Comedian Mark Steel has joined Lauren Laverne on the first episode of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs since August, when its presenter revealed her cancer diagnosis.
On the Sunday morning show, which was pre-recorded before the 46-year-old went on leave to recover from the disease, Steel, who was adopted as a child, told the story of meeting his genetic family, describing it as “like a thing on Netflix”.
Steel, who presents Mark Steel In Town on the station, picked The Clash’s Janie Jones, Into My Arms by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, and San Quentin by Johnny Cash, a favourite artist of his late genetic mother.
It comes after Laverne revealed she had been given the “all clear” and would soon be “back to work” on the One Show last weekend.
On the show, Steel explained that in 1995 he decided to start looking for his birth parents after becoming a father himself, with his aunt telling him his mother had come to her “crying” and telling her she was pregnant and did not know what to do with the baby.
She told her that her brother Ernie would look after him, and that was how Steel came to be adopted with the radio presenter remarking: “It was probably more administrative work to hand over a washing machine.”
He eventually found out that his mother was living in Rimini, Italy, and wrote her a letter but heard nothing back.
Steel said: “A few months went by and this lady (who he had asked to search for his parents) said, ‘I’ve got her phone number, I think the time has come when I should ring her’.
“I said ok, the drama of it was amazing, it was like watching a thing on Netflix, but I’m living it.
“She said, so I spoke to Francis (his birth mother), and she was rather cross, she was rather angry then she said, ‘who on earth they gave you my number?’, and I had to try and calm her down and explain that you meant no harm whatsoever.
“And then all of a sudden, she said, out of nowhere, Francis, she said, ‘I would like to ask three questions, she said, the first question is, does he have any children of his own?’ and I said well he has a son and he has a daughter.
“Then the second question she said, ‘what does he do?’ and I said, well, he’s a comedian.
“And then the third question, she said, ‘and what are his politics?’, what a question, she said, ‘I believe he’s on the left’.
“Then she said to me, ‘Mark, I’m going to put the phone down’, but before I do, let me tell you the name of the father, and she blurted out this name with such vigour, I thought, oh well, that is like a drama you’ve now left.”
Steel then went on to explain he had met his father Joe Dwek, a multi-millionaire backgammon player, and said he was still in touch with him.
He added: “He was great, I found an email address for him, he didn’t reply to that, and I thought, do I not get a reply from any of them then? And then a few months later, I wrote another message, and he did reply to that with a really sweet email saying that he remembered Francis.
“He said in his message to me that she’d contacted him some weeks after they’d had this little weekend fling, and said that she was pregnant, and he said, ‘I told my Dad and I met up with her and arranged for an abortion’, which wasn’t an easy thing to do back in those days.
“It was a few years before the 1967 legalisation, so he said, ‘I gave her the money and arranged for it’.
“But I met Joe, he was very nice, we met in a sort of coffee shop, and he came over to me and said his first words, he said, ‘I’ve got a lot of meetings today, this is the most awkward’.
“And I said to him, ‘oh, that’s okay, incidentally, I’m in touch with the family, so if you want the money back, that they clearly owe you for the abortion, I can ask if they’ve got it?’
“And I went, ‘it was bad joke wasn’t it’, then he went ‘yeah’, that was that, we got an alright, he was really sweet.”
