Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 9:03 pm Post subject: Sean Lock
Sean Lock brings his unique stand-up show to Halifax.
James Rampton catches up with him www.halifaxcourier.co.uk
Sean Lock has been cooped up inside TV studios for the past four years. Don't get me wrong, he's had a whale of a time becoming one of the most popular faces in TV comedy and producing critically acclaimed hits in three different genres, the sitcom 15 Storeys High, the panel game 8 Out of 10 Cats and the clip show TV Heaven, Telly Hell. And yet, all that while he has been missing his first love, live comedy. Now Sean's stand-up show is back, and he couldn't be happier about it. It arrives on Saturday at the Victoria Theatre, Halifax, just one stop in a nationwide tour. And he just can't wait.
"It is brilliant to be returning to stand-up. It's been a long time since I've done a tour. Creating the new show has been great fun," he says, crackling with enthusiasm. "Live comedy gives you a unique thrill. Nothing else can match it. People have come out specifically to see you. You're the entertainment for the evening and that's quite a rush."
All in all, it is an absolute treat to see Sean back where he belongs – in front of a live audience. But don't just take my word for it, he has the awards and accolades to prove it. He won the British Comedy Award for best stand-up in 2000, the Time Out Award for Comedy in 1995 and was nominated for a Perrier Award in 2000. So what will he be entertaining us with in his show? One of his principal themes will be his deep unhappiness with the recently introduced smoking ban in English pubs.
"I'm not a heavy smoker, but I'm furious about it," the comic fumes. "It's a power that a Government simply should not have. They treat everyone like kids. I hate the fact that this is yet another terrible thing we've inherited from America."
He will also be giving us the benefit of his thoughts on green issues and a lament on his lack of hobbies. "It worries me that I don't have any idle pursuits. Maybe I'll try water-skiing. People who do that are always waving and grinning, so it must be fun."
This is the sort of delightfully daft stuff that Sean comes out with all the time. A warm and welcoming comedian, he is like your funniest mate from down pub. There is only one thing concerning Sean and that is how to unwind when he comes off stage. "I used to drink a lot after a show, but I'm too old for that now and I suffer too much the next morning. I'd be quite satisfied now if I could just have a cigarette by the fire exit, blowing the smoke out of the door."
With one final, winning laugh, Sean concludes: "that's as wild as it gets for me these days!"
I'd love to see Bernard Manning haunt Ben Elton
TOMMY HOLGATE
08 Jan 2010
He'S written for Lee Evans, Bill Bailey and Mark Lamaar. He'S a regular panellist on survey-based 8 Out Of 10 Cats, as well as the intellectually stimulating QI. But even he admits to being as thick as a brick.
Sean Lock tells me: "I'm not an educated man, Tommy. I only went to drama school for one year, but had to get myself thrown out so I didn't have to pay my grant back. Great excuse to have fifteen nights out in a row though."
Perhaps that boozing went to the award-winning joker's head, as his memory seems to have gone walkies too. "For example," he adds, "people ask me about my favourite statistics from the Cats show and I honestly can't tell them. The only one I remember is 8 Out Of 10 Cats 'something something something'. "
The Woking-born funnyman has never got to grips with technology either. "When email came out, I had no idea how important it would become. The address I chose made me look like a transsexual pole dancer - something 'like' Mrs Una Paloma Blanca. I have not got it together to get a new one, so when I exchange details - even now - I have to say 'you'd better get a pen, you'll never remember this!'"
Sean recently became the 'curator' of Bill Bailey's former BBC radio 4 comedy game The Museum Of Curiosity - and I'm curious what comedians Sean would bring back to life for the show . "Eric Morecambe would obviously be great. Bernard Manning too...I have always thought Bernard Manning would be a great ghost. I'd love to see him haunt Ben Elton, so all Ben Elton heard before he went to bed every night was 'my wife was so fat'. "Richard Prior would make a great team player as well, partnering Kenny Everett. I wouldn't get a word in!"
Getting words in is something Sean does for fun on tour, but he is keen to get the audience involved as much as possible. "I have this tour called Lockipedia starting in February. There is an interactive element to it so it's different every night. For instance we play audience battleships, where the crowd chooses what happens; it is not just an hour of mad barking at an audience."
