‘I feel optimistic. I am not panicking’
Last week, the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen revealed that he is suffering with bowel cancer. He tells all to Joe Shute
Thirty-five years, 20 wars, a dozen or so close colleagues killed … Jeremy Bowen weighs up his BBC career in numbers. So, too, his diagnosis and ongoing treatment for bowel cancer. “I’m in the final week of my fifth of eight cycles of chemotherapy,” he says, plonked wearily on the sofa of his south London home, as his family rattle about having breakfast downstairs.
Every month this year, he has reported to the Royal Marsden Hospital for a day of tests before being sent home with a carrier bag full of drugs, which he administers over the following fortnight: three pills in the morning, four in the evening.
“The numbers are in my favour, and that’s very much what I’m hanging on to,” the 59-year-old says. “I do feel pretty optimistic. I’m not panicking.”
Bowen, the BBC’s long-standing Middle East editor, had planned to undergo his treatment out of the public eye. He is fiercely protective of his two children, 18 and 15, who he has with his long-term partner Julia Williams, also a BBC journalist, and as a famed war correspondent has an aversion to making the story about him.
Eventually, he says, he was moved to reveal his diagnosis on Breakfast last week after being inspired by his colleague and close friend, the newsreader George Alagiah, who has publicly revealed his own stagefour bowel cancer, which is now incurable, and recently recorded a podcast with the charity Bowel Cancer UK to mark a month raising awareness of the disease.
“I felt a bit selfish not saying anything, so I got in touch with the charity, too,” Bowen says.
“You don’t want your medical history put on television, but I thought to myself if even one person gets tested and gets their cancer caught in time then it’s worth doing.”
The two BBC men have worked together since the Eighties and Bowen says his colleague (a few years older at 63) has been to visit him at home during his treatment. “We’ve compared notes a bit,” he says. “It’s quite a personal thing.”
Bowel cancer is the fourth most common in Britain and the second biggest killer, causing more than 16,000 deaths each year. But early diagnosis remarkably improves one’s chances. According to NHS figures, enquiries about the disease have trebled in the past week, something being referred to as a “Bowen bounce”.
His diagnosis last autumn and treatment have been a gradual process. “There was no Hollywood moment – sit down Mr Bowen,” he says. He and Julia made the decision early on to be open with their children. “I’m not trying to keep anything from them,” he says. Both regularly visited him in hospital – his son popping in most days on his way back from school.
Now he puts a typically stoic face on his treatment. After all, in 2013 Bowen broadcast for the BBC Ten O’Clock News just hours after being blasted with shotgun pellets in the head and leg, during a protest in Cairo. “I’ve got the buckshot they took out of me somewhere around here,” he says looking about the living room of the house he has lived in since the early Nineties. His brother, a QC, lives next door.
However, such bravado aside, while on the wards in nearby King’s College Hospital, he admits: “I did have a few long nights when I was worrying about how serious it might be and what might happen.”
After an operation to remove the tumour (which, according to Bowen, appeared mushroom-sized on the endoscopy), he was only meant to spend five days in hospital, but ended up there for a month after his repaired intestine started to leak.
“It made me very ill, and was very unpleasant,” he says. “It’s a really serious thing – you can die of it. My bowel had shut down, so I couldn’t go to the loo. Everything was inside me like a drain backing up. In the end, they put a pipe down my nose to pump everything out, then it started getting better. That was worse than the chemo, by a long margin.”
Journalism is a family business for Bowen. His father, Gareth, worked for the BBC in Cardiff, and his mother, Jennifer, was a press photographer. They met at the Western Mail Christmas party and as a youth he recalls tearing around the newsroom messing with the paste pots on the subs desk.
He joined the BBC as a graduate news trainee and, with a postgraduate degree in international affairs, soon found himself being dispatched to war zones. His first conflict was the Salvadoran civil war of the late Eighties and in quick succession he was posted to Iraq during the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, the Balkans, various uprisings in Africa…
“When I first started reporting,
I had that invulnerability feeling,” he recalls. “I was so excited, it was like being in a film. As time went by, I realised that it was a dangerous game. People I knew got killed
( Sunday Times war reporter Marie Colvin was a close friend). I still wanted to do it and still enjoyed it. But I had some moments when I thought: ‘I’m going to die now’.”
His scariest moment in the field was in Grozny during the winter of 1994, when he was cluster-bombed by Russian jets in a square where he had been interviewing Chechen troops. His lowest moment occurred in 2000 when his Lebanese fixer – a colleague he had worked with for some six years – was killed when the car they were travelling in was shelled by Israeli troops. Bowen and his cameraman were filming a segment a short distance away – if they had returned to the car, they, too, would have certainly been killed – and he says the guilt was unbearable.
Shortly afterwards, he began noticing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: hypervigilance and suffering nightmares. He returned to Britain for counselling and found himself in the taxi rank at Paddington station “working out what I would do when the shelling starts”.
“I had some counselling and they explained to me it was a fairly normal response to trauma,” he says. “In the course of my work I’d seen an awful lot of death, but not on that personal level.”
A stint on the sofa presenting Breakfast with Sophie Raworth followed before, in 2005, he returned to the field as Middle East editor. He believes he has recovered, but admits: “The psychological impact of incidents, like the one that prompted it, doesn’t go away.”
He says his partner has never sought to dissuade him from such dangerous assignments. “She’s given me some very good advice over the years, but never said you can’t do that,” he says. “She tells me it’s your responsibility to take the decision.”
It was on assignment in Mosul, Iraq, last year that he first noticed the symptoms of bowel cancer: shooting pains in his lower back and legs, which no amount of over-thecounter painkillers could address.
When he returned home, he went to hospital and at first was told the pains were the result of his intestine catching on old scar tissue from a hernia operation. But he decided to visit his GP for tests, which was when the signs of cancer were detected.
He has some family history of the disease, but otherwise lives a very healthy life: he is a keen cook, attends spinning classes at his local gym and in the back garden has a pile of unsplit logs ready for chopping – a grinning Bowen says he received a chainsaw for his 59th birthday present.
At present, he lacks the energy for such endeavours, but soon he will be on chemotherapy cycle number eight and then he hopes for the allclear and a return to reporting on the next crisis in the Middle East.
“I was talking with the professor at the Royal Marsden about the chances of a recurrence and he told me not to worry,” he says. “‘You face far worse odds when you go to work.’”
‘If even one person gets tested and their cancer is caught then it’s worth doing’