To understand the mindset of a comedian, Mark Steel says, you should imagine you’re on a plane that’s going down. While most people are screaming, hugging loved ones, saying their final prayers, the comic is sitting quietly, mind whirring, thinking, “I wonder what the joke in this is? It would be even worse if it was a plane full of comics,” Steel says when we meet at his home in south London. “Everyone would be trying to come up with the darkest, funniest thing to say before they hit the earth.”
This certainly explains his new book: The Leopard In My House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland. Back in 2023, the 64-year-old was diagnosed with throat cancer – the “leopard” in the book’s title – and he’s spent the past year recovering from debilitating chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment. His gruelling account hardly glosses over anything: there are tales that make you wince, moments of gripping drama and a seemingly endless flow of mucous stories (the unstoppable production of snot was one particularly unpleasant side-effect of the treatment).
But above all else, it’s relentlessly funny. Steel compares the difficulty of trying to get through to his doctors on the phone – “Remember, your tumour is important to us” – to buying tickets for a Taylor Swift gig. He mocks his attempt at making a self-deprecating joke on the anaesthetist’s table, in which he got as far as the words “I’m famous…” before slipping under. (“Those surgeons have every legitimate right to think, what a wanker.”) And he homes in on the absurd interactions with consultants, such as the time one of them tapped their desk and said “Touch wood, no” after being asked if the cancer would be fatal.
At one point he describes receiving test results via an app but, on clicking to read them, is told that first he will have to enter a code that’s been sent to his email, prolonging the already-unbearable suspense. “It’s like the whole thing is being written by a fine dramatist,” notes Steel. As a cancer patient myself – treated at the same place as Steel was – these tales are all grimly relatable. I’ve been bamboozled by that app many a time.
It’s a running joke throughout the book (and likely in his upcoming tour) that whenever people saw Steel during his cancer journey they would invariably say “You look well” – as if that fact alone overruled anything the doctors might be saying. I refrain from saying that today, but he does – undeniably – look well, dressed in a smart coat, shoes and jumper, the only splash of colour his rainbow-striped socks. He isn’t actually in when I turn up at his house – instead I’m greeted by his son Elliott, also a standup, who had no idea I was coming. He hurriedly does the dishes and makes me a coffee, while peppering me with questions about journalism and recounting the dramas that go on within the comedy circuit these days. It’s just the two of them here, and Steel senior credits Elliot with being there for him during the hardest moments of his recovery. “You come out of the book well,” I say to Elliott. “What?” he replies. “Oh that. I’ve not read it.” Your dad’s mucous-ridden memoir about facing his own mortality is probably not going to be top of your reading list.
When Steel arrives, bringing digestive biscuits and milk for our coffee, we retire to the living room to chat – a photograph of a Crystal Palace player leaning on the mantelpiece is pretty much the only concession to decoration here. It’s lunchtime and Steel answers my questions while eating a bowl of cereal and a banana. Unconventional, but perhaps a remnant of his illness – a hole in Steel’s epiglottis left him coughing up blood and unable to swallow any food or liquid for weeks. In the book, he recounts attending a book launch and spending a full 20 minutes trying to get down a single cocktail sausage.
You wouldn’t really say that Steel has slowed down since his illness. As well as the book, he’s still presenting the podcast What The F*** is Going On? with Elliott – an exasperated take on current affairs – and has continued recording his Radio 4 show Mark Steel’s in Town, in which he performs a standup routine from, and about, a different place in the UK each episode. But he says he is taking things easier now. He’s more picky about jobs, feels less need to “perform” for people at social events and no longer puts pressure on himself to perfect everything.
Cancer has caused him to reevaluate some of his previous outlook on life, too. When he was in the midst of the treatment he received a surprise call from the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, who had read Steel’s Guardian article about being diagnosed with cancer and wanted to offer his support. “I was struggling at the time – coughing and spitting into this salad bowl I was carrying around with me – and I was really moved by him calling.”
Steel’s comedy has always been entwined with his left-wing views – as a teenager and young man he would stand on street corners with his socialist collective, loudly protesting against whatever injustice was occurring in the world at that time. The alternative comedy circuit he fell in with in the 1980s viewed the likes of Tarbuck as a dinosaur. And when Tarbuck came out in support of Thatcher’s government that was it: he was the enemy. And yet here he was, this object of derision from the past, calling up for no reason other than to be kind. “I did think: ‘I wouldn’t have done this for you, would I?’” Steel admits.
