Back in March, the broadcaster and journalist Steve Hewlett received the sort of mortal shock that frequently opens a newspaper article about how to deal with a serious illness: he was told by doctors, almost out of the blue, that he had an aggressive form of cancer that would be difficult to treat.
But Hewlett’s long experience as a journalist and media commentator for the BBC meant his story has followed a far less private path than most.
On hearing his diagnosis, Hewlett, 58, found himself, almost without missing a beat, wondering how best to communicate his situation and explain what he was learning along the way.
“My initial reaction, quite genuinely, was just to think ‘OK. My luck has finally run out.’ But there is something about journalism that is quite central to the person I am – a tendency to ask awkward questions. And I have realised over time that if I don’t understand something, it is quite possible that other people don’t either.”
So last month, Hewlett recorded the first of a series of candid radio interviews with Eddie Mair, the presenter of Radio 4’s PM news programme. Hewlett’s illness was not a secret among colleagues, but the impact of his decision to go public and talk on air about his medical journey was to give him the second big shock of his year, and this one was much more welcome.
“The size of the response has been amazing,” he told the Observer. “Hundreds of people are in touch. My social media followers went up by a thousand, for a start. People say I am brave about cancer, but I am just realistic. I have my moments, of course, when I well up.”
Hewlett suspects the strength of the public reaction is due to the rarity of hearing a couple of men just talking in a relaxed way about cancer. Hewlett’s analytical approach has always been no-nonsense, whether interrogating media executives on Radio 4, producing an award-winning 1991 BBC documentary from the Maze prison, or interviewing the late Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi.
Now, in a chatty style, punctuated by his trademark phrase “to cut a long story short”, he has offered his listeners a down-to-earth assessment of his prospects, with honest reactions to his treatment, from details of his chapped hands and feet to his use of a cold cap to try to prevent major hair loss during chemotherapy.
The veteran radio critic Gillian Reynolds summed it up: Hewlett’s instinct for a strong story, she wrote in the Daily Telegraph, is what “makes him the best reporter on the unfolding story of his own physical change”.
For Hewlett though, Mair is at least half of the reason why the radio interviews work. “I have known Eddie for a long time, though not particularly well. When I was offered the chance to talk about the cancer on air, I suggested his show because it is a fairly free format. If he was willing – and warmed to the idea – I said, go ahead. But I have been amazed by the amount of time given to it. The first was almost a third of the programme. The second almost crashed the 6pm pips.”
Gwyneth Williams, controller of Radio 4, has also suggested that Hewlett record a diary for a separate documentary. “I have never had much trouble talking, after all,” Hewlett drily notes. “And so far I have had few side-effects from treatment.”
The scale of listener reaction is “enormously gratifying” to him and he says he has been especially pleased to hear from former colleagues, from his time as director of programmes at Carlton TV, where he produced the acclaimed Second World War in Colour, and right back to Panorama, where he was in charge when Princess Diana gave her famous “there were three of us in this marriage” interview to Martin Bashir in 1995.
Aside from replying to kind correspondence, Hewlett is persisting with research into potential treatments for his condition: advanced oesophageal cancer. Many of his doctors seem, he says, grateful to discuss possibilities with an informed patient. “I’ve looked up clinical trials and drug development programmes because I have the time. I don’t know how much anyone can do to alter the outcome, but you can make the journey better for yourself.”
The latest news on his condition is not great because the first round of chemotherapy failed two weeks ago, after a beguilingly positive start: “It gave me three or four months of improvement and without that I might not be here now. Now I have uncertainty again. I feel as if I have been given notice, that’s all, but can’t know yet if I will be one of those who respond well to the next kind of chemotherapy. There is only around a 4% chance of full remission in any case.”
There is a tendency to endow people who are confronting death with a superior brand of wisdom. Some deliver on these expectations, providing memorable music, in the case of David Bowie, or poetic visions, like the playwright Dennis Potter. Hewlett, however, is not of a contemplative or morbid bent. He is an enthusiast and, in his own phrase, “a question-asker”. So he has straightforward advice to offer, like the tip, passed on to him by his BBC colleague Nick Robinson, that chemotherapy can make you prone to sunburn.
“Most of us will end up in my position at some point, although it is not quite the same when an older person dies,” Hewlett says. “Then there is something almost orderly, or even natural, about gradually sloughing off this mortal coil. This is different.”
An avowed rationalist, he has now had to reconsider his easy dismissal of the “touchy feely” rhetoric of care. He now “listens to his body”, he says, and admits that the aromatherapy sessions set up by the Royal Marsden have helped him to relax: “It has challenged my attitudes.”
This week he is scheduled to rejoin Mair on PM alongside his three sons, Fred, 29, Bill, 24, and Bert, 19. His openness has helped them, he thinks.
“Some ill people feel an instinct to protect their family and say nothing, and that is common among men, apparently, as well as among mothers. But I found talking helps because it gives them a reason why I am behaving in a particular way. It seems important to tell people who might feel they can only see the same grumpy bastard.”
Hewlett’s long streak of luck, he recounts, started when he was taken from a children’s home in Birmingham as a baby and handed to his adoptive parents, Larry and Vera. “I did luck out there,” he says fondly, before listing a further series of fortunate incidents that shaped his career, starting with the moment he was on hand when the BBC needed a local Manchester journalist to find the identity of two men involved with a crime.
The fates nearly turned against him in the mid-1980s when his student activism was detected by the BBC’s covert vetting system and his contract was terminated. In 1985, his evidence to Observer journalists David Leigh and Paul Lashmar helped reveal the processes by which MI5 once controlled the hiring and firing of BBC staff.
Offered a job on the BBC1 consumer show That’s Life, Hewlett instead took a production role with independent company Diverse, making his name with The Friday Alternative and Brass Tacks, before joining Channel 4, then Carlton, then returning to the BBC.
He has, he says, a “tenacious” grip on a story and remains determined to tell this one. All the same, he is unsure whether to track down his birth parents. There is, he points out, now a genetic interest in finding out what happened to them. He would like to give his sons the information.
“It is a hard one,” he says. “It might be worth it, or it might bring someone a brief agony after a lifetime of emotional pain.”
Maybe caution will win out here. Or possibly Hewlett’s instinct is too strong. “I now realise that is really what I am about. I am a storyteller.”
Steve Hewlett: ‘People say I’m brave about cancer, but I’m realistic. I’m a storyteller’