Talk soon turns from mad barking to, er, bad parking - as snow wreaks havoc across the UK. "A little bit of snow and Britain stops, which I find quite quaint," smiles ex-Perrier nominee Sean. "There is uproar. I was stuck near Colchester once. There was a party in a village pub a few miles away. Everyone was slaughtered and trying to get off with each other - relationships were ruined. I just watched and laughed at the 60-year-old women dancing on sofas. If that is the side effect of a bit of snowfall, you cannot complain."
Sean's Lockipedia tour begins in Leicester on 21 Feb.
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I'm sure it will be a good show, but I'm not impressed by the name. There's been a 'Pilkipedia' site for a couple of years now, so as Britich comedians go, that construct's taken!
Sean Lock brings his brand of comedy battleships to Cardiff Comedy star Sean Lock is familiar to millions through his TV appearances, but he wasn’t always so welcome, especially in Wales, as he tells Dave Owens
David Owens,
South Wales Echo
Oct 18 2010
Sean Lock hasn’t always had an easy relationship with Wales. The comedy star confesses there was a time when he thought we were grumpier than he was – quite a feat considering he’s famed for a stand-up persona that trades on his own particular brand of absurd world-weary cynicism. “I was 14 and went on holiday to North Wales with my parents,” he recalls. “As you can imagine as a teenager the last thing I wanted to do was go anywhere with my mum and dad. I remember looking out the window at the sheep and thinking, ‘You lucky bastards out there on your own in a field’!
“If I recall it was quite a political time in Wales back then (in the ’80s) and I can remember stopping off at a café and asking the waitress if there was any ketchup. She pretended she didn’t understand me and then got the manager, who started shouting in Welsh.”
It’s at this point Sean starts making a noise that is difficult to repeat, but I’m glad he’s on the other end of a telephone line and I’m not sat next to him – for fear of being liberally covered in his saliva. “I thought to myself, ‘You mardy cow’,” he continues. “There I was sat there thinking how much I resented my parents and how everyone resented us because we were English. That episode put me right off Wales for many years. My initial impression of the Welsh was that they were grumpier than I was!” Thankfully, he’s long since forgiven us.
“I remember being booked to play Bangor when I was first starting out and thinking I didn’t want to go there! Thankfully it was great and then I went to Aberystwyth not long after and got to see how beautiful and welcoming the country is.”
The 8 Out Of 10 Cats team captain and regular on shows such as QI and Have I Got News For You will be back in Wales tomorrow night with his new show Lockipedia. The tour gets its name from the many bits of knowledge swimming around Sean’s brain. It’s what he ‘knows’ about stuff.
“I do this thing called Audience Battleships,” he explains. “I shout out a row, letter and seat number, and whoever is in that seat, (makes the noise of a bomb dropping) I get them to give me their name, a letter and a word that begins with that letter. So they might shout out P and, I don’t know, pilots or pirates or something like that, and I have to do material on that. It’s obviously impossible. At one gig a bloke shouted out ‘penultimate’, so I had to do some material about something being the last but one, but it’s how I get out of it – that’s where the fun is. It’s like comedy escapology. And it’s funny how some audiences get it straight away and others go, ‘what, he hasn’t got any material on creosote?’”
For a comedian whose show borrows its title from one of the internet’s most revered websites, Wikipedia, Sean admits he’s not a fan of cyberspace – in fact he does everything he can to avoid it. “I don’t blog, I don’t tweet, I don’t have a website and the only thing I have is a mobile phone (it’s worth mentioning at this point that when I first ring Sean his phone is about to run out of battery power and I have to ring him back on his tour manager’s mobile) and I can barely operate that! I’m not a modern man in that respect. It’s a source of continual frustration with my management. I did once have a MySpace site but it was like a badly tended grave.
“My niece set it up for me and I wrote a couple of things for it, but then I just couldn’t be bothered and now it’s just laying there with weeds sprouting up around it! The old ways are the best ways,” he continues. “I just can’t see the point of it all, especially Twitter. Why do people bother? It’s just people twittering, wittering on about a lot of piffling bilge. I’m just not interested in that level of mass communication. In my mind if you’re over 25 and using Twitter you need to have a word with yourself. It’s like people who have tattoos because they’re fashionable. If you’re over 22, getting a tattoo and you don’t do work that involves tools you should be ashamed of yourself!”
