The Leopard in My House by Mark Steel review – a comedian's chronicle of cancer

The Guardian

03-03-2025

It starts with a lump on the neck, noticed while shaving and briefly ignored; progresses via a bewilderment of bureaucratic processes to a 'gloriously jolly radiologist' dispatching him for a biopsy; and quickly, although not without the delays and mishaps of a painfully overstretched system, lands up with comedian Mark Steel being handed a cancer diagnosis. When Steel asks the consultant whether his tumour is likely to prove fatal, the doctor replies 'Touch wood', and then actually touches some wood; at least, his patient notes, he was being professional about it. Maybe if the cancer had spread, Steel reflects, 'they'd offer a more extreme approach and get me to pick up a penny and pass a black cat'.
Cancer is common, and accounts of experiencing its arrival, treatment and – if you're fortunate – aftermath are hardly rare. But this is not to suggest memoir fatigue. People, and illness itself, are infinitely various, and each chronicle reveals something different in between what have become the tropes of the genre: the shock of the news, the emotional and physical reserves required to endure treatment, the almost inevitably altered perspective on one's own life and on more existential questions of life and death themselves.
As a connoisseur of the everyday, as witnessed in his BBC Radio 4 show Mark Steel's in Town, in which he travels around the country meeting the citizenry and performing to them, he is unsurprisingly interested in the minutiae of his treatment and on his interactions with medical professionals, fellow patients and friends and family. Many of these involve throat-catching gallows humour: there is the Russian doctor he meets at the investigation stages, whose muttered 'chances not good' in fact translates to optimism – the chances are Steel doesn't have cancer rather than its reverse; and, in some of the book's most moving passages, the sporting idiom he and his new pal Jules adopt when they're going through radiotherapy together. ('Each day we'd describe the previous day's climb as 'set off at a good pace but only the first stage of the Tour de France'. By the third week it was 'two sets and a break down with a heavily bandaged ankle but determined to finish the match.'')
Jules has a bit of luck when it comes to dealing with the claustrophobia induced by the mask worn during treatment because he used to be an army tank commander; he's less lucky with the byzantine path cancer cuts through his body and, despite Steel's understandable impatience with the martial or value-laden language used to talk about the illness, it's impossible not to feel astounded by his courage. He also points Steel, with immense usefulness, in the direction of Stoic philosophy, not in its axiomatic, vibesy current incarnation, but in the part of its original form that deals with the counterproductiveness of feeling that one has been wronged.
We are often reminded of those who have not survived. Two of Steel's closest friends, comedians Linda Smith and Jeremy Hardy, both died of cancer, and Steel unabashedly commemorates their lives while pondering that, although he was close to both of them during their illnesses, nothing can convey the intricate practical, mental and emotional realities of facing death.
Elsewhere, he catalogues the support given to him by peers who have coped with their own diagnoses, including Matt Forde and Rhod Gilbert, and relays an extraordinarily unexpected and touching message of support from Jimmy Tarbuck. And there is also the background account of Steel's complex relationship with Shaparak Khorsandi, much of which remains private, but which clearly sustains him (perhaps especially when she sends him a Viz annual anonymously).
The treatment itself is appallingly gruelling, with particular horrors attendant on the way it deprives the body of saliva – without which eating, drinking and speaking are near impossible – while also flooding it with mucus. But here, too, there is room for comedy, as in the fraught exchange when a provider rings up to enquire how much nutritional formula Steel requires, and the patient is simply unable to make himself heard. The challenges of navigating the healthcare system are legion, but as this clear-eyed, humane and engaging book makes repeatedly and abundantly clear, without the NHS's central tenet – if you are ill, you will be helped – we are completely sunk. Steel himself is now recovered, and cancer-free, but you feel there isn't a day when he doesn't think of those who didn't, or won't, make it through.
Sign up to Observed
Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers
after newsletter promotion
The Leopard in My House: One Man's Adventures in Cancerland by Mark Steel is published by Ebury (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply