Stand-up comedian Mark Steel: Laughing in the face of cancer

There aren’t many people who would make a mental note of all the funny things that have happened to them during a horrific throat cancer experience, from diagnosis, through agonising treatment to recovery – but that’s exactly what stand-up comic Mark Steel has done.

The 64-year-old comedian, a popular panellist on shows including Have I Got News For You and Mock The Week, is embarking on a tour named The Leopard In My House, a reference to the cancer, with an accompanying book, which describes in detail all the ‘funny’ moments, from when his biopsy results were lost, through his hospital stays, the chemo and radiotherapy, the mucous-filled months, the tubes through which he was fed and the characters he met en route to recovery.

It all sounds – and indeed it must have been – a hellish time, yet while he never sugar coats the devastating onslaught his body endured, the book is full of belly laughs and a far cry from a medical memoir filled with despair.

Today, looking out into the sunshine from a café in Brighton, where his daughter Eloise lives, the London-based writer and comedian who is also known for his BBC Radio 4 show Mark Steel’s In Town, is still laughing as he recalls a fellow patient who attempted to light a cigarette while on the critical care unit of the cancer ward.

“God, I don’t want it (the book) to be traumatic, I don’t want it to trigger people,” he says chuckling, dryly imagining the comments. “‘Mark’s book’s done ever so well. Unprecedented boom in mental health issues, PTSD…’”

Joking aside, the lump on his neck and diagnosis of throat cancer, which was found to be secondary cancer in the summer of 2023 (they never found the primary tumour) and the gruelling treatment which followed, the drastic weight loss, fading voice, the coughing, the tiredness and the sickness, led to him penning a funny show and book to give people a different perspective.

“Cancer does not have to be as scary as I was brought up to think it was, which is that the minute someone says it, you’re going to die by Tuesday. That isn’t necessarily the case.

“Also, lots of brilliant things can come out of the experience of it, strangely. Most people that I came across who had been through it, the people I was in hospital with, the people I made friends with, all say the same – you come out of it strangely positive and within that, loads of things that happened are genuinely funny.”

One of the worst effects of the treatment was that it batters the glands which produce saliva, which the body compensates for by producing mucous, and the vast amount he was producing meant there wasn’t even a sufficient gap between any of the spits and coughs to fall asleep.

“You just think, get through today. I could just about think a week ahead, and that if I get through another week of this, a week is manageable.

“My daughter and son remember it slightly differently. They remember me being worse than I remember.”

At one point he was so weak his children had to carry him up the stairs to bed, he recalls. Another time, he was rushed to A&E coughing up blood.

For some months he couldn’t eat – nutrients had to be fed through tubes – and he lost three stone.

“There was a point where I thought I might die,” he admits, when early on he was called in for a meeting with the doctor.

“I knew from his demeanour that things were bad and he went, ‘It’s not good news. The biopsy has found cancer in at least two places and I can’t tell from the scans whether it’s spread beyond that, and you have to see someone else tomorrow about that.’

“I said, ‘Is it fatal?’ and he tapped the table and went, ‘Touch wood’. But even in the ‘touch wood’ moment I was aware that this was funny.”

After an operation and six months of treatment, Steel started to come out the other side. It’s ironic, he recalls, that he never lost his hair and among his proudest moments was when, in the middle of chemotherapy sessions, he summoned the energy to visit the hairdresser for a haircut.

Other comics supported him and made him laugh over the year including Seann Walsh, who gave him a packet of Strepsils shortly after the diagnosis, saying ‘That should sort it’ while laughing uncontrollably, Steel recalls, chuckling.

His son, Elliot, also a stand-up comedian, quipped: “I might be getting on the property ladder sooner than I thought”, after attending the shocking diagnosis appointment with his dad.

While he was ill, his on-off relationship with fellow comedian Shaparak Khorsandi – whom he references many times in the book – blossomed again and they are now an item, he says.

“Over the last eight or nine years we were sort of together and not together and then this (the cancer experience) resolved it,” he muses.

“She was absolutely brilliant (when he was ill). She’s fascinating and hilarious.

“When you really know about mortality, all the little rifts and squabbles make you think, what do I know? It makes you order the rest of your life, however long you think it is. It is finite, so how do I want to spend that time? Shappi is someone I do want to spend that time with.”

He reckons they live together two thirds of the time. “It pretty much feels like that’s resolved.”

Around a year after diagnosis, he was given the all-clear by doctors, who told him the cancer had gone. Eating is still difficult thanks to the damage to his swallowing mechanism, his vocal cords are battered and his hearing has declined, he says, but it’s a small price to pay.

“I lost three stone and when people see me who hadn’t seen me before, they go, ‘Oh, you look so well!’ That’s not the cancer. It was because I couldn’t eat. After the operation I had to feed myself through a tube and then as I was recovering from that, the chemotherapy kicked in so I had no desire to eat.”

He currently has to go for check-up scans every three months and attempts not to consult Dr Google.

“A couple of weeks ago I looked at the odds of it coming back and I wish I hadn’t done that because they’re quite high. It’s not the right way of looking at it. You’ve just got to think, ‘I’m fine now, there’s no reason to think I won’t be.’”

The 40-date tour will be his first major undertaking since recovering from cancer – and he sincerely hopes his experience will make the audience laugh.

“A therapist might say it’s deflection, but I think these things are genuinely funny. Other things were genuinely scary and sad and sometimes they can be all of those things at once.

“People who’ve been in Japanese prisoner of war camps still tell funny stories about it. They are not hiding the truth or unpleasantness of what happens.”

“I hope in some ways the show removes the stigma for people. If some years later they fear they are going to be diagnosed with cancer, they can go, ‘This is a serious situation but one I can embrace and deal with’. It doesn’t mean, ‘Oh God I’m going to die and that’s the end of everything’.”

The Leopard In My House by Mark Steel is published by Ebury Press on February 27, priced £22.  Mark Steel’s 2025 UK tour The Leopard in My House runs from February 27 to June 20.