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.
Over the next hour or so, you watch Amy navigate each heavy step. The mastectomy that came early on. The decision to go ahead with strong chemotherapy when she was informed that doing so would double her chances of the cancer not recurring. Visits to the fertility doctor after being told that chemotherapy can affect your remaining eggs.
Despite having been beamed into about 10 million people’s living rooms each year from 2017 to 2022, the Welsh dancer isn’t an untouchable, starry sort of celeb. She could be your mate from school, or your kid’s primary school teacher. She’s softly spoken, lives in a regular house and is strikingly relatable. Watching the film, you almost forget where you know her from. Cancer, that most feared of illnesses, can come for anyone.
Some of the harder scenes to watch are those featuring her family. Her parents, two lovely-seeming people who clearly love Amy dearly, tend to put on a brave face around their daughter. When Amy tells them that the initial lump has nearly doubled in size, and that she has grade three cancer, the most aggressive type, you can hear them steadying their voices down the phone. “Right,” they say, their voices overlapping. “OK.” And then, “It’s a lot to take in today, isn’t it?” says her mum. “I’m shattered,” says Amy. “I bet you are,” her mum replies, soothingly. Later, when she rings their doorbell after her final round of chemotherapy, she puts her arms around her parents, all of them wearing matching T-shirts: “Nobody fights alone.” Saccharine, yes, but that’s what battling cancer calls for.
It can be uncomfortable watching documentaries about sad and scary subject matters, but this isn’t a mournful, grief-stricken sort of film. If anything, you’ll feel heartened: Amy is a remarkably resilient person – because she has to be – and it’s hard to not feel a great deal of hope. She surrounds herself with friends, colleagues and family, looks constantly to the future and approaches each hurdle as it comes.
Not that it’s easy: there are plenty of teary moments when it looks as though she is at her limit. But in the getting up and carrying on, there’s an unexpected optimism. If she can get through this, you think, any of us can get through anything.
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Even so, this is real life, so there isn’t a neat, happy ending to bring a sigh of relief. It’s not easy to recover from cancer – mentally, physically, in your day-to-day life – and there’s often the very real fear that the illness can return. Amy herself says that her dancing has suffered; she’s not as fit or fast as she used to be, and her upper body has changed, meaning that she has had to endure a good deal of extra training to get back on track.
But Amy’s alive to tell the story and the outlook is positive. Right now, there’s no sign of the disease. Next month, Amy will return to Strictly – her seventh year on the show. “It feels as if I’m set free,” she says.