My, this film about Rhod Gilbert’s cancer treatment puts its audience through the emotional wringer. With a rare frankness, the comic lets the cameras see him at his most vulnerable – and it makes for a powerfully raw watch.
The headline facts you may already know: that the stand-up, now 55, was diagnosed with stage four head and neck cancer, caused by the HPV virus, in July last year. And with a dark irony, he ended up being treated at the Velindre Cancer Centre in Cardiff, for which he had long been a fundraiser.
‘I thought I’d have life-long immunity,’ Gilbert notes wryly. ‘Apparently not.’
The news, of course, turned his life upside-down, not least because the location of the cancer imperilled his voice – and therefore his work as a stand-up and presenter – even if he survived the disease.
Surviving the treatment was another matter. A Pain In The Neck does not shy away from sharing the toll the punishing chemotherapy and radiotherapy took on his body – and his spirit.
At first, the chemo does not seem too bad. For all the nightmarish fears the word put into his head, it turns out to be merely ’a little machine that sounds a bit like a printer’.
Radiotherapy, though, is a different matter: a remorseless pummelling of his body day after day, leaving him feeling worse than he’s ever felt, and feeling increasingly hopeless. The toll it takes is etched on his face, even before he tries to put it into words. He can barely hold it together as he describes it ‘being the worst time in my life’.
‘I just want this to stop,’ he says desperately, as the treatment drains his energy and his optimism. ‘I want to stop feeling like this. I want to start to feel a little bit better, even if it’s just a tiny, tiny bit tomorrow.’
After 30 unrelenting days of this, emotions are high when he rings the bell to signify his last session. Addressing friends and family who gathered outside the clinic, even at his lowest ebb, Gilbert gushes with heartfelt gratitude for all the medics whom he has encountered.
I defy anyone not to get at least a little teary as they watch this deeply affecting moment. His relief that this ordeal is over, whatever the future may hold, is palpable.
The scene also cuts through all the clichés about NHS workers being ‘angels’, so readily trotted out by politicians as they refuse to pay them accordingly, to show the real, overwhelming effect their work has on their patients.
At one of the countless low points, Gilbert muses in his video diary: ‘I’m not laughing any more, not sure if I ever will again.’ Yet he does maintain shards of humour, which help see him through, even managing a knob gag as he speaks about the draining effect of the radiotherapy.
The end of this treatment does not mean the all-clear, of course, and we pick up with the comic as he goes for a scan – on Friday the 13th, inauspiciously – to discover if it has worked. When Gilbert calls it ‘just yet another apprehensive, scary, emotional moment’ we know exactly how he feels.
Watching an hour-long documentary can only ever give an almost immeasurably small fraction of one per cent of an idea of how emotionally and physically demanding it is to go through all this. But Gilbert makes that slither count for so much by laying his heart and soul open to the viewers.
In his introduction, Gilbert says: ‘When I got cancer, to be honest, I was terrified. So I wanted to do something to take my mind off it, to make the whole thing feel less scary, and to maybe help other people too. So I decided to film it all, and I really hope that my story gives you a little hope.’
Bloomin’ buckets full of it, Rhod, even if we have to see the miserable lows to appreciate the joyous highs – and the newfound appreciation the comic has found for even the simplest pleasures in life. This remarkable film portrays that so effectively because it is so honest.
• Rhod Gilbert: A Pain In The Neck For SU2C is on Channel 4 at 9pm tonight. Click here to donate to the Stand Up To Cancer appeal.
