EXCLUSIVE'Sometimes I think "Why me?" And I scream at God... but you can't be so scared of dying you become afraid of living': TRISHA GODDARD reveals incurable cancer treatment in first interview
Please don’t apply the word ‘terminal’ to Trisha Goddard’s cancer. Life-limiting, incurable, stage four, metastatic – because it has spread from her breast to her hip bone – are all allowable, but do not imply she is dying from it because most emphatically, she is not.
Here she is today, her skin luminescent, her wit stiletto-sharp, with a rich vein of dark humour lacing her anecdotes, proving she is every bit as entertaining and provocative as she was when she presented her ITV show Trisha in the UK for 12 years from 1998.
To a mixed chorus of consternation, incredulity and admiration – she has never been known to provoke an anodyne response – Trisha has just completed a nine-day stint in ITV’s Celebrity Big Brother House.
She made history as the first ever contestant to enter the house while undergoing palliative care for stage four breast cancer. Last week she became the third housemate to be evicted – the former Conservative MP Michael Fabricant preceded her, while actor Mickey Rourke was ejected for flouting the rules of common decency – and her appearance on the reality TV show was testament to her determination to wring every drop of joy out of the life she has left.
Even so, she has faced rancour: ‘I had messages like, “You should be spending your dying days with your family, not in the Big Brother House”, and the assumption is that the cancer has spread all over your body: liver, kidney; everywhere. But for a hell of a lot of people with metastatic cancer – me included – it’s not the case.
‘It’s in my bone; specifically my right hip bone. And people have lived with cancer like this for five, ten even 20 years. By the end of this year there will be 3.4 million Brits living with cancer, a lot of them almost hiding away – and I wanted to show that you can still live a full and vigorous life. You can’t be so scared of dying you become afraid of living.
‘Many people are still working, muddling through. They have to. They don’t tell anyone about their diagnosis because they’re frightened of the reaction; scared, too, of losing their job. And lots of employers are not equipped to keep them in work. But how about saying, “What can we do to help you work?”’
She reels off the list of complementary therapies she has alongside her chemo and targeted hormone treatment – massages, acupuncture, exercise classes, nutritional advice – and points out: ‘It’s less likely you’ll be admitted to A&E and you can keep working and paying taxes rather than drawing benefits and sitting at home being depressed.’
Trisha has just completed a nine-day stint in ITV’s Celebrity Big Brother House, making her the first ever contestant to enter the house while undergoing palliative care for stage four breast cancer
Trisha's appearance on the reality TV show was testament to her determination to wring every drop of joy out of the life she has left
She is crisp, authoritative; hard-wired to come up with practical solutions. But I wonder – aside from her determination to obliterate ‘terminal’ from the national lexicon: ‘I’m not about to hit the buffers yet,’ she smiles – if she actually enjoyed being in the Big Brother house.
‘Oh, it was like being paid to go on a holiday: it was captivity that offered a level of freedom from everyday life. I was a child again absolved of all grown-up duties, and who gets that in life? You have food, play time, a wide cross-section of people to talk to.’
But there was one unexpected corollary of her openness about her cancer diagnosis and treatment: she did not solicit their confidences, but her housemates wanted to tell her all about their families’ tales of sadness and loss.
‘It’s life. It touches everyone and there were some very moving moments, but I genuinely didn’t realise the impact it would have on me. I got to the point when I had to cut a few people short because part of me was screaming in the dark.
‘I rang my daughter Billie and said, “I’m burnt out with other people’s grief. It’s just too close to home.”’
London-born Trisha, 67, lives in Connecticut in the US – her home since 2012 – with her fourth husband, Allen. She is unforthcoming about his surname, age and profession, although she tells me he is a businessman and had been a widower raising his children alone before they met in 2017, thrown together by chance when they were ‘table fillers’ seated next to each other at a ball.
A gentle, bespectacled, scholarly looking man, he arrives at the London hotel where we’re chatting after our interview.