He has found himself surrounded by kindness – support, humour, good advice. The best piece of advice, he says, came from his friend, Pat, who told him that whenever someone says something well-intentioned but extremely annoying – for instance, the neighbour who keeps telling him that it was probably pasta that caused his cancer – to simply view it as someone trying to be helpful. Another bit of pleasing advice came from a charity worker who told him to just keep going to the appointments: “I thought, well, that’s obvious. But she said, ‘No, there’s a lot of people who don’t keep going.’ They must just get fed up with it all and go, ‘Oh, fuck this, if I go then I go!’ How mad is that?”
He flashes a devilish smile. “From a statistical point of view, you think, well those people probably account for quite a big percentage of the people that don’t survive. So that makes my odds better, just from going to the appointments.”
Along with the cancer drama, the book has another subplot: Steel’s on/off relationship with fellow comedian Shaparak Khorsandi, or Shappi as he calls her. (Steel’s two children are from previous relationships.) At the time of his illness the romance was most definitely “off” and the pair hadn’t been in contact for several months. He credits his new perspective on life as giving him the kick he needed to sort things out. “Once you realise life is finite, you really can’t just procrastinate and think ‘We’ll sort it out eventually’. Because time will catch up with you.”
They set to work resolving whatever issues they’d had. “We were no good not being together,” he says. And since then it’s been going well? “Yeah, great,” he says. “It’s lovely. You can never say with these things, but… I think it’s permanent now.”
Steel was raised in Swanley by two loving and utterly traditional adoptive parents. He had grown up incurious about who his birth parents were until he became a father himself in his mid-30s. It took him several years to discover their identities, a story he recounted in the standup show, Who Do I Think I Am?, and a subsequent 2021 audiobook.
Told with commendable empathy, Steel recounts the discovery that his mother, Frances, had never wanted to give up her baby – and the pressures she must have been under to do so. He traces her to the Italian city of Rimini and discovers his father, a financier from Egypt and a former backgammon champion.
For whatever reason Frances had not wanted to meet Steel, and she died before changing her mind. Steel did meet up with his father, for a cautiously positive encounter that ended with the promise of further meet-ups. For various reasons, not least the pandemic, they never materialised and their relationship drifted. Then, after he had recovered from cancer, Shappi told Steel that he should let his father know what he’d been through. There was other news to share, too – Steel’s daughter had recently given birth to a little girl.
Despite the fact they hadn’t spoken for two years, he sent an email to his father. His father apparently replied, but if anything the message seemed to confirm to Steel that he was the one doing all the chasing in the relationship. “There’s lots of people that I could write an email to who would want to hear from me. So why go to all this trouble for someone who doesn’t seem bothered?” he says. In Who Do I Think I Am?, Steel notes how his father never courted publicity around his prior successes. This seems to be the case also around their relationship.
Cancer, if you’re lucky enough to get through it, can have some positive side effects. Steel says it’s even left him more hopeful about the world. “Not in the short term,” he says. “That would be a little bit deluded to say when that lunatic has taken over America again. But I realised you’ve always got to be hopeful about human instincts.”
As with his Tarbuck experience, he’s trying to think differently about Trump and Reform voters rather than falling into the trap of writing them all off as stupid or nasty. “Calling them a load of names won’t work,” he says. And besides, even he can see that Farage or Trump knows how to talk to the average voter more than the likes of Rachel Reeves. A lot of talk is spent on which politician you’d most like to go for a pint with and, after a bit of debate, we both decide that Reeves is probably the politician you’d least fancy accompanying you down the boozer.
“Imagine sitting there for an hour. You’d be like… er, do you like, umm, custard, Rachel? And she’d say–” (he’s very good at impressions is Steel) “‘I think that custard, in moderation, if taken responsibly, is something that we can look forward to having in the future. I think to have too much of it now would damage any meal that we had.’”
Sometimes, Steel has to pinch himself when he realises just how much life has returned to normal. This time just over a year ago, he was having perhaps the least festive Christmas Day you can imagine. Four weeks into his treatment, his voice had gone, his neck was throbbing with radiation burns and the only food he could manage was a nutritional liquid that had to be syringed directly into his stomach. He was coughing violently and the only way he could breathe was by covering his head with a towel and hovering over a bowl of steam. “And then I had a machine called a nebuliser,” he adds. “You put on a mask and breathe in this salty solution like some kind of Dr Who monster from 1965.”
