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There is clearly a private story that runs in parallel with the public appearances. To be fair, Alagiah, 66, has offered the occasional update on his health over the past eight and a half years. In late 2017 he revealed the cancer had returned after more than a year of him thinking he had got clear of it and in 2020 he shared that it had spread to his lungs. 

Now, he tells me calmly, he has a “tumour site” at the base of his back. “It is near my L5 lowest vertebra. I’ve spent a lot of the last 18 months in extreme pain. There have been times when even lying down makes it worse.”

There was a period last year, he says, when he was getting four straight hours’ sleep a night and counting himself lucky. “Sleep deprivation was an issue, but I don’t want people to think I am feeling sorry for myself.”

He has been on chemotherapy almost constantly since 2014 – though with a 15-month break when the cancer appeared to have gone. He has lost count of the number of rounds, more than a hundred – not the 17 sometimes mentioned in reports, he points out, making a plea for old-fashioned accuracy in journalism. His current regime is low doses for around three quarters of the year, and higher doses for the rest of the time. But there is “uncertainty”, he says, over whether it may have to change. 

So has the cancer spread into his spine? “I don’t know if it is into my spine. It is very technical so you have to be careful. What I have is a tumour that is resting very close to the spine and, as far as doctors can make out, has eroded a bit of a vertebra. More importantly, it is sitting very close to the nerve and the aorta. Both of which are significant. That’s the one we are watching.” The word “significant” is typically measured in the circumstances. He even manages to smile as he says it.  

‘One thing you learn is that with cancer each day is a different day’

In a casual pink and orange T-shirt, he is sitting in the family picture-lined top-floor office of his large and attractively lived-in north London home, shared with his wife of 38 years, former charity worker (at the Fairtrade Foundation) Frances Robathan. The two of them met and fell in love while students at Durham University at a time when mixed-race relationships were, he has said, “certainly less common back then, though not unique”. (In 2011 he drew on his own experience to make a BBC2 series, Mixed Britannia.)

He has asked for our interview to be on Zoom. If there are ill-effects of his ongoing treatment that he is trying to keep private by opting for online, then he isn’t making a very good job of it. “I go into the clinic to start off each dose of chemo, then I come home with a little pump that hangs around my waist for three days. Then a nurse disconnects it. By the end of the three days … I’ve been on it so much that my fingernails are beginning to fall off.” He holds them up to the camera to demonstrate. “I don’t know if that is too much information.”

Even though he is on a low dose, he explains, he has ulcers in his mouth. “The thing about bowel cancer is, it is all about poo and bums and people don’t like talking about them. But I have discomfort all the way from my mouth to my bum. And that becomes acute after three days of chemo. Usually by about a week later it is beginning to be better. Now, though, it is lasting longer, so I may go into the studio [he is due to broadcast on the two days following our interview] with the issues with the ulcers.”

There are some days, he confides, when he wakes up “feeling s---”. “It happens quite regularly when you are on chemo. I can suddenly have an energy collapse. But I’ve got amazing colleagues at the BBC who step in to my place on the rota.”

The back pain is currently not so bad as it has been. His doctors agreed for a second dose of radiotherapy on the tumour near his back, deciding that the potential gains outweighed the risk of side effects. And they clearly have. The only time he even starts to look his age is when he puts on a striking pair of dark pink specs to work out how to turn off a message that keeps appearing on his computer screen.

How, I wonder, does he manage the pain if it strikes suddenly while he is reading the headlines, or interviewing someone live in the studio? “It is incredible what adrenalin will do,” he laughs. “It is invented by nature to get you through anything.” He draws a comparison with tight spots he got into in his award-winning career as a BBC foreign correspondent. “Adrenalin got me through dealing with gunmen in Somalia and earthquake aftershocks in Kashmir.” 

