Skip to main content

Strictly Amy: Cancer and Me review – an exceedingly raw real-time battle

The Welsh dancer invited a team to film her as soon as she got her diagnosis – then they followed her through every scary step. It’s a bold, uplifting and very teary journey indeed

Last year, the day before Amy Dowden’s honeymoon, she felt a lump in her breast. Immediately, she knew. In that intuitive way you can tell when something’s different about your own body, it wasn’t a moment she could brush off. “I just felt a bit sick to my stomach,” the now 34-year-old Strictly Come Dancing regular tells the camera. “So I saw the doctor and he said: ‘Amy, it’s not good news – we’ve found something.’ And I just said: ‘Is it cancer?’ And he just said: ‘Yes.’”

Strictly Amy: Cancer and Me, the BBC’s new documentary on the professional dancer’s cancer story, is a result of the fact that as soon as she received the diagnosis, she invited a team to start filming in the hope that it might raise some awareness about the disease. The real-time effect is exceedingly raw. You feel as if you are on this journey with her, and don’t know where it might go. “My first thought when I had to tell Strictly was, ‘Keep my job,’” she says, her face crumpling, her hands reaching up to rub her eyes. “Because that was the scariest thing.” Looking back, she later says, her earlier fears seemed naive.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/Hst4FDp

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

England booed off after failing against Iceland once more in Euros warm-up

It was a long way from being the triumphant Euro 2024 send-off for Gareth Southgate and his England players at a sold-out and increasingly fretful Wembley. Never mind the result because it was not the main thing, however much it stirred memories of you-know-when against Iceland. It was the performance that raised the difficult questions, the worst one for quite some time and at exactly the wrong time. The home fans, thousands of whom made for the exits before the end, were forced to watch the second half – from about minute 55 onwards – through the gaps between their fingers. And it had not been great before that. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/4ndfQL0
Post a Comment
Read more

Bodies of Men: the love story taking on toxic masculinity in a time of war

Nigel Featherstone’s new novel tackles traditional conservatism and patriarchy through an unconventional romance How can you be a man and be anti-war? This is the question that Sydney-born novelist Nigel Featherstone, who is a pacifist, considered while he took up a three-month writing residency in a military library. He set out to discover what happens to very different expressions of masculinity placed under military pressure. “Australia does have a very defined, toxic brand of masculinity,” says the bespectacled Featherstone, seated by the window at his local pub facing the railway station at Goulburn, north of Canberra, while men on stools at the nearby bar sink beers and televisions on the walls screen horse racing results. Continue reading... from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2N8piOc
Post a Comment
Read more

Coronavirus live news: California sees record daily cases as global infections top 15m

California Covid-19 cases pass New York’s after record day ; WHO emergencies chief says vaccinations unlikely before 2021; global cases pass 15m. Follow the latest updates US daily coronavirus deaths surpass 1,000 for first time since June California surpasses New York as state with most coronavirus cases after record day Nearly a quarter of people in Delhi have had coronavirus, study finds See all our coronavirus coverage 12.54am BST South Africa on Wednesday announced a record 24-hour increase of 572 coronavirus deaths, bringing its total number of fatalities to 5,940, AFP reports. The country is the worst-affected in Africa and among the top five in the world in terms of confirmed cases, with 394,948 infections reported to date. 12.33am BST Dr Deborah Birx, the chief medical officer on the White House’s coronavirus task force, has called the surge in infections across the United States, “a very different epidemic than we had in March and April”. Speaking on Fox news, Bir...
Post a Comment
Read more