It’s a balmy summer’s day at Salford’s Media City, sun streaming through the windows of Quay House’s fifth floor, where a popular Radio 5 Live podcast, You, Me and the Big C, is being recorded. On one side of the screen sits producer Mike Holt, a lovely bear of a man in a lumberjack shirt – he’s usually found producing the boxing show Fighting Talk. Next to him are BBC shift worker Alex Healey drinking a sugar-free Red Bull, and assistant producer Alex Entwistle (“there’s no H in my ’wistle,” he points out, helpfully). The mood is one of fast-paced, drivetime-flavoured perkiness. “Don’t be fooled,” Mike says brightly. “We were all crying two hours ago.”
On the other side of the screen, Rachael Bland, Deborah James, and Lauren Mahon are laughing, as they often do. “You’ve got a tumour on your liver – that’s good news!” Bland says, talking about herself without drawing breath. “Well, not good news, but that means it’s big enough to be measured as a marker, which means you’re on the trial [she is one of 150 patients worldwide on a new experimental trial being managed for her by Manchester’s Christie NHS Foundation Trust].” Sun columnist Deborah James sits next to her in a leopardskin shirt, brunette curls loose on her shoulders – she often goes off on a tangent, Holt says (“it’s like herding cats with her”). Mahon sits far right, joking about recovery rate data in her broad cockney. “I mean, I’m wiping my bum with the stats now!” It’s like listening in to three raucous friends in the pub.
Launched in March, the BBC podcast is about something that on paper sounds very hard to sell: what it’s like to have cancer, presented by a woman who has it (Bland), and two who have recently gone into remission (James and Mahon). Consistently popular on the overall iTunes chart, You, Me and the Big C peaked in March at No 3, with a glut of five-star ratings. Bland, 40, a BBC News and 5 Live presenter, is its de facto host. James, 36, is a deputy headteacher turned Sun cancer columnist, while Mahon, 32, blogs at GirlvsCancer. Her site’s tagline is “for badass women making cancer their b*tch”. Its main picture is of her topless, two middle fingers covering her nipples.
Today’s recording has been particularly tough. Bland announced two days earlier on her blog, Big C Little Me, that her cancer has returned, and is now classed as metastatic, which means it’s essentially incurable. “I feel like a grenade with the pin out,” her post goes. “Just waiting for some odd sensations to appear. Tick tock.”
You wonder about the effects of divulging such devastating personal news, but this show has been a rock, Bland insists, as the recording wraps up and we decamp to a table in the BBC’s offices. “We wanted to create a space where you feel like you’re sitting down with girls like you, having a cup of tea, talking about it like it’s EastEnders. Do you know what I mean?” She speaks seriously, without irony. “Because when you have a conversation about it, you normalise it.”
Not that Bland was sure the show would work – she hadn’t even met her colleagues until the first day of recording. But since then they have explored many issues, such as mental health, money, fertility and chemotherapy, with aplomb. “We never imagined it would have worked out this way, actually. Did you, at the start of this?” Bland turns to her friends, one by one. James gurns and shakes her head. Lauren Mahon agrees: “Jesus, no.” “But it’s provided me with so much strength,” Bland continues, “and if we don’t record together, we really miss each other.”
You, Me and the Big C started to come together in January after Bland went to her BBC bosses with an idea. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in November 2016 after finding a lump under her arm; she had just finished breastfeeding her son, Freddie, now two, and was trying for another child with her husband, Steve. The simple act of putting these sentences to paper creates an air of tragic narrative, of course, but these are simply some of the facts about Rachael Bland’s life. There are others, which is why her podcast exists.
Bland found regular advice channels and forums unhelpful, an experience the other two echo – “I got handed a leaflet in the hospital,” says Mahon, leaning in, “and I looked at this woman on it, ill, with a scarf on her head, and went, uh-uh, that’s not me” (she was diagnosed with grade 3 breast cancer in 2016, a few months before Bland). More useful were the like-minded souls Bland discovered on social media, particularly on Instagram Stories, where lots of women – although there are men too, she adds quickly, and many young people – post about living their ordinary lives around their treatment. “You realise quickly that everybody feels really lonely. But these two” – she jabs out her thumbs at her friends – “were my absolute favourites.”
We talk about how little the community aspect of social media is celebrated today, particularly the ways it helps women join together in endlessly positive ways; against sexism, sure, but also by underlining the language in which women actually speak. “You also don’t want to talk to someone you’ve known all your life when you’ve got cancer,” James adds (she was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in December 2016). “You want to talk to somebody who understands what it’s actually like.”
The podcast studio space seems to take all filters away, becoming a confessional booth. Then the inevitable happens: your family and friends listen in. “And they all find out things. Like your dad said it was the first time he’d realised…” Bland turns to James. “What did he say on the pod?” “It was the first time he’d realised how scared I was of my own cancer because I’d never really spoken about it,” says James. She is referring to a particularly moving show in April, which saw the women step aside for Bland’s husband, James’s father, and Mahon’s brother to speak together about their experiences, along with cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew, whose wife has had breast cancer. (5 Live commentators are often added to the show’s mix, and the varied stories from familiar voices works brilliantly.)
There have been some lively recordings. One day in April, Deborah turned up in what she calls her “poo suit”: a poo-emoji fancy dress outfit sized for a six-year-old. “I bought it when I was still a little bit inebriated from the general anaesthetic,” James explains; she wore it during Bowel Cancer Awareness Week, knowing that people would wonder why she was dressed that way on social media, and then discover her talking about the symptoms sooner than they would read a leaflet. Then there was the fertility episode featuring Olympian athlete Steve Parry, who had a testicle removed as part of his treatment. The moment where Mahon inquires if he now produces half of what he used to is priceless.
The women got criticism, of course, for not including men in their presenting team. “Literally before the podcast had even launched,” Mahon moans. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about testicular cancer, my love, I don’t have balls, contrary to rumour.” She shrugs. “There’s always going to be someone who’ll be like, ‘All right, princess, calm down’, isn’t there? Oh no, you’re one of those. Blocked.” The show’s bold humour hasn’t encountered much criticism, however – the presenters know that it helps draws people into a subject that might otherwise be too difficult to contemplate.
The episode in which the women go from discussing fertility to how they told their children about their cancer, to my ears, is the toughest – James’s children, Hugo and Eloise, are old enough to understand its implications, she says, being nine and seven respectively. I broach the subject gently today considering Bland’s news; James wells up, and the subject moves along quickly. “Some topics are so close to where it really hurts, they’re, you know…” She stops. “It’s quite emotional.” And yes, they’ve had meltdowns after recording some episodes. “It is the processing of a trauma,” Mahon says. “But the reward – that sense of unity, that we’re in this together, and knowing that it’s helping other people... I’ll take that any day.”
And yes, the women cry as much as they laugh, they say. There were tears again at the end of today’s recording, when James’s oncologist credited her for her attitude throughout her treatment (the women are delighted by the positive feedback they’ve had from doctors and nurses listening to the show). Are there things they’d never discuss? No, they insist. What’s more, they’re facing Rachael’s diagnosis in the only way they know how: they’ve just announced a new series, which begins recording in a few months. A few months ago, Bland had messaged her colleagues to say she wasn’t sure she was going to make it to the end of the series. “And Debs was like: ‘Shut up, Rachael, stop being so over-dramatic.’ Which is exactly what I wanted to hear.”
• This article was amended on 14 June 2018 to correct the spelling of the surname of the Olympian Steve Parry.
You, Me and the Big C is available to download now on iTunes and BBC iPlayer
