When the GP called, his voice was a little shaky as he reported that the scan had
shown a 6cm growth, and blurted out: “Oh gosh, it’s pretty big.”
“He was more upset than I was,” recalls Herring, when we meet in London. “And just
hearing his voice wobbling and him not saying the word cancer, which he had been
happy to say when he didn’t think I had cancer, I suddenly thought, ‘Oh shit!’ ”
Herring, who was one half of the Lee and Herring 1990s TV comedy double act with
Stewart Lee and is now a stand-up and prolific podcaster, blogger and comedy writer,
approached testicular cancer with his usual eagle eye for comedic moments. Part of
him was strangely thrilled that something was wrong because he thought it would
provide new material for a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. He has turned his
experience into a book and his sitcom, Relativity, which is running on Radio 4, features a character whose experiences of an anomaly
in his scrotum are heavily based on his own.
In 2021 he was worried that he was heading for an “ironic death”, given that he once
created an entire show about penises, called Talking Cock. When he came off the phone with the doctor he cried in a way he never had before.
The previous year a close male friend had died of cancer, leaving behind a son, and he
thought about the effect his death would have on his wife, Catie Wilkins, who is also a
comedian, and their children, Phoebe, then almost six, and Ernie, three. “[My friend’s]
circumstances were so similar and I’d known him for so long, that was where my mind
went. Having a young family, my immediate fear was much more about them than
about myself.”
He worried that his son would have no memory of him and that his daughter would
only have a vague recall of what he was like. Would it be better if he died quickly so
that the kids would have no memory of him and it would hurt them less, he wondered.
Then his thoughts turned to what he describes now, with a wry smile, as “that slightly
self-obsessed thing about who will come to take my place”. He imagined his wife
making a new life with a mustachioed chancer in cowboy boots who smelt of Herring’s
cherished single-malt whisky. “Look, she could do a lot better. She made the correct
decision of marrying a man 13 years older than her. She’s got a good chance of getting
a second go,” he says.
The doctors decided that whatever had taken over his right testicle was so large that
the whole testicle would have to be removed. Then they would test to see if it was
cancerous. Herring quickly concluded he would not mourn the loss of one of his balls.
He did not care about his testicles; at least not as much as he cared about living.
His friend had had an eyeball removed during his illness. “If you’re going to lose a ball,
this ball is better than an eyeball,” he says. He wanted to ask the doctor if he could
keep the diseased testicle to use on the Channel 4 quiz show, Taskmaster, but for once he was lost for words.
