Comedian Mark Steel: ‘The hospital lost my biopsy result – then the cancer surgery went a bit wrong’
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For 10 days in September, Mark Steel thought there was a chance he might not have cancer. He was waiting for biopsy results on a lump in his neck. He’d been told they would come through in a few days; doctor friends assured him that if this was serious, he’d hear quickly. The days passed – a week turned to two. “Every day that went by without me hearing the results I thought oh that’s a good sign because if it was bad I’d have heard by now,” he says. “What I didn’t account for was that they’d lost the biopsy.”
He later learned that the sample that showed he had secondary cancer in his neck had been delivered to the wrong hospital. “It was probably [picked up by] Deliveroo,” he deadpans. “‘Your biopsy is by the gate’.”
Nora Ephron said everything is copy; for Steel, everything is comedy. From the moment he was diagnosed with secondary neck cancer in October, every mishap, every doctor with a questionable bedside manner or eccentric wardmate (including the one who lit a cigarette on the critical care cancer ward) has been filed away for use in a future show. “There’s no way I’m going to go through all this and not get a half-hour out of it,” says Steel, cackling.
We are talking in the living room of Steel’s home in a part of south London he describes as being like Stella Street – there’s a comic on every corner. He takes a call midway through our conversation from the comedian Isy Suttie (best known for Peep Show), ringing up to see if he fancies a coffee. He’s thrilled to see her, though he’ll have to forgo the coffee – Steel is currently being fed via a gastrostomy tube after surgery he had in October to remove the cancer in his neck went “a little bit wrong”.
“Turns out you’ve got a thing called an epiglottis. I’d never heard of it. It’s a little dangly thing above your throat. It protects your airways. If you’ve got a hole in it then any food or water just goes wherever – airways, lungs, stomach, liver, kidney – and all these other organs are going what the f— is this? Then you start wanting to be sick.”
The surgeon who took the cancer out accidentally left a hole in Steel’s epiglottis. Not that Steel seems all that phased. He was similarly sanguine about the doctor who, when he asked over the phone in the early investigative stages if he thought he might have cancer, replied, in a thick Polish accent: “Not good. Chances not good.” He panicked. Whose chances? His or the cancer’s? The doctor laughed. “Ah-ha, I mean, unlikely you have cancer.”
“That was horrible,” says Steel, “but funny – I knew at the time this was funny.”
Funny it might have been, but unfortunately the doctor turned out to be wrong.
Weeks before, Steel, 63, had discovered a lump on his neck while shaving. “I thought: that’s not the right shape, is it, for one half of your neck to be?” Google was unusually reassuring on the matter – it was likely a gland infection. When it didn’t go away, he thought he’d better run it past the GP, who sent him for an ultrasound. “I always think there’s a moment when you know this isn’t OK, we’re in for something here, because the woman was there with this jelly, looking at the screen, and she went…” he raises his eyebrows. “And that’s the moment you know. You’re so attuned to the slightest little thing when you’re in these rooms. [...] Of course then your mind goes in all directions. You start thinking oh blimey, what do I tell the kids? And then they said we’re going to call you in for a biopsy. All I know is these are all words connected with cancer. Once you go for a biopsy that’s pretty much it, you’re not going to see the month out.”
Sitting in the waiting room to see a consultant about the results of a series of scans and his biopsy (once his results had finally been located in the wrong hospital), he turned to his son, Elliot, 27 (also a comedian). “I said to him I felt like a football team that can’t get a win at the start of the season. I thought I just want one win. The consultant said: ‘Well, we’ve got these scans back and the cancer hasn’t spread to the next place it would go, which is your lungs. It hasn’t got in there at all.’ And then my lad stood up and went: ‘There’s your first win of the season!’
“And I think from that moment onwards I’ve known this is basically going to end up all right. You’re never certain but the probability is that it’s going to end up all right.”
They went for a pint immediately. “I’ve never known anything like that. We went up to the café up the palace there [Crystal Palace] and sat and had a beer at about one in the afternoon.”
The relief was “immense”, not least because Steel was in the early stages of a new relationship, with comedian Caroline Beaton. Navigating a cancer diagnosis alongside a fledgling relationship was “tricky”, he says, an unexpectedly shy smile creeping across his face as he talks about Beaton. “There’s not really an easy way to… of all of the handbooks on how to deal with the early stages of a relationship, I don’t think any of them say why not slip into the conversation that you might have cancer.”
They hadn’t been dating long when he first suspected something might be wrong. “I thought ‘oh hang on’, what’s this?” It sounds as if Beaton was unphased, though Steel admits the news “probably wasn’t ideal”. She has been “brilliant”. “I couldn’t have blamed her if she’d gone sod this for a laugh. I want to find someone who hasn’t got cancer.”