Steel tried to watch Ridley Scott’s Napoleon movie with Elliott, but he had to keep crawling up the stairs to be sick. He hadn’t been prepared for the constant nausea, nor the fact that it doesn’t abate even after a good vomit. All in all, the day could have gone better.
And yet something positive did emerge from this woeful day. Six months later, in a café in Crystal Palace, Steel decided to throw a delayed Christmas party. He got a tree in from Argos, bought crackers, and asked the café to put on a Christmas spread. “You’re not going to want roast turkey, are you?” the owners wondered, aware that it was set to be a boiling hot July day.
“I said, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I want!” says Steel. “They ended up getting the chef to do a Christmas pudding, too.”
Partying away, surrounded by friends, family and Shappi, Steel thought back to six months previously and how this wasn’t even something he could have allowed himself to imagine.
It would be a fitting way to end this story, but cancer doesn’t always provide neatly wrapped endings. The week before we meet, during what Steel assumed was a routine check up, the doctor presented scan results that showed no indication of the cancer returning and, after feeling his neck to make sure there was nothing suspicious growing, declared: “Congratulations, you got through the first year.”
Congratulations? Maybe, but Steel had never been warned that head and neck cancers were likely to return. He went online and worked out that, even after getting through the risky first year, there was still roughly a one in seven chance of it returning in year two. “I’m like a boxer that’s knocked someone over,” he says. “You think you’ve won, and then your opponent’s got back up and they’re bloody jabbing you in the face. You think: ‘Oh, right, I’ve still got a lot of fighting to do here’.”
Since then he’s been a bit wobbly, trying to get his head straight to adjust to the next year or two of precariousness. He’s turned to the lessons of the Stoics, the Ancient Greek philosophers who practise accepting things you cannot change, and working solely on what is within your control. He knows the chances of it returning are still small and that if it does return it will have been caught early. He knows that there are other medical avenues to pursue. And he also knows that there is no point frittering away the time you do have left in a state of permanent terror.
“There’s a perfectly decent chance that I live to be 90,” he says. “There’s also a chance that it will kill me. I have to accept that.”
You suspect that however things turn out for Steel, he will somehow find a way of seeing the funny side.
Steel yourself: an extract from The Leopard In My House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland by Mark Steel
I wasn’t sick after the first two weeks of chemo, which I was proud of, as if it was a result of my own skill, something you can learn, like playing the xylophone.
The day after the first chemotherapy treatment I made a meal, with salmon and cheese sauce and a delicate array of steamed vegetables, then looked at it with utter contempt, pushing it down in the way you squash down the rubbish because you can’t be bothered to take it out and fetch a new bin liner.
It was the last meal I ate for several months.
On that day a low hum developed in the bottom of my stomach and sulked in its corner like a miserable lodger. I didn’t see it much but it was always there, in its own room, unsettled and unsettling, contributing nothing, so I could never forget it.
For most of the next four weeks I was in this constant state of being almost sick, until I wondered if that was worse than actually being sick. I’ve always done anything I can to prevent actually being sick, even if being sick would remedy the problem by getting rid of the muck that’s making me feel sick. Because I was brought up in a world in which being sick was a sign of failure. The kid at school who was sick was sniggered at, a subject of pity as a caretaker arrived with a tragic bucket of sand. Once I was 16, if you were sick after a drinking session, that was a sign of terrible effeminacy: you had proved you were untrustworthy in battle. On a boat the real man is never sick, even in a hurricane.
All this was deep in my psyche as I stood before the toilet on Christmas Day, firing out spheres of mucus, each one queuing up to be shot out, like kids on a midsummer’s day at an amusement park, being clicked into place on the log flume and hurtled down the chute only two seconds after the ones before have set off.
Eventually my body couldn’t sustain an assault at this rate. I felt the familiar gaseous rumble that told me I was going to be sick and that there was nothing I could do; then came the violent jerking defeat of Nutricia Fortisip 2.0 kcal drink launching itself up my body like a firework. You’re not supposed to taste this stuff; it’s just filling you with nutrients to keep you alive. But you taste it when it comes back up. Fuck my old boots, it’s horrible. It’s light brown and sickly without being sugary, as thick as a custard that didn’t turn out to be properly thick, with a slightly sweet aroma that would normally make you think something is maliciously poisonous.
