her to three-dimensional life. A woman who loves gardening, jazz, cricket. Who would insist on a café a three-mile walk away just because she loved the tiles on the wall.
‘I’m going off at a big tangent here. But there’s a sort of image of comics sometimes that we are tragic people, being the clown and all that. There was a series of plays on the telly about different comics — very well done — and one was about Tommy Cooper.’
Made him out to be not only a drunk but fairly callous to boot.
‘And I thought, well, yeah, all of this may be true. But he was FUNNY. If you went out with Tommy Cooper for the night, I bet you were crying with laughter.’
That’s why comics love hanging out together. ‘Because a lot of the time, we are just trying to think of the funniest, the most outrageous thing you can say.’
For instance?
‘Well, this isn’t a very nice example, but the way [Linda] told it I thought was so funny because I didn’t expect her to say it.’
She was in a café alongside two young mums with pushchairs. ‘She said, ‘One of them said to the other, ‘Hang on a second’; then turned to her toddler and said, ‘Sit up, you c**t.’’’
Same with the cancer. Some of his favourite interactions are along the lines of a phone call with fellow comedian Seann Walsh, who asks how a consultation has gone. Good, Mark replies, before attempting to launch into details. ‘Alright,’ Seann cuts him off, ‘no one wants to know all that bollocks; if you’re going to be cured that’s all we need.’ Then hangs up.
There’s his friend, Matthew, who answers questions on behalf of a speechless Mark with such medical precision that the impressed specialist asks, ‘Are you a doctor?’
‘No, Matthew replies, ‘I’m a hypochondriac.’
Other pals gave excellent advice.
‘I’ve got a mate, Pat: lovely, lovely friend. When he told me he had cancer six years ago, I thought, ‘Oh my god! He’s going to die.’ Now it was so much less than what I went through that I say to him, ‘Oh, that was more of a cold what you had!’
‘But he said to me, early on after the diagnosis: People who will annoy you will be the ones who give you crazy cures — pineapple; beetroot up the arse; whatever it is.
‘And people who tell you you’re being brave.’
But Pat added something interesting, too. ‘He said: Just remember it’s coming from a good place.’
Can’t always be easy when people say the ‘wrong’ things?
‘It’s not their fault. They’re being nice. There’ve been these arguments when someone has been in a hospital and a nurse has said, ‘I’m praying for you’ and someone’s kicked up a fuss: How dare they! I’m an atheist.
‘I think, well, stop being so rude, you absolute miserable twat. Someone’s going to sit down tonight and, in their prayers, they’re going to remember you.
‘And all you can do is be rude.’
Family — and his partner, the comedian Shappi Khorsandi — are priorities now.
‘It sounds all cheesy, but things can be cheesy and true. As George Orwell said, ‘Sometimes something can be true, even if it’s written in the Daily Telegraph.’’
Steady…
He’s meeting his friend Matt later. ‘I had a couple of [press] interviews this afternoon that were suggested, and I wonder whether the pre-cancer me would have gone: Work comes first! But I’d arranged to meet Matt and now I think: No. It would be another six weeks before we’d be able to do that again. So, I’m going to meet him.
‘I didn’t have to think about that.’
So that’s what Mark Steel has got out of this experience. What does he hope people will get out of the book and the show?
‘Well, I am fundamentally a comic and so I’m going to enjoy it more if people laugh…
‘If a whole audience of people come away going, ‘We were silent throughout because we were so moved by the amazing stories, and it’s encouraged all of us to become surgeons and to live our lives in a meaningful way rather than the superficial nonsense that we had before. You have transformed all of us, Mark.’
‘That, to me, is an utter disaster.’
I’m praying for you, Mark.
Mark Steel’s 2025 UK tour, The Leopard in My House, (including Swindon and Oxford) runs until June 20.
The Leopard in My House by Mark Steel is published by Ebury Press.
marksteelinfo.com
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