Nick Robinson
Saying goodbye to my friend Steve Hewlett
Not since Year Five English with Mr Allan had I written a poem. Not, that is, until a fortnight ago. Lying in bed, unable to sleep, the alarm clock set for 3.30am (my wake-up time when presenting the Today programme), I sat up, switched on the light, and started to tap the words into my iPhone.
It began, “One last conversation. So much to say. So little actually said”. It was written for my friend, my colleague and fellow cancer sufferer Steve Hewlett two days after I saw him in London’s Royal Marsden hospital when it became painfully clear that I would never see or speak to him again.
Steve’s death, at the age of 58, this week was national news – which, had he been here to see it, would have produced a characteristically laconic Hewlett chuckle. As would the idea that my rather maudlin iPhone poem would be reprinted in newspapers and shared online.
By the time he died, though, millions of people had been turning up the car radio, stopping their ironing or waiting before turning the kettle on so that they would not miss the latest weekly instalment of the Hewlett cancer chronicle. So transfixed were they by this middleaged man describing the pain in his oesophagus and the failure of his liver; the splitting of his nails or chapping of his feet; his search for the drug or treatment that might buy him some time before the end, which he, and we, sensed was coming all too fast.
“To cut a long story short,” was one of Steve’s phrases that we all became familiar with, even though his tales from the medical frontline were anything but short and could be painful to listen to. Few would have imagined that these anecdotes would become a recipe for broadcasting gold. Except, perhaps, Steve. It was one last reminder of his sixth sense for the stories that engage an audience and, boy, did he know how to tell them.
It was something I saw from the moment I first met him. I was as establishment as you could be – a BBC trainee straight out of university who’d been schooled at the Oxford Union debating society. Steve, on the other hand, had a radical chic aura which came from his time at the new, and positively daring, Channel 4 where, it was said, he’d made a film giving a Marxist interpretation of cricket.
Years later, he would become editor of Panorama and inherit me as his deputy. We accidentally made history – and not in the way we would have liked – by being the first programme to have an interview with the Prime Minister blocked from transmission by a court ruling (“cutting a long story short”, it involved me falling out with a certain Alex Salmond for the first and not the last time). Steve could have blamed me, but it never crossed his mind. When I edited a programme which the Daily Mail dubbed “the BBC’s astonishing Royal attack”, he backed me again. It is what great editors do.
Even more years after that he and I would talk regularly – both on air and off – about the issues he analysed and explained as presenter of Radio 4’s Media Show.
What made us close, though, was our shared experience of cancer. Two years ago, when I was recovering from the surgery, which successfully removed my tumour but robbed me of my voice, Steve reassured me and wrote in the Radio Times that the audience would get used to my new throaty sound. When he told me about his diagnosis last year, I wrote him a beginner’s guide on how to cope with chemotherapy. We appeared together on breakfast television to explain why we’d found comfort in talking about being ill.
With so much history you might expect that I would know what to say when I visited Steve at the Royal Marsden with our mutual friend and agent Mary Greenham. The words flowed. There were no awkward silences. That last conversation lasted about an hour. And yet, as I wrote to him afterwards:
We chat, we gossip, we exchange insights about our shared world.
I’m too British, too male, too stiff-upper-lipped to really talk about the fact that it’s a world you and I both know you’ll soon be leaving.
I now know, thanks to the response to those words on Facebook and Twitter that that feeling – of not having said what needs to be said – is shared by many who have been at a loved one’s deathbed. I also know that many, many cancer sufferers and their friends and families share the view that I wrote
You “fought” they said.
You’ve been so “brave” they said.
Yet you know, I know, anyone who has faced it knows differently.
Cancer is not a battle.
There is no choice whether to fight let alone whether to win or lose.
No amount of courage no measure of cowardice can decide the outcome.
This is not to suggest that patients should be passive. Anyone who heard Steve’s dispatches will know that he fought as hard as he could to get the best treatment that he could to give his body the best chance it could have.
I wrote the words above the night before I had a routine scan of the sort that all cancer sufferers grow used to having every few months. It was nothing to worry about for someone who has had not the slightest sign of his cancer returning.
Yet it turned out to be anything but routine. My doctor told me: “You need another scan. Something’s shown up on your liver. It’s probably fine but we need to be sure.”
What followed was a return of the uncertainty, the fear and the dread that I thought I’d long since put behind me, but which Steve had faced for so long.
In the end, it was a false alarm. As far as anyone can tell, I was and am still clear of cancer. There was, indeed, nothing to worry about though, perhaps, my subconscious thought differently when I wrote :
There is no virtue in survival. Certainly no lack of it in death.
I lived.
You now know that you will not.
Luck. Chance. Fate. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Steve, though, did make one important choice – he confronted his sickness and his imminent death in public. That decision made thousands of people realise that they were not alone.
If I close my eyes I can picture that hospital room where we spoke – the pile of letters sent to Steve from Radio 4 listeners, the little gifts they sent him and the unopened bottle of champagne to celebrate the wedding he, his nurses and his wife-to-be, Rachel, had to plan, organise and celebrate within an hour of his doctor delivering the news that he could do no more for Steve.
Once he told Mary and I that tale it was suddenly time for us to go.
As I leave, you gripped my arm. An unspoken goodbye.
Only now do I know what I should have said.
No one who heard you talk about what you’ve faced will ever forget.
Oh yes and one more thing.
Thank you.
First and foremost, Steve was a storyteller who believed in using the power of television and radio to deliver the BBC’s mission to “inform, educate and entertain”. When we worked together at Panorama he had another catchphrase – one I now use. The measure of any programme is whether it passes “the my mum test”. Would my mum, or yours or anyone else’s, care about the story you’re telling and could they understand it?
To his last day Steve passed that test with flying colours.
‘I know that feeling of not having said what needs to be said is shared by many’