Values really matter

Jackie Macadam meets Ed Stourton, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme and learns how faith his shaped his life and of the challenges of living with cancer.

FOR many readers, a Sunday wouldn’t be Sunday without listening to the measured tones of Ed Stourton in his role as presenter of Radio 4’s ‘Sunday’ magazine programme.

A man of personal faith, Ed grew up in a traditionally religious Catholic family and now, after a life spent in front of the camera and behind microphones, is facing his own mortality with a cancer diagnosis that is now untreatable.

“When my (brilliant) oncologist told me my cancer had metastasised he said it was possible to get used to ‘living with cancer’. In my mind I snapped back – in the manner of a Today interviewer – ‘that’s a euphemism, you mean dying of cancer, not living with it’. Happily, I did not give voice to that thought, because he was, in fact, right. Years later I am still here, currently sustained by drugs that were not even invented when I was first diagnosed,” he says.

“I think you have a choice when you are diagnosed; you can make your cancer your profession and the centre of your life, or you can treat it as an interruption and an inconvenience, rather than an end to everything. The second choice is much easier to make if you have a cancer like mine which is slow moving, and that’s the choice I have made; I refuse to allow myself to be defined by the disease. I am not sure I would have been able to do that if I had been given a prognosis of weeks or months, but I have done a lot of rich (in the sense of experience) living while under treatment.

“ I think you have a choice when you are diagnosed; you can make your cancer your profession and the centre of your life, or you can treat it as an interruption and an inconvenience, rather than an end to everything.

Of course I live under the shadow of uncertainty, and of course I know the cancer will probably get me in the end, but the sun is shining on the late roses in the garden, the granddaughters were on fine form when they came to lunch last weekend and we have a good line-up for next week’s Sunday programme.”

It’s a typically optimistic and positive way of looking at life, and a way that Ed has tried to embrace his whole life.

“My (late) father was a very traditional Catholic – and grumpy about the loss of regular mass in Latin; Vatican II ended not long before my first communion, so the reforms were very much a live issue. My mother was a relaxed Anglican during my childhood (she has become a more regular churchgoer in her late eighties). My father dictated our religious life (always mass on Sundays, Lent, regular Confession, Holy Days of Obligation and Family Fast days always observed) and I was sent to board at a Catholic prep school when I was eight.

“The Reformation loomed large in school life; most dormitories were named for men who died horribly at the hands of the English state; I slept in More (after Sir Thomas, who was beheaded), Campion (Father Edmund, who was racked at the Tower, then hanged, drawn and quartered) and Fisher (for Bishop John, beheaded in his sixties). They were held up as models of fidelity, but their fate inevitably gave us an unusual perspective on what it means to be British – or at least English.

The sense of living in the shadow of the Reformation remained during my time at Ampleforth, the Benedictine public school in North Yorkshire, and there I came to realise that my own family had been part of the story; they were recusants, who remained Catholic under the Tudors, and over the centuries they had supported exiled religious communities like the one that eventually settled at Ampleforth.

I found the Benedictine way appealing. Religion at Ampleforth was dressed in beautiful clothes – the Schola’s singing at High Mass stays with me – and most of the monks seemed humane and thoughtful – at least that is how I remember them, and this was long before the Independent Inquiry on Sexual Abuse.”

“In my professional life I found my faith useful; as a trainee at Independent Television News, I exploited my knowledge of Catholicism to prepare briefing notes for presenters and correspondents covering John Paul’s historic visit –when you are starting out in the media, any USP (unique selling point) is worth a try, and there weren’t many people at ITN who knew what transubstantiation meant. For a while I cornered the market in Catholic stories; these were the days when Pope John Paul II was making big news regularly with his globe-trotting – especially his visits to Poland.

“The BBC turned me down when I applied from university, and I joined ITN as a graduate trainee instead. There was no real training course – it was more of a ‘thrown in at the deep end’ experience, and sometimes, because of ITN’s tabloid tradition, slightly mad. Coming in one morning I was instructed: ‘Oi you, trainee, go to Brixton and find an escaped prisoner!’ But it was a very thorough – if rough and ready - preparation for a career in broadcast journalism, and my real break came with the foundation of Channel Four News in 1982.