George presenting from Cairo during the Egyptian revolution - BBC News© Provided by The Telegraph

When it gets really bad, he takes painkillers. “I don’t like it and I’ve managed to wean myself off them. But that’s right now – and it may not be true for tomorrow. One thing you learn is that with cancer each day is a different day.”

Born in Sri Lanka, the middle child in a family of five, and the only boy, his parents Donald and Therese – Tamil Catholics, a minority group in the island’s population – left for west Africa when Alagiah was six, deciding (correctly, as subsequent history has shown) that they wouldn’t get a fair chance in their own country. “It’s really tough there now,” he says, on the basis of regular conversations with cousins still in Sri Lanka. “Amid the economic collapse, there is a widespread sense of ‘how did this happen’. Poor leadership is definitely part of it.” 

His father started working as an engineer in Ghana. At 11, Alagiah was sent – as his sisters before him had been – to a Catholic boarding school in Portsmouth. Has faith stayed with him, or offered comfort in coping with a stage-four cancer diagnosis? There is no stage five. “I envy people who have faith. My family home was a very Catholic home. We would end the day by sitting around saying the rosary. So, I understand it, but I’m afraid I no longer have it.” He thinks for a moment. “Having said that, we light candles in churches when we go in occasionally, around Christmas. Call it habit, call it superstition. I call it getting comfort. It’s almost meditative.”

He began his journalistic career in 1982 on the international magazine South, becoming its Africa editor, before joining the BBC seven years later. For the next decade, he was a foreign correspondent, including a spell based in Johannesburg, winning a Royal Television Society award in 1993, and a Bafta in 2000. 

‘My career took me to some of the most dangerous places on the planet’

With two growing sons – Adam and Matthew (both now in their thirties, the latter following in his father’s footsteps in the media) – he returned to Britain in the early 2000s and landed the principal role at the Six O’Clock News, as it was, in 2007. His has been, he says, a blessed life. “I’ve had an amazing gift of a life for a man who was born into a house without a proper toilet. We weren’t poor people, by the way, but it is just the way things were in Sri Lanka in the 1950s. To have ended up where I am now: what is not to be grateful for?” 

His public profile made it inevitable, when he shared his cancer diagnosis in 2014, that there were approaches from charities wanting to involve him. But he resisted initially. Subsequently there have been podcasts for BowelCancerUK - and now these Rankin photographs for Macmillan Cancer Support, which accompany the announcement of its annual Coffee Morning fundraising event later this month.

“You can’t get a cancer diagnosis without knowing about Macmillan because they are everywhere,” he explains. “I’m not afraid of vulnerability or saying I am vulnerable, so I’m slightly surprised at myself that I kept seeing these leaflets and pamphlets, but somehow I had in my head that if I go to Macmillan, I would be telling myself it’s over. That is clearly nonsense. But, at that stage I was getting my head around this disease, and being told I had to sort my affairs out, desperately wanting to get better, worrying about my family and all those different emotions. Anyone who has lived with cancer will know this.”

The struggle to adapt lasted around a year, he recalls. “There was that sense of abandonment, of ‘God, I am leaving these young men [his sons] and my wife’. And then there were people saying, ‘come and help us with the campaign’. I definitely remember thinking that I didn’t want to be defined by my disease.”

Now he realises that he has something to contribute. “Each of us has to find our way of doing it. You can be right out there or in the background. My relationship with Macmillan is more of the latter – not too out there.”

His approach is different from that of Dame Deborah James, the campaigner who also had bowel cancer and died in June, eight years after her diagnosis. The two were not close, he says, but their one encounter is firmly fixed in his memory. “We had a mutual friend. When my cancer got into my lungs they arranged for us to have a conversation because it had got into hers too. When I called her, she was walking out of the Marsden [London’s leading cancer hospital], having had her own regular scan to see if the cancer was spreading. That day, it was OK.” Alagiah told her he would ring back, that the most important thing was to rush home and tell family. “But she stopped and talked to me for half an hour. I was so privileged to have had the chance to talk to her.”

