You may know Sarah Beeny from her property shows, or her New Life in the Country, and you may see her as a sleeves-rolled-up, can-do, get-on-with-it sort of person. Sarah Beeny vs Cancer cracks open a window into a more personal area of her life. In August 2022, Beeny was diagnosed with breast cancer. At first, she thought she might keep it to herself and not go public with the news, but in this hour-long documentary about her diagnosis and treatment, she explains that she realised making a film about it might help her, and might help anyone else going through it, too.
The film starts three weeks after Beeny’s diagnosis. She has three lumps in her left breast, she explains, which are grade 3, “the most active type”. Beeny’s mother died of breast cancer at 39 and much of this film sees Beeny exploring her own treatment while comparing it with what her mother went through 40 years earlier. “I’ve spent 40 years waiting to be told I have breast cancer,” she says, while still joking with the camera crew that they didn’t know what sort of film they were letting themselves in for.
This is a story told with frankness and good humour, and is more sensitive and less combative than the title suggests. Beeny decides early on that “breast” is too clinical a term and she will refer to them as “boobs, actually”. When she has reconstructive surgery, she likens it to “stuffing a cushion … with memory foam”. Her husband, Graham, calls her “a force of nature” and offers a useful perspective on what it is like to be the partner of someone receiving cancer treatment. Her four teenage sons do the same for children understanding and coping with a parent’s illness. She decides to cut her hair off before it falls out and the boys help her. She donates it to a charity that will turn it into a wig for children. “It’s not that bad at all,” she says.
This “inner steel” sustains her for a while, but it certainly becomes much less of a steely film as it goes on. One of her great fears is that she won’t be there for her sons. “People need their mother,” she says, her voice understandably cracking with emotion. She was 10 when her mum died. When she got her own diagnosis, she had spent so long anticipating it that she interpreted it as the doctors saying: “Which colour coffin do you fancy?”
One of the main threads of the documentary is how much has changed since her mum died in 1982, which she learns about through her mother’s medical records. Later, she talks about the film as exploring the past (her mother) and the present (her own illness), but she also takes it into the future, meeting the inventor of a new technology that analyses tissue through the smoke produced when operating on it. She also hears that survival rates have vastly improved over the past 40 years. Beeny admits that she is confronting her fears and handling them by meeting them head-on. She is attempting to roll up her sleeves and get on with cancer, too. She says that she has a tendency to go into organisational mode in a crisis, which will not surprise anyone who has seen her property shows. Even here, we see her filming an episode of her afternoon series the day after she leaves hospital.
Yet it doesn’t shy away from how tough chemotherapy can be, nor does it ignore the “rollercoaster” of treatment and the decisions that must be made. Beeny does not want cameras to show her first chemo session, but later, we see it. “This is it, really,” she says, having a biscuit. She shows us the times she feels relatively OK afterwards, and the times she feels so awful that she has to go into A&E. We see her undergoing an ultrasound to measure the tumours. After the mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, she says that “everything hurts, to be honest”, and it takes her some weeks to start to feel well again. Her candour is a crucial element and it offers important balance.
This is a well-rounded documentary that aims to be of some use to others, and is likely to fulfil that brief. In opening up about her own experiences, Beeny urges others not to be afraid. Don’t be too afraid to get your breasts – sorry, boobs – checked, she says, as her own treatment reaches a sort-of endpoint, and she reminds viewers that progress is being made, every day.
• Sarah Beeny Vs Cancer is on Channel 4.
