Inspirational stories of children living with cancer
Growing Up with Cancer (BBC One) began with 15-year-old Natasha shaving her head and picking which of her wigs to wear today. “My name isn’t cancer, so why should my whole life revolve around it?” she asked. Quite right too. She got through her all-day chemotherapy sessions with positive thinking and bracing blasts of the aptly titled Bad Medicine by Bon Jovi.
Every day in the UK, we were told, seven teenagers find out they have cancer. This affecting documentary followed three courageous patients being treated at The Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow. Here, the Teenage Cancer Trust have set up a dedicated unit that was described as “more like a youth club than a ward”.
With games, gadgets, films, a jukebox, pool table and youth-friendly decor, this communal space meant the youngsters could hang out with fellow patients and just be their normal selves – which is therapy enough when you’re shuffling around with a drip and no hair, feeling “like crap” and getting pitying looks from strangers.
If patients had been stuck in hospital for eight months like longestserving resident Declan, some of it in strict isolation, the boredom-busting nature of the facility was a lifeline. When the 14-year-old lost his appetite, staff even let him have a treat of Mcdonald’s fries. This cheered him up almost as much as beating grown-ups at Monopoly (Glasgow Edition, naturally).
As optimistic 14-year-old Nairn was told he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he was most worried about his exams. “I’m definitely taking biology this year,” he decided, “so I can know my body better and understand what the doctors tell me. And I need to keep smiling because I know it helps my parents cope.”
Mixing fly-on-the-ward-wall footage with intimate video diaries, this poignant film was ultimately uplifting. Natasha responded well to chemo and was in remission. “I’ll just focus on my health and education now, that’s it,” she vowed. Declan was finally allowed home and was “so happy, I can’t describe it”. Nairn, after being worried about his hair falling out and “feeling uglier when I look in the mirror”, learned to enjoy wearing hats.
Teenagers too often get a bad rap, but this trio were truly inspirational.
‘Ilove a car chase,” announced one character in Preacher (Amazon Prime). Well, he was in luck. The cartoonishly violent comic-book adaptation promptly roared back onto our screens in a hail of squealing tyres, flying bullets and highway fireballs.
Redneck cops were viscerally blown to smithereens and a sheriff was made to spray Mace pepper spray down his own underpants. Our outlaw anti-heroes eventually escaped by siphoning petrol with a human intestine. Songs of Praise this was not. More like Father Brown with a whisky bottle, a pair of Ray Bans and a gun.
As we returned for this second series of genre-bending supernatural drama, our motley trio – renegade Texan priest Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), his assassin ex-girlfriend Tulip O’hare (Ruth Negga) and drunken Irish vampire Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) – were on a road trip to find God. Not in the metaphorical sense, either. God had gone missing and was walking the Earth, so Jesse was on a mission to hold the disappearing deity to account for abandoning his post.
In between car radio singalongs to Dexys Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen (“too-rye-ay” indeed) and stop-offs in strip clubs, they were being stalked by a killer cowboy from Hell, who pulled out people’s tongues if he didn’t like what they told him. The wanton carnage and violently schlocky set pieces made Game of Thrones look like The Thorn Birds.
Meanwhile, we learned that God was a jazz fan, the internet kills your soul and you should never leave a pet cat in the room with a peckish vampire.
It was all energetically written, handsomely shot and performed with charismatic gusto. The three stars (all Britons, pleasingly) clearly had an absolute ball making it.
Preacher just feels slightly… hollow. Style over substance. Sound and fury, signifying nothing much. A noisy, gory, breakneck-paced romp aimed at overgrown teenage geek-boys. I’m a bit of an overgrown teenage geek-boy myself but not enough to bring me back next week.
Growing Up with Cancer Preacher