‘He drives me to most of my chemos, he advocates for me, he comes to doctors’ appointments because I only take in one word in three,’ she says. They are kind, affectionate: she is wearing comfy woolly slippers he brought her, and he reaches to hug her before he shakes my hand.
Trisha Goddard and husband Allen, whom she described as her 'rock', on their wedding day
‘It’s an over-used phrase, but he’s my rock,’ she says.
I wonder how he greeted the news that his wife had decided to fly to the UK – midway through a ‘brutal’ course of chemo – to take part in a reality TV programme.
‘He needed convincing,’ she says with a smile. ‘He was worried; scared for me. But he knew better than to say, “Don’t think of it”. Actually he was more concerned when I said I was going back to ice skating – although I do wear a padded suit.’
She took part in ITV’s Dancing on Ice in 2020 and has resumed the sport despite the fall two years later which shattered her hip and disclosed the spread of the cancer, which had first appeared in 2008.
Both her medical team in the US and the Big Brother care team liaised to make her appearance on the show possible.
It only adds to my awe-struck esteem for her, to learn that she flew 3,000 miles to Britain the day after her last chemo.
‘I went to the infusion centre on April 1. I call it my spa room,’ she laughs. ‘I had a soupcon of chemo and targeted hormone therapy, one little bag after the other. I have a port catheter [she shows me the dint in her chest where the tube is lodged] and I get plugged in.’
She lightens the mood by miming a comic dance, as if she’s having an electric shock. Then she admits: ‘It’s a brutal regime but I went into it fit, thank you God. It takes about two-and-a-half hours and it’s all on Medicare’ – the federal health insurance programme for the over-65s.
Both her medical team in the US and the Big Brother care team liaised to make her appearance on the show possible
‘Then the next day I flew over to the UK. I had to wear compression garments – tights and a sleeve on my arm – and I took disinfectant wipes for the seats, tables, armrest and loo. My oncologist is brilliant, a rock star, and so sweet. He said, “I’m going to help you do this because your message [of hope] is so great.”’
She had an ultrasound scan when she got to England to check she had not developed a deep vein thrombosis – she hadn’t – and a medical.
She was also accorded a few special privileges in the house. ‘I thought I was going to get – ooh – a bed with a curtain but amazingly they decided I should have my own bedroom, loo and bathroom which I genuinely wasn’t expecting. I was blown away by that. And they gave me my own low-fat food in a little fridge.
‘I missed out on not being in the main bedroom – I got a bit of FOMO.’
I ask what was in the cocktail of pills and potions she brought with her. ‘Oh, gawd,’ she cries. ‘Let’s talk about constipation!
‘I had to take poo powder three times a day. It’s one of the side-effects of chemo. I also had a
prescribed dose of calcium, and so many people will say they’re tired with chemo. Not moi! I take
Ritalin [a stimulant typically prescribed for ADHD]. It stops exhaustion.
‘This is what upsets me: there are so many people with cancer, so many suffering so much they can’t function, but side-effects can be treated. Nausea? I do a super mild wibbly-wobbly workout with weights that helps my balance. The hospital doesn’t even need to give me anti-nausea meds.
‘Sound therapy can also help. And it’s free. The NHS would
save money.’ She is evangelical about these benefits. She hopes to meet Health Secretary Wes Streeting – who was diagnosed with kidney cancer but is now cancer-free – to discuss these ideas.
‘I remember getting a call from palliative care. I thought, “Oh my God, does that mean I’m dying?” No! It’s symptom care for the management of cancer. I have a pain in my hip. I get steroid injections for it.’
She is philosophical to the point of cheerfulness, but does she ever cry? ‘Some poor bat had to become a statistic and sometimes I ask, “Why does it have to be me?” And I scream at God.
‘But I’m lucky, with treatment, the cancer has shrunk. I can never say I’m cured, but for now I’m good-ish.’
Her life has been a series of learning curves, of setbacks so catastrophic a less resilient soul would have crumbled. Not Trisha.
I last interviewed her in 2007. She had already endured much: her former first husband’s death from Aids – she suspects he was homosexual – her second’s blatant infidelity with a work colleague.