A word with comedian Sean Lock Ahead of appearances in Dundee, Kirkcaldy and Perth, veteran of the comedy circuit Sean Lock talks to Jennifer Cosgrove about his signature style and his indifference to the internet.
Dundee Courier
28th Oct 2010
You'd think a comedian who has named his show Lockipedia — after online phenomenon Wikipedia — might actually have a penchant for the internet. But not Sean Lock. In fact, the stand-up known for his appearances as a team captain on Channel 4 show 8 out of 10 Cats positively despises the online world.
"I'm like the anti-Stephen Fry," he says, talking about the self-confessed technology geek who hosts QI — another show on which Sean often appears. "I've got somebody on Twitter pretending to be me at the moment. My agent phoned up and asked if I wanted him to be stopped. I thought it sounded a bit heavy — plus I didn't really care. If someone is getting their rocks off pretending to be me, and other people enjoy this pretence, there's no harm in it. And, anyway, how do we know it's a bloke? It could be a little old lady called Edna up in Dundee."
Sean's new show Lockipedia consists mainly of stand-up, but he's introduced a new dimension to get the audience more involved — and he doesn't mean hecklers. "People tend not to heckle a great deal these days as the shows are in theatres and they've come for a night out. They're quite civilising environments, theatres. In the old days at comedy clubs and pubs I dealt with loads of them."
Sean says his show isn't really based on Wikipedia. The only similarity is all about what he knows — which tends to be unreliable, misleading but highly entertaining information. "It's mainly a stand-up show but what I also do is get the audience involved in a very random way. What happens is someone calls out a letter and then a word beginning with that letter and I have a book with some jokes in it. It's technically impossible what I'm setting out to do — which is to have a joke on every possible word in the English language.
"Sometimes I get lucky and manage to think up something on the spot. And, actually, what it's mostly about is how I get out of it. It's really messing around with the idea of the comedian interacting with the audience in a different way, rather than 'what's your name, where do you come from, what do you do for a living?' It lets people who would never normally shout out be involved in the show."
A veteran of the comedy circuit, Sean has worked extensively in television and radio, including his own BBC 2 series 15 Storeys High. He has won various awards including a British Comedy Award for best stand-up in 2000 and a Time Out Comedy Award. His new show has been described by critics as "surreal" — something Sean says is a load of nonsense.
"I don't think my act is surreal. I don't think people know how to use the word. I sort of tread into the absurd every now and again. I often think people who get the job of describing comedy don't really know anything about it and then they describe things as 'surreal'. That's one of the many bad things about the internet — the fact that what some journalist writes is just there, forever, like it's carved in stone. Or a comment you made in an interview 10 years ago, just stuck there. Then people start to collate all the rubbish that's been written. It ludicrous."
So has he looked at his own Wikipedia page lately? "I haven't seen it for a while. When I had two children, it used to say I had three daughters, which my wife saw as an omen we should have another one." The couple did go on to have a son and the page now states, "Lock has mentioned on several occasions that he has three children, of which at least two are girls."
"It used to say my first TV appearance was in 1974 having my spoon bent by Uri Geller, which wasn't true — but I was quite happy for people to believe that, because it wasn't damaging. It also says I was born in Woking, Surrey, but I was actually born in a place nearby called Chertsey — but it's not a big deal. These are little things — it doesn't bother me — but they're wrong. It's the same as blogs. I couldn't bring myself to read a blog because they're rubbish. There's a reason these people are writing on the internet — it's because they're bad, scrappy writers."
One thing his Wikipedia page does have right is that Sean used to work as a labourer on a building site. "I used to go to comedy gigs and see people in pubs in London then I started doing open spots and it was a hobby for many years. One day, I got my first gig and I got paid £15 for 20 minutes and that's when I realised you could earn a living from it. Writing jokes is a lot of work — but you can't practise being witty; you'd be an insufferable person. It's about finding what's funny and what you like doing."
But, the ultimate question is, was he actually born in 1962? "Really? Have they got that? No, that's wrong. I'm younger than that! I'm outraged — it's 1963."
