The terrifying brain scares we have both survived – to keep on riding bikes, cooking and talking b******s on TV
From unbearable tragedy to TV triumph... and sheer horror as they were told their waists had ballooned to 50in
SI SAYS...
‘WHAT have you got on today?’ I asked the landlord of the pub.
‘Chicken curry, naan and poppadoms, Si,’ came the reply.
‘I’ll have one of them then,’ I said. ‘And another pint, please.’
‘I’ll ’ave the same, please,’ came a voice behind me at the bar.
It was 1995. I looked over my shoulder and saw a round-faced, bald-headed guy with a neatly trimmed beard. He introduced himself as Dave Myers, the new head of make-up on the set of The Gambling Man, the Catherine Cookson television drama on which I was the second assistant director.
Dave seemed like quite a serious, unassuming fella. He tells me his first memory of me is that I was ‘large, hairy and loud’.
He told me he had a flat in Aberdeenshire and was renting digs in Newcastle. ‘So how are you getting around? Don’t suppose you’ve got a motorbike?’ I asked.
That was it: the ice was well and truly broken, and over the following years we’d become as close as brothers.
DAVE SAYS...
IT WAS New Year 1998, and I’d just got together with Glen Howarth, a script supervisor 16 years my senior. There was no doubt in my mind: Glen was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
When she took me to Blackpool to meet her father shortly afterwards, I decided to propose. Glen hesitated for a split second and my heart nearly stopped, but then she said yes. It was a magical moment, one I’ll never forget.
A few weeks later, back at her flat at Hampstead, North London, something very strange happened to Glen’s face. Her skin turned yellow, just as if a switch had been flicked.
On January 23, 1999 – Glen’s birthday – she was admitted to the Royal Free Hospital. In the midst of a lot of panic and confusion I can remember hearing the words ‘tumour’ and ‘stomach’ and ‘cancer’.
The doctor said the tumour they had found in Glen’s stomach had its own blood supply, and she needed surgery to remove part of the digestive system to bypass it.
Three days after the operation the doctors explained she had an infection, and she was going to be moved to the intensive care unit.
I slept at the hospital nearly every night. Si came down to support me, for which I was very grateful. He was with me when I plucked up the courage to ask the consultant what Glen’s prognosis was. ‘There’s a 15 per cent chance of her living,’ the consultant said flatly.
Si and I bawled our eyes out together that night, telling each other that Glen would pull through.
Eventually, I was allowed to take her home, but a week later, her temperature shot up and she was rushed back to hospital. She went straight into intensive care again, and that’s when the penny dropped. Glen was not going to beat her cancer.
On May 9, I was sitting beside her when I felt a kind of veil waft across her, and I knew she was gone. I’d imagined a lifetime of happiness with Glen, and it had been snatched away in the blink of an eye.
I went back to work in September, on a couple of films being shot in Luxembourg. I felt lethargic and terribly run-down the whole time.
I was making up the beautiful American actress Pam Grier when something very odd happened. It was as if the make-up I was applying was sliding off her face. Then I couldn’t focus and had black dots floating in front of my eyes.
I was taken to a nearby hospital run by German nuns. I caught a brief glimpse of the CT scan picture and was shocked to my core. There was a massive shadow in the lefthand side of my brain.
I was convinced I had a giant brain tumour, and that I was going to die, just like Glen. The next day a consultant explained it was an extremely large but relatively harmless cyst. It was so big my brain had grown around it, and it could have been there possibly since I was a child. Now it had reached the size where it was putting pressure on my brain.
I decided I wanted to go home. At Aberdeen Royal Infirmary I was seen by a wonderful neurosurgeon who suggested inserting a shunt into my head to relieve the pressure slowly, plus drains to remove the fluid gradually from the cyst.
When the surgery was over I felt better than I had in a long time. The shunts and drains were left inside, which took a bit of getting used to, but they never gave me any trouble. They are still there to this day.
And after more than 30 years of suffering from alopecia, my hair started to grow back normally, albeit with a receding hairline.
SI SAYS...
I’D BEEN fortunate enough to work on two Harry Potter films, but after 9/11 film budgets were being slashed. My work dried up very quickly. Jane and I had no savings and a big mortgage to pay every month, and in a frighteningly short space of time we didn’t have two pennies to rub together.
Dave was also feeling quite jaded at this point in his career, having worked in make-up for more than two decades. As my debts stacked up, a phrase Dave had used years before came into my head.
‘How great would life be if we could just ride bikes, cook food and talk b******s?’
What if we could make a TV programme out of it?
The following year, 2003, we were filming the pilot in Morecambe Bay and at Dave’s house. The results are laughable when we look back today. I start off saying: ‘Cockles don’t grow in Tesco you knooow! They grow in the sea! Oh, here’s Dave!’
Then Dave swoops over saying: ‘Eee, I’ve got loads of cockles!’