Vomiting is not just a physical discomfort, it’s psychologically disturbing because you have to accept a loss of control of your own body. Once the torpedo of sick is launched from the core of the stomach, you’re at the mercy of forces way beyond you. You can try and direct it, so you don’t ruin trousers, carpets and plants, but you have to surrender to it. For however long it lasts you will be sick’s bitch. And chemotherapy sick has a special stamina. It doesn’t simply demand the offending poison is expelled until you can return to a period of calm. You will be sick and then more violently sick and then go back to feeling sick and a couple of days later you’ll have another chemotherapy session so more of the poison that was making you sick is pumped directly into your veins. It’s as if you had a wretched night of vomiting from food poisoning, then two days later had to eat another plate of the same out-of-date mouldy fish that caused the trouble in the first place.
So on Christmas afternoon, around the time of the broadcast of the King’s speech, I stood and sat and kneeled in turn over the toilet bowl, making those desperate noises: at first an almost defiant Ayeeuuuurghh, but 40 minutes later a resigned oh oh hnnnn wur, which translated from sick language means, “I give up, I’ll do whatever you want.”
On and on it went, and all I could think about was being sick, and that eventually it must stop as no one is sick for ever, and a couple of times it occurred to me that it was Christmas Day.
I felt dimly aware of Christmas but it felt like a festival that other people participated in. It was like being in a small Spanish town as they have their biggest day of the year, a celebration of a saint you’ve never heard of, and a procession in which everyone dresses as a llama. I enjoyed watching other people rushing round shops but felt it was nothing to do with me.
But for a few days my body eased off from the worst of the afflictions. I bought a 3ft Christmas tree and a few presents and had a haircut. This was a moment of immense pride. I had a haircut! During my fourth week of chemotherapy! How hard must my hair be? Not only had it not fallen out, it needed to be cut! My hair was saying to the chemo, “Is that all you’ve got?”
You can often underestimate the significance of an event that may seem routine to you, but to someone else is a glorious day of life-affirming sanctity. A few months earlier I’d spent a day with someone I rarely see, who has two young sons. We went to the pub and then for a kebab, chortling through this blokey nod to the 1970s as a form of entertainment.
Several weeks later he told me that day had been momentous for him, as it was the first time he’d been out like that all day for a year. When someone is deprived of socialising and of culture, because they’re constantly looking after small children or elderly parents, or due to poverty or illness, an afternoon in a café with a mate can be enough to revive them, to reconnect them with a part of themselves that was disappearing.
I’d only had three weeks of feeling outside of my normal world, but the amble round some shops and 15 minutes of semi-chat with Cecile who cut my hair, before my voice gave up and I fell asleep as she did the fringe, was as exciting as a trip to Disneyland for a seven-year-old.
By week five of the treatment I was being assaulted from all angles. The painkiller constipates you, so you’re given a laxative, but it didn’t make everything normal; it meant I could have a shit but painfully. We’re all familiar with this situation: the dry scratching of the turd that scrapes out as if there’s an angry miniature swordsman in it, lashing out in every direction.
But however painful, if you’re experiencing this during week five of your cancer treatment, it’s almost welcome as a change from the routine discomfort of the mucus.
Somehow the body increases the amount of mucus being produced, even though you were already at the peak of maximum possible mucus flow, according to the laws of physics. It’s like discovering there’s something that travels faster than the speed of light. Every few minutes there would be a surge, bubbling from deep inside the stomach, then an intense but very brief rumble and then whoosh, out would pop a perfectly formed Cadbury Mini Egg-sized ball of mucus straight into the sink, where it would sit like a newborn kitten, slightly pleased with itself and wondering what to do next.
Even through the self-disgust and discomfort of this act – in the middle of the thoughts of “What on earth have I become?” – a bit of me would be fascinated and slightly proud. This wasn’t a sticky cumbersome dribble of mucus, the sort that amateurs cough up. It was pure and whole, and I’d admire it for a second as if I was a renowned potter and a beautifully glazed vase had popped serenely from my kiln.
By now my appetite was so suppressed that not only did I have no desire to eat or drink, I found the whole idea of eating or drinking disgusting. I watched other people eat in the way you watch a wildlife documentary in which a bird produces sick and pours it into the mouths of their young. It was as if I was observing a lesser species that hadn’t advanced to the stomach PEG and still did that revolting thing where they put food in their mouth.
