PM Radio 4
Sometimes, you have to hold your breath while you’re listening to an interview on the radio.
Steve Hewlett, presenter of the Media Show, Radio 4 has been a regular on PM with Eddie Mair talking about his cancer.
He was diagnosed in 2016.
The friendship has grown and blossomed on the radio - they have a laugh together, it feels very intimate...two men chatting about Steve’s cancer.
Women talk, yes. But it’s rare to hear two men chatting like this and Mair has a relaxed warmth about him that eases things.
The cancer has progressed recently and Hewlett joked that he was on a cocktail of drugs which meant he was on the radio and “quite feasibly, entirely off his face”.
He then explained that a second round of chemo was not going to happen and his doctor thought he was in a phase where he better “live every day as it comes”.
Weeks, maybe months, lay ahead, he was told.
And then he had a bit of a reaction to the morphine, or maybe not. Whatever, there was a flurry.
So he got married with just about an hour’s preparation time on a Friday in hospital to his partner Rachel with his ex partner and good friend, Carol, present and with his children close by.
It was all a bit “vicar of Dibley” he joked.
“Are you sure this happened?” asked Eddie.
“I have the photos,” said Steve.
“Did you cry?” asked Eddie.
“Of course I did,” said Steve.
Sometimes, raw intimacy is too much, too intrusive.
It seems there are cancer diaries everywhere these days.
But sometimes it’s important to hear two men talking openly about cancer.
There’s a chemistry with these two – Steve just told it as it was and Eddie listened – pausing to ask the obvious question: “You do have a will, don’t you?” as the rest of us stood by the radio, holding our breaths and maybe, just maybe, thanking God it wasn’t us.
