George Alagiah

George Alagiah has revealed that his bowel cancer has spread to his lungs.

The 64-year-old BBC newsreader and journalist told The Times newspaper he was given the news by doctors in April, but only told his editor.

However, he added that his condition is not at a "chronic" or "terminal" stage.

Alagiah was first diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2014, and announced in 2017 that the disease had returned. It has now spread to his lungs, liver and lymph nodes, he said.

I don’t know what it is about the man but he is such a lovely person. As I said in the other thread - he comes across so warm and caring. He is still great at his job after 17 years, in fact better and he (in my opinion) looks great for his age.

What is there to dislike about the man?

If, 14 years ago, I had been told George Alagiah had written a book, I would have assumed that it was about how he had travelled from a modest childhood in Sri Lanka to a BBC News anchorman’s desk. Now that he has written another, I guess it is about the six years he has spent living with life-threatening bowel cancer, the initial diagnosis, the revelation that it had spread to his liver and lymph nodes, his 17 courses of chemotherapy, his five operations, its apparent cure and then its return in 2018.
In 2006 I would have been half right: A Home from Home was about his transformation, as he put it in the book’s subtitle, “from immigrant boy to English man”, although it was also a fine and sometimes critical study of multiculturalism. I am wrong today, however. The Burning Land, published last year but soon to emerge in paperback, is a novel about corruption in present-day South Africa. It’s the best kind of political thriller, both tense and informative, and was deservedly nominated for the Authors’ Club best first novel award.
It remains in the running this month for the Society of Authors’ Paul Torday memorial prize for a debut novel by a writer over 60. That Alagiah is 64 is worth celebrating in itself, of course. “I do remember when I was in ‘sort-your-affairs-out’ territory,” he says, dressed in a T-shirt, via Zoom from his north London home, “and a doctor saying the survival rate was 10 per cent after five years. Well, I’ve now gone on longer than that.”

Alagiah: “They haven’t told me to sort my affairs out. But it’s gone to my lungs”
I joke that the reporting so deftly incorporated in The Burning Land reveals a gifted, vivid, analytic print journalist tragically lost to television. He says he knows what I mean. He started his career on the international magazine South and became its Africa editor before joining the BBC as a foreign correspondent in 1989. There is no doubt that chicanery over land ownership in post-apartheid South Africa would have made a great subject for South, and it surely remains easier to discuss in a 270-page novel than in the 165-second special report Alagiah might have filmed when he was the BBC’s Africa correspondent in the Nineties.
“Television is very much a kind of front-page medium,” he agrees. “We don’t have the space to do the analysis that you have [in newspapers]. There was a sacrifice trading in print for television. I had to sacrifice a little bit of breadth for immediacy and reach. But although with coronavirus and ill health I haven’t done as much presenting as I’d like, the crisis has made me realise the importance of the immediacy that broadcasting brings to news.”

On March 17, a week before lockdown, Alagiah developed a fever and was admitted to hospital with suspected and then confirmed coronavirus. It was mild. He did not suffer a cough and did not stay in long, but with a compromised immune system it was “protocol” to report a heightened temperature to his oncologist. “The truth is I went in for cancer not coronavirus. When I came back home, my wife got it pretty badly. She didn’t go into hospital, but she had the worst of it.”
He went back to work. At the end of April came bad news.
“My doctors have never used the word ‘chronic’ or ‘cure’ about my cancer. They’ve never used the word ‘terminal’ either. I’ve always said to my oncologist, ‘Tell me when I need to sort my affairs out’, and he’s not told me that, but what he did tell me is that the cancer is now in a third organ. It is in my lungs.”

I am shocked and sorry. “Well, I haven’t told anybody. My editor knows . . . but that is the way it is. I said to my doctor, ‘You’re going to have to do the worrying for me.’ I don’t want to fill my mind with worry. I just know that he’s a clever guy, doing everything he can.”
His chemotherapy has increased from the low dose he was on to “the old-fashioned stuff, the grown-up stuff”. He is glad we are doing the interview today. “Last week I probably wouldn’t have been in a fit state to think.” He is not sure if he will be fit to work the week we talk, but a few days afterwards I see him back on air in any case.
When his cancer was diagnosed he was 58 and at the height his career, seven years into his stint as solo anchor of the News at Six, but still regularly out on foreign assignments. He was appointed OBE in 2008 and received an outstanding achievement in television award at the Asian awards two years later. He had made a start on The Burning Land. His boys, Adam and Matthew, were safely in their twenties, the products of their father’s happy marriage to Frances Robathan, whom he met at Durham University where he studied politics.