Then pressures of work and single motherhood resulted in what she called an ‘epic breakdown’. She attempted suicide but recovered, realising how much her two young children needed her. Later she discovered the man who had raised her, and beat her as a child, was not actually her dad.
It barely needs articulating that she has more grit than an industrial spreader, but this is leavened by warmth and approachability: small wonder interviewees have always opened up to her. She is also shrewd and forthright: cancer has taught her who her real friends are; the best of them, journalist Sarah Standing – daughter of actress Nanette Newman – who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma just before lockdown.
‘Darling Sarah!’ she cries. ‘I tend not to do snotty-nosed snivelling. One never wants to dump everything on loved ones. But we’ve done some crying together. She rings me when I’m shaking like a chihuahua. She rings me from the loo. Sometimes we’ve sung nursery rhymes to each other.’
But set against this deep loyalty are the disappearing friends: ‘They say. “Just call if you need anything” and then you don’t hear from them at all. You think: did I upset them?
‘There are people in my life who know what has happened and never even ask how you are. Anyone who is out there, who has done that to someone: are you scared it’s catching?’
She is irritated too by other cancer terminology. ‘Battling. I hate that word! It then leads on to “winning” or “losing” and you are painted as weak if you’ve lost the battle.’
However, she reserves the full force of her contempt for those who offer inexpert, unsolicited and frankly dangerous advice.
‘You hear them say, “If you eat lots of garlic, it wards off cancer.” Bunkum of course. Don’t ever take advice from anyone except your qualified medical team.
‘I’ve heard people say, “I can’t believe that you’re so stupid as to have chemo. It’s not natural.” That gets me so mad. A lot of these people who hand out advice, when they get a diagnosis themselves, eye of newt goes straight out of the window and they rush for the chemo.’
We track back to the July day in 2022 when she learnt the breast cancer had returned. She’d been cleaning the steps to her front door and she sprinted up them, slipped and landed face down.
‘The pain was excruciating. My hip was completely shattered. I held on to the banister. I knew if I let go and fell I’d be dead. What saved me was my Alexa device. I managed to shout to it and asked it to call my husband who then called my neighbour.
‘She came round and helped me – she’s a physio – and when the paramedics arrived they worried I’d have a heart attack. At the hospital they injected me with all kinds of drugs. Then an intern wandered in and said they’d found a cancerous tumour.’
The only criticism she has of the hospital is the blundering nature of this revelation.
‘I said, “Am I going to die?” I can’t remember what happened after that. Then a bone oncologist told me I hadn’t got bone cancer. It was metastatic breast cancer and he handed me over to my current oncologist, Dr Lo, who is brilliant.’
For two years she hid the fact that the cancer had returned from everyone except close friends and family. ‘I said to Allen, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to do this to you again” – his first wife had died of cancer – and he has gone above and beyond.’
And of course for her children Billie, 35, and Madison, 30, ‘this wasn’t their first rodeo with their mum having cancer – and working all the way through it’.
For the first four-and-a-half months she was having chemotherapy every week, while still doing regular TV work. Chemo sessions are now every three weeks and she flies back home for her next treatment at the end of the month.
She came to the UK in May 2023 to commentate on the King’s Coronation for CNN, still harbouring her secret. She tells how, when she was on a US talk show, she suffered a nose bleed on air as a result of the chemotherapy.
‘People probably thought I’d had too much coke – although I’ve never taken cocaine – but employers are probably better equipped to deal with cocaine addicts than people with metastatic cancer,’ she adds wryly.
She quashed any such rumours by going public with her diagnosis last year. Charities – including Breast Cancer Now and Macmillan – have applauded her for going into the Big Brother House.
Her next ambition is to host a documentary in which she talks to people with late stage illnesses, discusses the problems they face and the means of overcoming them.
‘There are people with life-limiting illnesses who are living with more vigour than those who take their health for granted. If you hear the sound of a ticking clock you tend not to sweat the small stuff.
‘Sitting down and ruminating is not something I’ve ever done, and I’ve no intention of starting now.’