Sean Lock, TV comedian and quiz show stalwart, has been a stand up comic for over 20 years, and is just about to release his second live DVD, Sean Lock: Lockipedia. The genesis of the title is far from complicated, "The last one was called Sean Lock Live, which was an inspired moment," deadpanned Sean, "I came up with the name Lockipedia, because Locki sounds a bit like Wiki... it really was that blatant." The show sees Sean giving his verdict on the facts of life, and features some audience participation that really puts Sean on the spot.
AskMen caught up with the comic just as the tour was coming to and end, and we quizzed him on the trials and tribulations of life as a stand up comic.
AM: What sets Lockipedia apart from other live shows?
SL: I do this thing in the show called 'Audience Battleships', where I’ll call out a seat number and whoever’s in that seat has to give me their name, a letter, and any word beginning with that letter, then I see what I can do with it. It’s impossible to do it really, and I think the audiences get that; they understand that it’s an insane thing to do to yourself.
The only reason I do it -- without blowing my own trumpet -- is because the stand-up is so good, that I can afford these moments where things can go anywhere.
AM: Do you ever get stuck?
SL: Oh yeah, all the time, but it’s about how I get out of it. I just have to find a way out of it somehow, and that’s when it becomes interesting, it makes the show much more interesting for me to do.
AM: When did you first realise that you could make people laugh, and that this was what you wanted to do?
SL: I was quite lucky really, I fell into it by accident. I just used to go to pubs where they had it on, and had a go at it. It was an escape from the workplace for me, I didn’t ever want to be a comedian. I did it for about a year and a half, before I realised I could make a living out of it, and gave up my job.
It was very lucky really that I found it, and I had a great time in those years where I didn’t really care about it. I used to write a few jokes, but then I realised that it was a career and that I’d better work at it, and try to get better at it.
AM: If you could go back in time, what advice would you give the Sean Lock of 21 years ago before he went on stage?
SL: “You know they’re going to invent time machines don’t you?” That’s what I’d say to him. And the other Sean would say, “Christ I’m pissed.”
AM: Has being funny ever helped to get you laid?
SL: I don’t think that gigging ever did, I never used to use it as a sexual tool. Some comedians would hang around the bar after a gig and pick up girls, but not me. When I first started, I never used to wear my glasses on stage, and I would wear a pinstripe flared suit which I got from a second hand shop. I used to go onstage and my opening joke was, “Do you like my suit? I call it my just got out of prison look.” I looked very different when I came offstage, and I liked that transition. I only remember one or two gigs where I even got recognised afterwards.
In my general life, I imagine having a sense of humour has helped to soften my forceful personality. That sounds really sinister doesn’t it?
AM: When you’re on a long tour like this, do you ever get sick of telling the same jokes?
SL: No, I really like the jokes, I’m very proud of the show. It’s quite a thing to conjure up laughs so I still find a lot of it funny, and the thing about the modern comedy culture, because of the DVD, you can’t ever do it again. Once it’s on DVD, that’s it, it’s gone.
I know comedians who’ve been doing the same jokes for ten, twelve, fourteen years so, doing a tour keeps that freshness. You do still enjoy the show, but the show’s better now as it’s always polishing and improving as it goes along. I know it could sound a cynical, but I don’t get bored of it. If I had to do it for another year I probably would!
AM: Do you go out and watch live comedy yourself?
SL: I don’t usually, only because I work so much... and I can’t stand comedy. No, it's because I’m always busy, I’ve got a family with three children, so if I’ve got a night off, I’m not going to go and see a comedian. My wife would just be like (shrugs shoulders) -- because she’s Italian -– “What da fuck?” She wouldn’t want me to go out.
When I was in Edinburgh for a few days, I saw Mickey Flanagan who I thought was excellent; he’s a very good comedian. I do see a few, but not a great deal any more, which is a shame because I really like comedians. One of the things about being successful is that you spend a lot of time of your own. That was one of the best things about when I started -- the social aspect -- because comedians are generally quite witty and intelligent people to hang out with.
People always portray comedians as that they always hate each other, or that they’re all grasping and vaulting over each other, but I’ve never found them like that. Most comedians are good people. There are a few resentful, grumpy little shits, but that’s usually because things haven’t happened for them. I would never resent another comedian's success, because I don’t think that any comedian has made it without working very, very hard.
AM: Who’s your all time favourite funnyman?