In 1961 with his family in Ghana
Vulnerability had not, I suspect, been part of his psyche for decades, perhaps since his devout parents sent him to England for a proper Catholic education at a boarding school in Portsmouth and boys mocked the colour of his skin. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know what to do’, and then thinking, ‘Oh yes, I will find it funny.’ That was a real decision, to never let it be the thing defining me.”
Whatever stoicism was inculcated in him by his boarding school, however, it did not render him incapable of sharing his vulnerability when his cancer was diagnosed.
“That word ‘vulnerability’ is really, really important, though. Looking back on it, it probably took several months, six months, to get my head around everything. I had a lot of help from people who said, ‘You’re going through the angry phase, the why-me phase.’ You know what? I didn’t go through that angry phase. Growing up with four sisters [he was the middle child between two sets] and having four women’s voices in my ear has made me accept vulnerability and able to talk about vulnerability, talk about weakness. I’ve been able to talk more openly than others might and I think that helps enormously. The key thing was being able to say to my wife, ‘I need your help’, which is very difficult . . . a very difficult thing to do.”
What I don’t understand, I say, is how someone gets from being the fit star of BBC News to being stage-four cancer (there is no stage five) in a couple of weeks. “Well, on reflection, by being an idiot. How did I not know? Well, I normally have enormous energy. You said I was at the top of my game. Well, if I look at my diary, in the past six months I had been in the Philippines, in Colombo, to Knoxville literally for 12 hours to do an interview and flown to London to then get a plane to present a programme from Rwanda 20 years on [from the end of the civil war]. We had a family skiing holiday planned. We had gone for a weekend in Cornwall. I was full of energy and, looking back, the only thing was that I had lost weight. We thought it was because we had been eating so many vegetables.”

In 1992 reporting from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
One by one his friends and family dropped out of the skiing trip and he ended up going on his own. “That is when I saw blood in my stools. I think had we gone as a group I would probably have noticed too, but got out of the loo and then gone, ‘Right, where are we going for dinner then?’ I always put it down to that, being on my own.”
Reaching a kind of peace with his illness was also something he needed to do on his own. “I literally got to the point where I listed the pros and cons of everything that had happened to me: leaving Sri Lanka; finding Fran and falling in love with her at Durham; my career. I added up all of those things and then the bad things that had happened and I just realised in a very visual way, boy, I had had a lot of happiness. There was a lot more in the column of the good things that had happened to me than the **** things that had happened to me. And it was effective. I thought, ‘Well, let’s see what happens.’ I grew up in a house in Colombo where there was a bucket for a loo and a man came and emptied it out, and I ended up where I am now. It’s a good journey, a very good journey.
“I’m really careful about saying things like this. There are as many ways of dealing with cancer as there are people who have got it, and you’ve got to find the one that works for you, but for me thinking of things in that way was the key. Ever since, I’ve been able to deal with — well, some really tough medicine this week, for example. And what is really important is that I love life so much more to the point, I love the people around me so much that I will give it everything I possibly can to hang in there rather than say, ‘I’ve had a good life; let bad things happen.’”
Yet I think he has said he is ready to die. “I don’t know if I have ever said I’m ready. You’re never ready. But I’m not scared of it. I’m really not scared of it for me. I’ve worked through that. What I would say is that I’m not scared of it for myself, but I am completely scared of it for . . .”
His family, I quietly suggest when he stalls.
“My wife.”

He talks about his sons and his granddaughter, two in November, whom he has seen only three or four times in a park since Covid. It is hard to back off when she approaches for a hug. “All this has re-awoken in me this sense of wanting to protect those I love. It reminds me of what I represent to them. I’m sure they will all be fine but, you know, you can protect them a bit more if you’re around.”
I return to The Burning Land before I get upset. If the political themes in this nuanced thriller can be reduced to a few camera-ready sentences, Alagiah, the pro, remains the man to deliver them. “Elitism in South Africa now is not about white and brown. It’s about greed,” he says. “Although I think maybe the message of the book is that the people at the top, the very top, are still white people. I have close friends who say to me that whatever else the revolution was about, it was also about the right to be a bad capitalist and that that freedom should no longer just belong to white people.”
These paradoxes are also within the novel’s characters. Alagiah’s heroine is a conflict mediator called Lindi, a white South African who spent her teenage years in liberal London. Sent back to the country of her birth, she is conflicted herself, checking “her privilege”. I wonder if he identified with this deracinated soul, uprooted from one country, guiltily assimilated into another.
He says no, the character he thinks he resembles is Lindi’s childhood friend Kagiso, the son of her family’s house-worker. Kagiso is black, politicised, but confident enough to spend an evening drinking around a fire pit with Afrikaners. “He is a character that reflects me. One of my faults is I always want to see the other side.”