In fact, there wasn’t a single damn cockle to be found that day, so we used a bag full of pebbles instead. Then we did a bit of cooking in Dave’s quirky old kitchen.
All the while we really did talk a load of twaddle.
Our pilot was eventually submitted to BBC2 in early February 2004, and it sat there for many, many months. Eventually, one show was commissioned for BBC2. It was fantastic news, and we were of course completely cock-a-hoop. Now we had the commission in the bag there were emails and plans flying around all over the place. One email had ‘Hairy Bikers’ as its subject line. Nobody can remember who wrote it, but it was an affable description and it stuck.
DAVE SAYS...
WE WERE filming in Transylvania for our debut series. In our hotel there was a striking but incredibly austere-looking woman on reception who checked us in very coldly.
Nudging Si, I whispered: ‘I fancy her!’
‘What? She’s dead scary!’ he replied. I found out her name was Liliana Orzac and when we were
about to leave, we swapped email addresses. I liked her a lot and felt I’d made a friend. I phoned her on her birthday later that year and invited her to England for a visit.
Lil was the mother of two children aged nine and 15, and was understandably cautious about visiting a big hairy biker from Barrow-in-Furness whom she barely knew. She did come to stay, though, and eventually, she and her children, Iza and Serge, came to live with me. On January 8, 2011, Lil and I got hitched.
That year, we began work on a show called the Hairy Bikers’ Cook Off and the BBC asked us to have a routine medical. I was now pushing 18st, which was way too heavy, and taking tablets for high blood pressure and to lower my cholesterol. On top of that, I’d been warned I was borderline type 2 diabetic.
By some miracle, the doctor deemed me fit for filming, but when Kingie came out he was ashen and spluttered: ‘I’ve been told to go straight to the doctor. My blood pressure is incredibly high.’
Si was given a repeat prescription for the same blood pressure tablets I was on, only much stronger. It was a shameful state of affairs.
SI SAYS...
IN 2012 we were commissioned to make four shows called Hairy Dieters: How To Love Food And Lose Weight.
The thrust of the series was simple: we were going to discover how people like us could continue to eat delicious food but still shed the pounds. Naturally, for the show to work Dave and I would have to l ose a significant amount of weight. The first step was to get weighed and measured at Newcastle University. This was bloody terrifying. On the day, I weighed in at 19st 6lb, with a 50in waistline, and Dave was 17st 12lb, with a 49in waist. We were then both told we were morbidly obese. It was such a shock I could barely speak.
With the help of a nutritionist and dietician, we started creating lowcalorie recipes. We swapped fried breakfasts for lean ham, beans and rye bread with no butter, cut out milk in coffee, sprayed oil in the pan instead of lashing in a large glug, and started experimenting with low-fat replacements in all our favourite recipes.
To our utter delight, when we went back to Newcastle University three months later we found we had each lost an incredibly impressive 3st. Best of all, we were told we could come off the various drugs we were taking. We were triumphant.
DAVE SAYS...
IN 2013, I had a go at Strictly Come Dancing. When it came to my first performance with my partner Karen Hauer, I was shaking like a leaf. I gave it my absolute all and the audience roared wildly, but afterwards the judges said they felt the same way as I did: terrified!
There are two tanning tents backstage at Strictly, and every week I embraced the fake tan with relish. I’d have a double dip for Latin and a single dip for ballroom, and usually ended up looking like a Greek fisherman, but I absolutely loved it.
In Halloween week I had to jive to the Monster Mash while dressed as Beetlejuice. I looked more like an angry panda, or Alice Cooper after a car crash.
Karen and I survived for seven weeks, which was a great achievement, and something I am very proud of.
SI SAYS...
ONE Friday night in 2014, I went to bed at 8pm with a banging headache. On the Saturday morning I still felt absolutely terrible. Suddenly, when I looked at the telly, stuff started sliding off the screen, and that’s when I knew I was in serious trouble.
A taxi took me to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle where I found out I had a brain aneurysm, which meant one of the blood vessels in my brain had bulged out like a balloon, and it had ruptured, causing a brain haemorrhage. Left untreated, this could cause a massive stroke at any moment, so I needed an operation to save my life.
‘I was so frightened I’d lose you, Si,’ Dave told me eventually. ‘What if I lose Kingie? I can’t lose my best mate.”’
The first series we started working on after my illness was called The Pubs That Built Britain. We’d be visiting some of the oldest hostelries in the land to sample their beer and learn about their history.
Working on a new series was exactly what I needed, and it was another fantastic chance for me and Dave to do what we set out to achieve years earlier.
‘You know what, Dave?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t life be great if we could just ride bikes, cook food and…’
Before I finished, Dave added: ‘Aye, and go on an epic pub crawl for a job? We must be two of the luckiest men on the planet. Let’s have a pint to celebrate – I think we’ve earned it!’