His own main contribution to promoting the hopeful message that you can live, and live well, with cancer has been to continue reading the news on the BBC. He doesn’t like the “martial” language of battling the disease – “who am I in a battle with? Me? My own cells, and they have gone Awol” – but he has never wanted to hide away or turn his back on the job he has been doing all his adult life. 

 

 

George was a familiar sight on our screens as a BBC newsreader - Jeff Overs© Provided by The Telegraph

“Going into the newsroom doesn’t kill any cancer cells, that’s for sure. By the time I walk out of that newsroom at seven o’clock in the evening, having been there since the morning, I am absolutely knackered physically, but mentally I am rejuvenated. I’ve been with people who treat me as they always did, who don’t patronise me, and it is a tremendous fillip.”

One of the ways he has learnt to deal with his cancer is by realising that the body and the mind, though distinct, are also interrelated. “Being healthy, being content, being physically comfortable is as much about the mind as it is the body.”

He uses breathing techniques – taught to him by his “very clever and imaginative osteopath” – to calm his mind and deal with its reaction to the pain caused by the tumour next to his spine. “I am absolutely convinced that those things that keep you content and in the present and not thinking ‘tomorrow the pain is going to be worse’, are not just useful but are proven to work.” Carrying on working is a part of that, he says, “just as lying on the lawn or a beach with my granddaughters [he has three, to whom he is devoted] is also a part of that.”

He seems to be saying that cancer has changed him, and not always in bad ways. “Yes and no. I am generally an optimistic person. My career took me to some of the most dangerous places on the planet, and nothing ever turned out quite as bad as I thought it might.”

What has changed as a result of diagnosis, he says, is his understanding of the richness of each day. “I don’t think I would have had it if I had not been living with cancer, and been in a position where I had to think if I have one year, or two years, how do I navigate myself through that.” 

‘Understanding sadness helps you understand joy’

He now goes through a small ritual every evening as he goes to bed. “Last thing, I ask myself, ‘Georgie, are you going to be around tomorrow?’ And I always say, ‘yes I am’. I had no cause to do that before, but it is an important assertion of my living in the moment.” He does not ask, he points out, “if I am going to be here next month. It is really important for me to know that, when my eyes shut, it is only going to be for a little while and that another day will start.”

Are there ever darker moments, like when he had hoped the cancer had gone but then it returned? “I’ve not had the anger but it takes quite a lot anyway to get me angry. I have had days when things feel more difficult, when I feel, how long is this going to go on for? The question keeps popping up. Right now, when there is an unpredictability about my treatment, I would definitely call them not dark moments but difficult moments, when it is harder to reach that position of contentment which is where I am most of the time.” The most painful thoughts are those about his family. “I think I am an emotional man. I’m trying very hard not to get emotional.”

His wider family had a reunion recently, “all four sisters, most of my nieces and nephews. There were 28 of us.” Two sisters live in Britain, another in Switzerland and one in Florida. “It was a gathering full of passion and joy, but tinged with the realisation that some of us were more vulnerable than others.” One brother-in-law died last year, another has pancreatic cancer. 

“Understanding sadness,” he reflects, “helps you understand joy. There is no joy sometimes without sadness and they feed off each other.” He pauses, as if to ask himself if he is really going to say what he is about to say. “When it comes to my family, I still have this sense of …” He stumbles briefly and uncharacteristically. “One of the things I want to do is hold hands with my wife until the end, and am I going to be able to do that? It haunts me. Not every day.”

For the only time in our conversation, he turns away. He is doing a better job than me at keeping his eyes dry. “I’m not too scared for myself, but I’m here on the third floor of our house,” he says, almost over his shoulder. “And I am looking out of the window at Frances setting out the tablecloth on our garden table, and it occurs to me, is she going to have to do that for herself one day, and eat on her own?” 

Reference: The Telegraph: Peter Stanford