Last month they released the series - starring Stephen Tompkinson and Gary Wilmot - the BBC describes them "as buddies grappling the country’s most common and least sexy male cancer”. What?!! The ‘least sexy male cancer’?? What a load of tosh! Are any cancers sexy?
Anyhow it is great that this series is raising awareness - and particularly about the poorer survival rates for Black people. Although disappointing it doesn’t cover what else we can be doing to support our health and wellbeing. The episodes stay very clearly with conventional treatment despite the huge and growing evidence that lifestyle and complimentary can play a significant role in health. The show also appears slightly misleading at one point with mention of testosterone being the thing that helps prostate cancer grow. Well it is nothing like as simple as that - see my blog here looking at that issue a bit more (ii).
The website explains the title of the show; "Prostrate - because that's what everyone calls it and that's how it renders you - is a rebel yell of solidarity to every man (and supportive woman) living with the disease. The enemy is silence - the weapons are friendship and laughter”. Here’s the exchange between the two characters in episode one:
"Prostate not prostrate.”
“No its definitely prostrate.”
“Prostrate is when you are lying on the ground, helpless in complete supplication and submission.”
“And your point is?”
“Yeah, fair enough."
This is more of the description from the website:
"Tony – job going nowhere, marriage collapsed, son barely speaking to him - thinks life couldn’t get any worse. Until the nimble-fingered consultant tells him he has prostate cancer. Head spinning, Tony collides with Lenny’s car in the urology car park. Lenny has been in hand-to-gland combat with the disease for ten years but still lives life to the cantankerous max. Over five episodes, Lenny drags Tony out of the slough of despondency. Together they kick Tony's cancer into touch, and his life into vibrant new shape.
"47,000 men are diagnosed every year, with UK deaths from prostate cancer now exceeding those from breast cancer. Writer Martin Jameson was diagnosed in 2013 and endured lengthy treatment in 2014, despite which he discovered a well of humour and life-affirming camaraderie with other prostate veterans whose experiences get to the nub of what it is to be a middle-aged man".
Listen to it for at least the next year at:
Notes:
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