SHE may have been diagnosed with what she calls “the Carlsberg of breast cancers” but Sarah Cawood says her boobs are still her greatest asset.
And the former TV presenter, who hosted Top Of The Pops, The Girlie Show and Live & Kicking during the height of her fame, believes she could have boosted her career if she had posed for more saucy lads’ mags in the Nineties.
Sarah, 50, reckons she could have bagged bigger jobs if she got her kit off, but says her boyfriend at the time, Bluetones guitarist Adam Devlin, held her back.
She says: “Back then, the way to really get your profile built up was to do lads’ mags shoots and I didn’t. Partly because of Adam and partly out of some weird sense of propriety.
“Like, I’m not going to get my boobs out to get ahead. Why the f*** not? My boobs were epic. They still are.
“They were honestly the best boobs — better than Denise van Outen’s, I’d say. So I should have got them out. Why didn’t I? I was really conflicted. If I’d done more lads’ mags shoots, my profile would have been higher, I’d have been offered more of the high-profile jobs.
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“Who knows? I could be presenting Strictly Come Dancing now. But that didn’t happen and I don’t have any regrets. Because otherwise I’d never have met my husband Andy. It’s all Sliding Doors, isn’t it?”
Sarah, who lives with her TV producer husband Andy Merry and their son Hunter, ten, and nine-year-old daughter Autumn, in Leigh-On-Sea, Essex, was diagnosed with stage one breast cancer last month.
But she has taken the news in her stride. She says: “It was my first ever routine mammogram and I got a letter back saying they couldn’t give me my screening result back yet.
‘Demob happy'
“So I had another mammogram and an ultrasound and then they said, ‘We’re going to biopsy you’. That’s where they take a bit of tissue from your boob.”
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After being told that a lump in her breast was not just a cyst, Sarah suffered sleepless nights and assumed the worst. She says: “I was like, ‘What happens if this is aggressive, what happens if this is the beginning of the end?’.
“I did the lying in bed at night, not watching my children grow up thing. I always think cancer seems like a slow death. It’s like being chucked out of the party early.”
After a tense wait, Sarah took Andy along to get her results. She says: “The surgeon went, ‘Can you see that? That’s a very small cancerous lump’. And I went, ‘Oh, OK, is it aggressive?’.
"And she said, ‘No’. And I went, ‘Brilliant’. I was demob happy. “I was like, ‘OK, so easily fixed?’, and she was like, ‘Yes, not really much of a problem’.
"Nobody cried, it wasn’t very dramatic. It’s just a lumpectomy, radio-therapy, then a drug called Tamoxifen, which is a hormone blocker, for five to ten years.”
She adds: “It really is the Carlsberg of breast cancers. If you have to have it, this is the one to have. I feel really lucky. There are people that really are up st creek without a paddle, who have cancer, and I am not that person.
I always think cancer seems like a slow death. It’s like being chucked out of the party early.
“They’d give anything to be where I am right now.”
Sarah’s diagnosis means she has had to come off HRT, which she was taking for the menopause. And she is feeling the effects. She says: “The breast cancer is basically fed by oestrogen. So the more hormones you have in you, the worse it is.
“It’s a weird kind of hot. It’s like a furnace inside you. My mood seems to be OK, but the brain fog is really annoying. There’ll be days when I can’t really focus. I’ve forgotten my daughter Autumn’s name twice.”
These days Sarah’s main focus is on being a mum, as well as hosting her menopause podcast Irregular Bitches with pal Lou Mitchell.
But during her telly career she rubbed shoulders with the world’s biggest stars, including the Spice Girls, who she interviewed in 1997 on Channel 4’s The Girlie Show, co-hosted with Sara Cox.
Sarah says: “Sara always did the big interviews but I’d met the Spice Girls on another show. They are real girls’ girls and they were like, ‘We want you to do our interview on Friday, so we’re going to say something’.
“When I sat down to do the rehearsal, Geri said to me, ‘It’s amazing what having a quiet word can do, isn’t it?’. Get in! Thank you, Gezza. They made it happen.”
Sarah also recalls the boozing that would go on behind the scenes at Top Of The Pops. She says: “We had the Star Bar. We used to do our links in there, and it was attached to the studio. I got so s***tfaced in that bar so many times. Muse got me absolutely hammered on these cocktails called Long And Strongs.
“I couldn’t walk straight. This was after a taping. I remember getting back to my boyfriend and throwing up everywhere. And I remember when Oasis were on and this trolley of booze – whisky, champagne, you name it – being taken out of the Star Bar down to the dressing room.
Replaced a few times
“I didn’t go down there, but somebody told me they all left at 5am the next day. But it was really basic money. They used to say to us, ‘There aren’t any stars at Top Of The Pops.
The show is the star’. Also, nobody wants an ego. Leave your ego to the pop stars. You don’t want me and Jamie Theakston throwing our weight around, do you?” But as the careers of her peers including colleague Sara Cox, Tess Daly and Melanie Sykes, skyrocketed, Sarah felt left behind as she was shelved from a string of shows.
She says: “I remember being very insecure. When Will Mellor left karaoke show Night Fever, they got rid of me too. When Richard Blackwood left dating show Singled Out, they got rid of me as well.
“So I had been replaced a few times. The Girlie Show didn’t get commissioned for a third series. Sara immediately got a job at MTV and I immediately went and signed on.
“I didn’t really know what to do, so I went and worked in a charity shop. It was Mind in Camden. Sara was perhaps more friendly with TV people, whereas I kept myself to myself. I wasn’t schmoozing TV execs.
“So she did really well and I didn’t, and I was really envious. Tess Daly replaced me on Singled Out and I remember her saying something really nice once, like, ‘I’m not nearly as good as you were’. It was really kind of her and it made me feel a lot better, because I felt really st.”
Sarah adds: “I don’t work in telly any more but it wasn’t that I was ever rubbish – I just drifted out of fashion.
“I was a good TV presenter. I’m still a good TV presenter, but I feel very liberated now. It’s really nice not to have to live by anyone’s moral code except mine.
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"Now, with the benefit of age, you don’t measure success by how rich you are or how many primetime TV shows you’ve presented.
“You measure your success by how happy you are. If you’re happy in your life, then you are successful.”
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