MLast year, the day before Amy Dowden’s honeymoon, she felt a lump in her breast. She knew it immediately. In that intuitive way that you know when something is different about your own body, she couldn’t ignore that moment. “I just felt a bit sick,” the now 34-year-old Strictly Come Dancing regular tells the camera. “So I went to the doctor and he said, ‘Amy, this is 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 new BBC documentary about the professional dancer’s cancer story, came about because she invited a crew to film as soon as she was diagnosed, in the hope of raising awareness of the disease. The real-time effect is extremely raw. You feel like you’re on this journey with her, not knowing where it might lead. “My first thought when I had to tell Strictly was, ‘Keep my job,'” she says, her face twisted and rubbing her eyes with her hands. “Because that was the most horrible thing.” Looking back, she later says, her earlier fears seemed naive.
Over the next hour or so, you watch Amy navigate each difficult step. The mastectomy that came early. Choosing to undergo strong chemotherapy despite being told it would double her chances of the cancer not coming back. Visits to the fertility doctor after being told chemo could affect your remaining eggs.
Despite being beamed into the living rooms of around 10 million people every year from 2017 to 2022, the Welsh dancer is not an untouchable star. She could be your schoolmate or your child’s primary school teacher. She is soft-spoken, lives in an ordinary house and is strikingly approachable. When you watch the film, you almost forget where you know her from. Cancer, the most feared disease, can affect anyone.
Some of the hardest scenes are those with her family. Her parents, two lovely people who obviously love Amy very much, try to remain brave around their daughter. When Amy tells them that the original lump has almost doubled in size and that she has stage three cancer, the most aggressive form, you can hear them speaking in calm voices on the phone. “Good,” they say, their voices overlapping. “OK.” And then: “That’s a lot to take in today, isn’t it?” her mother says. “I’m devastated,” Amy says. “I bet,” her mother replies reassuringly. Later, when she rings the doorbell after her last chemotherapy treatment, she puts her arms around her parents, who are all wearing the same T-shirts: “Nobody Fights Alone.” It’s sweet, yes, but that’s exactly what battling cancer requires.
It can be uncomfortable watching documentaries about sad and scary subjects, but this film isn’t filled with sadness and heartache. If anything, it will encourage you: Amy is a remarkably resilient person – because she has to be – and it’s hard not to have a lot of hope. She surrounds herself with friends, colleagues and family, constantly looking to the future and tackling each hurdle as it comes.
Not that it’s easy: there are many tearful moments when it seems like she’s at the end of her rope. But there’s an unexpected optimism in the way she gets up and carries on. If she can get through this, you think, any of us can get through anything.
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But that’s real life, and there are no happy endings to take a breather. It’s not easy to recover from cancer – mentally or physically, in everyday life – and there is often the very real fear that the disease could return. Amy herself says her dancing has suffered; she’s not as fit or fast as she used to be, and her upper body has changed, meaning she’s had to do a lot of extra training to get back on her feet.
But Amy is still alive to tell her story, and the outlook is positive. There are no signs of the disease at the moment. Next month, Amy will return to Strictly – her seventh year on the show. “It feels like I’m free,” she says.