Before, when my swallowing mechanism was damaged, I’d been longing to be able to eat properly. I dreamed of that stew, or poached egg on toast. But now I gazed upon the Christmas dinners I would once have worshipped and saw it as a heap of debris, as inviting as a stagnant pond with a dead crow floating in it.
During the fifth week of treatment, my voice withered hour by hour, becoming fainter in the way a local radio station gradually vanishes as you drive out of range and into a different region. For a few days I could whisper, then that went as well, so I could make no meaningful sounds at all. Being voiceless is a confusing state and I often forgot it had gone. I’d start to sing along to whichever song was in my head, and for a moment I’d be thrown because nothing came out.
But it was more confusing for everyone else. I would mime to someone that my voice had gone, and usually they’d respond by asking how long it would be before it would come back. So I would stand there silently, and the other person would look bemused, as if they were thinking, Well, it’s a simple question, there’s no need to be rude and not answer.
A few times I was called by someone from the hospital. This was the only time I answered the phone during these weeks, and it would be with a misty “hawoo’: an attempt to make a word out of a breath, like someone making an old-fashioned obscene phone call.
Someone from the company that delivered the nutrition drinks called one morning.
A voice asked, “Hello, is that Mr Steel? I wonder if you can tell me if it’s all right to make our next delivery on Tuesday and how many bottles you require?’
I summoned up a puff of breath and tried to say, “I can’t talk,” but all I could say was an almost silent “ekentak’.
“Did you say you can’t talk?” asked the woman who could talk.
“S,” I hissed, which in my language was “yes”.
“I’m just wondering how many bottles you need for your delivery on Tuesday?’
“Ehehe,” I breathed, as I couldn’t manage “ekentak” a second time.
“Oh right,” she said, “well, can you tell me how many bottles you need and if it’s all right to bring them on Tuesday?”
Now I was reduced to “eh”.
Then she started saying the words slowly and loudly, as if she was an English tourist talking to an Italian: “I said ‘How many bottles?’ You know, bottles? How many?”
“Ofafasak,” I breathed. Then I turned the phone off.
Having no voice sends many people that you meet into blubbering confusion. At the hospital chemist I arrived at the counter for that week’s medication. “Can I have your name and date of birth?” asked the woman behind the counter. So I wrote it on a sheet of paper and handed it to her. She wrote underneath, “Have you had this medication before?” I wrote, “You can speak to me,” and handed it back. So she said hesitantly, “Have you had this medication before?” as if she was saying her first sentence in a foreign language, which she’d learned from a phrasebook.
I pondered this all the way home. Did she think, “How can he understand me when he can’t speak?” Or maybe she wrote the question as part of a scheme to show empathy with the patients, by adopting the same affliction as theirs. If someone arrives with one leg, they have to hop to the shelves and back to fetch the tablets.
My daughter accompanied me to my chemotherapy in week five of my treatment, just after Christmas. She held my hand during the “Oh, what is the matter with your veins?” part of the cannula process. I’d taken a whiteboard and pen so I could communicate and she suggested we played a game in which we had to draw a film and the other one guess what it was.
We started with the obvious ones: a shark’s fin above some waves for Jaws, a brick road for The Wizard of Oz. Then for two hours we carried on, sometimes joined by a nurse peering past my drip to see my infantile attempt to draw a bicycle passing the moon and shouting, “ET!” My daughter drew a trilby hat next to a mushroom cloud. “Oppenheimer,” I wrote, though what I was actually expressing as I wrote it was “Oppenheimer, yes, got it.”
One of us, I can’t remember which, drew a person splattered at the bottom of a cliff.
“Midsommar,” the other one either shouted or wrote, and we both laughed until the other patients looked across with that cocktail of curiosity and joy you feel when you see people giggling uncontrollably at something hidden from you.
Throughout this time I must have regularly spat globules into a salad bowl, and had my drip altered from water to chemicals to chemo. I must have been to the toilet while dragging my drip and felt my neck burning crisply away. But all I recall of those two hours is a beautiful period of laughter with my daughter, so I would without hesitation go through that exact experience any time it was offered with nothing altered, and I would like to thank my cancer for that.
The Leopard In My House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland by Mark Steel is published by Ebury at £22. Buy a copy for £18.70 from guardianbookshop.com
Mark Steel’s live tour The Leopard In My House is touring the UK from February. Tickets are on sale at https://marksteelinfo.com/.