SL: My all-time favourite stand up comedian would probably be Steven Wright the American, he’s a fantastic joke writer. Or Richard Pryor, that famous Richard Pryor show is fantastic. Or maybe early Sam Kinison, he was quite shocking but he was an amazing performer. I think Americans are light years ahead of us.
AM: Do you ever have problems switching off Sean Lock the comedian when you go home?
SL: Yeah, I have to knock myself out with alcohol every night, but I pay the price...I have a sex addiction. No, honestly, it is quite hard to make that transition, but you have to learn how to do it without booze, because I used to do it with booze all the time. I still have a drink, but I used to go mad with it every night, but I can’t do that anymore, I’m getting too old.
Sean Lock - Lockipedia Live is out on DVD November 22, 2010
Sean Lock: Twitter is for sad, needy people Sean Lock, 48, started his career in the early 1990s and toured with Rob Newman and David Baddiel. He appears regularly on comedy panel shows Argumental and QI and is a team captain on 8 Out Of 10 Cats. He’s currently on a British tour.
Do you get fed up saying the same thing every night?
I try to freshen it up a bit and the ‘audience battleships’ element is pretty random. I do material which I find funny so I don’t generally get fed-up with it.
Has the audience battleships bit ever gone massively wrong?
It always goes massively wrong. People shout out a letter and any word which starts with that letter for me to joke about. Someone shouted ‘titanium’ the other day and I don’t have any jokes about titanium or any other chemical element. It’s great when people get it, and even when they don’t. It’s about how I get out of it.
Do some audiences really expect you to have jokes prepared about all those random words?
Yes, some people think if I’ve said I can do it I must be able to. Some people in the audience look at me as if to say: ‘Why did you say you can do it?’ It’s like being a shit magician. I couldn’t do it without a strong stand-up show to do it around. The worst ones are when people shout boring things like ‘gate’ or ‘apple’. One bloke shouted ‘w’, which I thought might be a bit fruity, then said ‘wall’.
How has the comedy world changed since you started?
It’s more mainstream now. When I started, most comedians didn’t even think it was a job – I saw it as an escape from the workplace. It’s hard work to write jokes but if you’re a comedian you’re very lucky to get work from doing what you enjoy.
Do people get into stand-up now just to become TV presenters?
There’s a confusion about why people should or shouldn’t do the job. I don’t care what someone’s eventual aim is. If they want to become president of the world I don’t really care. I don’t know any successful comedians who haven’t worked their nuts off.
What have you got against Twitter ?
I know loads of people who do it and I don’t understand it. It’s a medium for comedians to get rid of shoddy, half-baked ideas that wouldn’t make it into a comedy set. It seems like it’s for sad, needy people who should have a word with themselves.
So you don’t want to give it a go to see how many followers you get?
There’s something very macho about that – about how many followers you have. Jesus had followers but he had something important to say, not: ‘Had a bath, watched Sex And The City.’ It’s not healthy. All these people who are receiving your messages – sitting at bus stops, or at home with the family – they’re not engaged with the world, they’re checking their fucking phone and you’re just adding to that white noise of bullshit. There’s someone on Twitter who pretends to be me but as long as he doesn’t say anything damaging, I don’t care. Let him get on with it.
What’s the worst gig you’ve ever done?
One at the Comedy Store years ago. One of the bouncers told me: ‘I’ve thrown out 14 people and they were just the ring leaders.’ I spent 45 minutes on stage dealing with hecklers. It was a full moon night. The entire audience went mad.
What’s the worst job you’ve had?
Working in the kitchens at a psychiatric hospital. I had to keep the patients away from the bins because they’d try to eat the contaminated food. I was like a scarecrow shouting: ‘Yah! Get away!’ I wondered what I was doing with my life.
What are the perks of fame?
Money. I don’t enjoy the fame bit. I’m pleased when people say they like what I do but I can’t go to pubs. People are much more familiar when they’re drunk. They’ll say: ‘Come over here and meet all my mates and speak to my sister on my phone.’ If you refuse and they’re pissed they’ll say: ‘Oh, he’s too big for his boots.’ So you don’t go to pubs. The perk is earning a good living.