He hadn’t yet had all those conversations that tend to accompany a grave diagnosis with his children (alongside Elliot, he has a 22-year-old daughter from a previous relationship – he also dated, but has no children with, the comedian Shappi Khorsandi). “It was a bit early for that and I didn’t want to scare my daughter.” He was relieved that a hopeful prognosis (he’d need chemotherapy, radiotherapy and an operation, but doctors were confident they’d get the cancer) meant he didn’t have to go down that road, not least because he wants to be around for his “gorgeous” two-year-old granddaughter. “Absolutely adorable little thing.”
No one wants to have to tell people they love that they have cancer. “Being a comic it’s even worse,” says Steel. “If you have to tell people I’ve got cancer and it’s not going to be all right, I think that must be incredibly difficult [...] because you’re making other people’s day worse, and you don’t want to do that.”
The experience has made him think about his own mortality for the first time, he says. “There will be a day when this is the end. It might be another 40 years, but it will happen. I have thought about that in ways I’d never done before. The funny thing is that it’s not so bad once you’ve thought about it. You think, that’ll be me one day. Everyone will go ‘you hear about Mark?’”
Steel spent time with his friend the comedian Jeremy Hardy in the period before his death from oesophageal cancer in 2019. He recalls the time leading up to Hardy’s diagnosis clearly. “He was saying ‘oh they’re not sure what it is and they’re going through these tests’ and everything. And then I didn’t hear from him for about two weeks which was very unusual. We used to speak all the time. I left messages and I thought this is really bad. And then the next time I spoke to him he said ‘I’m f—--, I’ve got a couple of years, he didn’t even have that in the end. [...] I’ve not had that.”
Fellow comedian Rhod Gilbert, who was diagnosed with stage four cancer in July 2022, but recently revealed he had received his first clear scan since being diagnosed, has been a great support. Gilbert got in touch as soon as Steel announced he had cancer. “He spoke to me for ages. He sent me a message last night to say ‘how are you getting on’ and everything. He had a more difficult situation. He had cancer in four places. And I know he was told ‘a significant bump in your journey, we hope it’s not the last’. That’s more serious than what I was told.
“His situation was very difficult. But now he’s through it, he’s not at the point where he’s glad he’s been through it but he seems to be reinvigorated. Maybe more than if he’d never been through it somehow.”
Gilbert has clearly been a source of inspiration for Steel. “He’s been brilliant telling me what to expect and all that.”
Gilbert is turning his experience into a tour; Steel is determined to mine his for comedy too and hopes to return to stand-up by the middle of next year. The comedy industry has changed a lot in his time – Steel says he feels “like an old football manager who’s still full of enthusiasm and passion for it”. The debate about what is allowed to be funny these days seems never-ending. Has it darkened his door? “It doesn’t appear to have done. I keep thinking oh am I going to accidentally say a bad thing. ‘Oh no! Dad you can’t say that, what have you done?!’ ‘I don’t know!’”
He is sceptical about whether the risk of cancellation is as high as it seems. “I hear people saying ‘you can’t say anything these days’ and you think that’s not true. There are one or two clubs where people go ‘this is a fearless club where you can say whatever you like, we’re not going to give into the woke culture’, and you see a clip and think well, you could do that at The Comedy Store. I don’t quite understand where they’re coming from those people, it’s almost like they want to be victims.”
It helps, he suspects, that his audience is behind him. “I sometimes say things that I think ‘oh God that’s outrageous, how did I get away with that?’ Maybe I’m just lucky nobody videoed it.”
Two months into his treatment, Steel’s prognosis is good. Surgeons weren’t able to find the primary cancer, but they’re confident they got it all out. He is having daily radiotherapy and chemotherapy for the next three weeks to make sure they catch anything that might still be lurking in there.
He travels into town for treatment at University College Hospital every day and chooses a different artist to listen to on Spotify in the radiotherapy suite. “Today I had Little Simz, yesterday I had the Libertines, the day before that Nina Simone. It just helps you get through the 10 minutes, because you think this track is about four minutes, once this is done I’m four minutes into it.”
He is feeling pretty dreadful – the chemotherapy is making him feel constantly sick. “This is testing me. Everything tastes of wet salt.” But it would be “churlish to grumble”, he says. “Every day that goes by I think… OK… that’s all right. It’s really, really horrible, but in the long run, it’s all OK.”
Christmas will be quiet this year. “But I’ll be with all my people. My plan is to watch a couple of films with my son. At the risk of sounding really schmaltzy, this must be very difficult if you haven’t got family around you.”