“Most of us on the original team were very young (older, wiser heads judged that the show might not last, and it nearly didn’t) so we were given really challenging opportunities unusually early in our careers. I was sent to Washington as the programme’s first resident correspondent when I was in my mid-twenties; I lived there for three years and it launched me into a decade of foreign reporting – as the BBC’s Paris correspondent and then diplomatic editor at ITN. I covered wars and revolutions (Beirut, Bosnia, Baghdad, Haiti) elections (in America and all over Europe) and international conferences like the Maastricht summit, which founded the modern EU, and the negotiations which settled the end of the Cold War.

“My BBC career really began in the mid 1990s when I became a television news presenter, and I’ve worked for the corporation ever since – in all manner of roles.

“For the first decade of the new millennium I was one of the main presenters of the Today programme, and was very sad when my time on Today ended. It came about in a hideously messy way – I read the news of my defenestration

in a newspaper – but when tempted to rage against my bosses I remember advice attributed to St Augustine: ‘Feeling resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.’

“I was diagnosed with prostate cancer nearly ten years ago – I went to see the doctor because I was peeing too often during the night. The cancer was at that stage confined to the prostate gland, so I was treated with radiotherapy and given good odds (over 80 percent) on a complete cure. I’m an optimist, and assumed that the treatment would work, so when the cancer returned a couple of years later it was a shock. By this stage it was metastatic and incurable.

For most of my life I have been blessed with incredibly good health; my biopsy operation was the first time I had ever taken a day off work for health reasons. I still find it difficult to accept that the way I live is constrained by health considerations, and in so far as it is possible, I behave as if the disease isn’t there – so, for example, I still cycle the five miles to New Broadcasting House when I am presenting The World at One. There’s no pain at this stage, and most of the physical impacts – like tiredness – come from the drugs I take to control the disease rather than the disease itself.

“Philip Law at SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) proposed a book to mark half a century of Sunday programmes, and so, ‘Sunday’ was born. I agreed to do it because I think the Sunday programme is a remarkable institution, one of the very few media outlets which really reflects the continuing power of religion.

“I admit, it’s something of a hobby horse; we are a very secular country, and my colleagues in the media are probably more secular than the population at large. This means that we very often miss a hugely important dimension in news stories; you cannot, for example, understand the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians unless you allow for the influence of religion, and the same applies to politics in the United States.”

“ I’m an optimist, and assumed that the treatment would work, so when the cancer returned a couple of years later it was a shock. By this stage it was metastatic and incurable.

Ed is a little dispirited by the world he sees around him at the moment, something writing the book has brought closer to him.

“The last half century – the years since Sunday first went on the air – have been stained by the terrible record of abuse in the Catholic Church, and the Church of England’s endless debates about issues like women priests and sexuality sometimes have an Alice in Wonderland quality; reading through fifty years of archive material on these questions was a dispiriting experience.

“It is also sad to find very few stand-out Christian leaders; there are some – an early interview with Desmond Tutu is a reminder of just what a huge figure he was in political and religious terms – and one or two surprising figures (eg Dennis Potter) can be found saying unexpected things in the archive. Jonathan Sacks’ contributions to the Sunday programme demonstrate that there is, more broadly, still an appetite for powerful religious voices in the public square. But all too many of the priests and bishops in the programme archive speak like politicians, not prophets.”

Cancer has given Ed a new perspective on life in general.

“Of course I regret the times I have been insensitive or done something hurtful, but regrets over big decisions are a mug’s game. There’s too much to get right now for worries about what I got wrong in the past. I have certainly had to re-evaluate opinions I once held – the revelations about abuse at Ampleforth, for example, really shook some of my intellectual foundations. But there are also things that endure and become more salient, including, ironically, one lesson I learnt from the monks all those years ago; values really matter.” ¤