Writer and comedian Mark Steel: 'Doing my car tax was more stressful than having cancer'

Mark Steel was born in 1960 in Swanley. He was adopted shortly afterwards and grew up in the Kent town with a father who worked in insurance and a housewife mum who had stints as a lollipop lady and a factory worker.

After a tempestuous spell at school, Steel discovered punk and harboured hopes of becoming a musician before trying his hand at stand-up, part of the new breed who came to prominence at London’s The Comedy Store in the early 80s. Mark Steel now also counts author, broadcaster and newspaper columnist among his professions, and is a regular on our TV screens on panel shows such as Have I Got News for You and Mock the Week. His radio show In Town has won numerous awards.

Cricket fanatic Steel, whose son Elliot Steel is also a stand-up comedian, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2023, but his treatment was successful.

Speaking to Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Mark Steel looks back on a life of rebellion which is mellowed into an acceptance of our differences.

I was completely lost at 16. In those days you could get into the pub at that age. I would go down the pub with my mates probably four, five nights a week. The big night was Friday, because I would see how much I could drink. I could drink eight pints of bitter but I never managed to drink nine. And that was my ambition. Oh yes, I was someone with ambition and aspirations.

I hated school. I couldn’t wait to leave. I just hated being sat, stuck, not able to move. I felt like I was being strapped to something. Well, you are in a way, you can’t just get up and walk about. Now, if I’ve got to write something, I don’t have to sit in one place until it’s finished. Nobody writing has to sit like that in a classroom, just staring and terrified that they’re going to be made to go and see the headmaster if they’re caught talking. Nobody who’s ever done anything useful has done it in that environment, and yet that’s what we make kids do in school. So I was angry and livid and furious about the way school was when I was young. And I’d tell my younger self about that, not only are you right to be angry, but I think you should be even angrier.

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What I think I would say to my younger self is, you’re so angry about the world and everything, but don’t be angry about people, because the overwhelming majority of people are really trying to be as helpful as possible. Even if they don’t agree with you on things, try and find out why they don’t agree. Try and find a point of common agreement with people. You might not like what they say about one subject, but then it might turn out they’re a big fan of Johnny Cash.

It’s very, very, very rare to find someone with no redeeming features. I think with almost everyone you can find a lovely bit of them. I was pretty stupid. I’d tell my younger self, make use of the time you’ve got, rather than just going to get drunk. There was a lovely phrase that Dennis Potter used about looking back at your youth. He said you should look back at your youth with tender contempt. And I thought that was a really nice way of putting it. 

If you met the younger me you’d think, what a scruffy bastard. My hair was everywhere. I thought it was a concession to authority to get it cut or to wear anything that didn’t have holes in it. I was a right mess. I was someone with a load of anger, and I just didn’t know where to send it. So it went to everyone. I could get angry about absolutely anything – as far as I was concerned even bus drivers were part of the state. I mean, the younger me wasn’t helped in that regard by the fact that I was the perfect age for punk, which just legitimised unsolicited and untargeted rage.

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I liked the idea of being a musician – music was the thing I was fascinated by. I bought a little organ, and I learned to play a bit on that. I actually play a piano in the new show. But I’d love to play better. The thing is, you didn’t get a lot of encouragement in those days. Things are so much better now. And that’s a brilliant thing. If you said to your parents, “I think I’d like to learn to play the clarinet,” they’d have said, “What?! The sodding clarinet? I’ll clarinet you on the other side of your face.” Whereas middle-class parents now say, “We’re so excited – this morning Nectarine said that she loves the sound of the word ornithology, so we bought her a flock of hummingbirds.” 

The comedy circuit started in the early 80s, and I thought that it’d be fun to give it a go, try and get up and do some bits and pieces. There weren’t many people to look up to in those days. The old way of doing comedy was just telling loads and loads of jokes, and I knew I didn’t want to do that. So I just thought of some funny things and most of it was rubbish. I did a couple of silly voices and stuff, and it sort of worked. Then I got slots at The Comedy Store, which was really good. My son, who’s a stand-up, he does The Comedy Store now, and that’s such a thrill for me, because that was the most exciting thing for me. It could be wild on a Saturday night, and that was great fun. Learning to just be in the moment, learning to improvise.

I remember my first-ever corporate gig. I’ve not done many of them. It was in the late 1980s and these young advertising executives had had a particularly good year, and they put on a comedy show as part of their sort of Christmas festivities. There were loads of them and they were drunk, drunk, drunk. Loads of things were hurled, and this bloke threw a runner bean at me. And I said, “That’s why you are worth this bonus, isn’t it? This is why most people in the country are struggling but you’ve got this massive salary? Because you’ve got the intelligence to throw a runner bean.” And he shouted, “It’s not a runner bean. It’s a mange tout.”

If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be Jeremy Hardy [the left-wing comedian who died of cancer in 2019]. He was an immensely complex figure, which is partly why we were friends for so long. He was unpredictable, but mostly funny. If he suddenly came back and we were able to have 10 minutes, I’m absolutely certain that I would be crying laughing at something utterly outrageous that he’d said. And I wouldn’t ever be able to publicly repeat what he’d said without ruining his reputation. He was outrageous and immensely funny. I’ve seen so many people on the left say he was brilliant because of his political activism and so on. And that was a side of him, that’s all true. But mostly he was so funny. I was with him in the hospice on the night that he died. I left, and he died about an hour later.

I think the way I dealt with having cancer is one of the few times I probably got my head in roughly the right space. I think you have to be aware that you’re not certain to come through it. You’ve got to be aware that it means you’re probably still going to be alive one way or another for quite a while. You know it’s not going to be easy, but if you can just take it a day at a time, you’ll sort of be all right. I don’t remember it as being a particularly stressful time. I’ve just done my car tax this morning. That was, by some distance, way more stressful than having cancer. At least when I had cancer, I just had one problem to deal with, and it was sort of easy. I just had to syringe into my stomach and have my medication and make my way into the hospital to have my radiotherapy. I’d try to catch some sleep if I could, in between coughing up industrial levels of mucus, and just get through the next hour, then the next day.

I remember having a day in the chemotherapy room that was lovely with my daughter. We were playing a game where we were drawing films and we had to guess what the film was. And the nurse came over and joined in. My daughter’s really good at drawing, so she’d do, for example, this beautiful picture of a bicycle flying across the moon for ET. I was talking about that day recently and she said, “No, it was horrible, dad. I was sat there watching you having cannulas in and drips attached.” And I said, “Yeah, I enjoyed it.” 

Mark Steel’s The Leopard in My House is out now (Ebury, £22). Steel is touring the UK until June.

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