The one-night stand that saved my life! How Sean Lock made an alarming discovery
Bonnie Estridge
27th November 2010
Some might think it's a brave man who volunteers the fact that a one-night stand has saved his life, but comedy star Sean Lock is the first to put up his hand. He is known as the first comedian to have performed at the 12,000-capacity Wembley Arena in 1993. But it's an event that might not have happened if it was not for the keen eye of a girl called Tina, who spotted his malignant melanoma - skin cancer.
Most cases of skin cancer are discovered in young people between the ages of 15 and 34, and Sean fell right into this category with a diagnosis at 27. Despite his fair skin and hair, the comic confesses that in his youth he was a typical male and spurned the use of suncreams. 'I was 18 and had taken A-levels in Woking where I grew up. But I didn't want to go to university so left sixth-form college. My father was in the building industry and he found me a job stripping concrete panels off buildings. It was dangerous work on high scaffolds, sometimes 12 hours a day, Monday to Friday, and often weekends too.'
Over the next seven years he worked on building sites and gave little consideration to what he was wearing, or any possible sun damage to his skin. 'I liked the work and the wages - £340 a week, which, in 1981, was a lot of money,' says Sean, 47. 'You could hardly ask a big Irish foreman, "Please could you rub some Ambre Solaire on my back?" And we didn't wear hats, either. None of us took any notice of the fact that we were going red.
'Actually, I never seemed to suffer from sunburn too much but some of the guys had very pale Irish skin and were so red they must have been in agony. But they would never admit it, probably because they didn't want to be thought of as soft.' Despite all those hours toiling outside, Sean also enjoyed holidays abroad, travelling in Europe and working on a kibbutz in Israel. 'There were sunscreen products around but nobody really took any notice of factors. I'm not even sure that there were factors on the bottles back then,' he says. 'We just rubbed some kind of oil into our skin and fried.'
It was in the late Eighties that Sean started to visit comedy clubs and then began venturing on stage for open mic evenings. 'I'd never been the class clown and comedy was not a fulfilment of a dream. But it worked for me and I seemed to go down well.' Which is exactly why, in 1990, he won the British Comedy Award for Best Live Comic. This set the pace for his stellar performances from London's Royal Albert Hall and Apollo Theatre to the Oxford Playhouse. And with fame, he says candidly, came the enjoyments of a bachelor lifestyle.
'I was in my late 20s and had been in a long-term relationship which had come to its conclusion, so I was single. But the fact is, I was with a girl called Tina one night and if I hadn't been, well, I'd be dead now,' he says flatly. 'Because she noticed something about me that I hadn't. She said there was something weird on my back. I asked her what it looked like and she said it was a patch of skin which was black, misshapen, with a crusty texture and about the size of a 10p piece. I had no idea how long it had been there. It didn't hurt or itch, so there was nothing that would have drawn my attention to it. And being in the small of my back, it was not something you could easily see while looking in a mirror.'
Sean's GP in Rotherhithe, South-East London, was concerned enough to make an appointment for him with a dermatologist at Guy's Hospital the following day. 'The dermatologist was fantastic,' he says. 'He saw me immediately and said, "This needs to come out right now." He gave me an injection of local anaesthetic and cut it out there and then. I felt no actual pain but there was a strange feeling of something flapping on my back - which must have been skin - as they cut out the melanoma. I was told to come back a fortnight later for the results of a biopsy. I felt no anxiety about this whatsoever. In fact, I almost missed the appointment as my alarm didn't go off and I got to Guy's quite late and rather bleary-eyed. I was young and thought nothing could ever harm me, that I was invincible.'
And it was his feeling of being indestructible, he says, that protected Sean from the shock when the doctor delivered the results. 'The doctor asked me, "Did anyone tell you what we thought when we first saw your back?" I replied no, still not thinking there could be anything-seriously wrong. "We believed it may be a malignant melanoma - and it is," said the doctor. 'I can still remember my reaction, or rather, non-reaction. I said something like, "Right ...'''
He says: 'Strange as it may sound, I did not associate the word malignant with cancer. I guess then, in 1990, we didn't read much about such health issues in the way we do today and cancer was not something people really talked about. In any case, to me, it was something which was associated only with old people. I had no idea what the relevance might be to a healthy guy like me. It took a long time for me to take in how significant this malignant melanoma was.' Doctors told Sean that had he not been to see his GP and referred to a specialist promptly, three to four months down the line the cancer would almost certainly have spread into his lymphatic system and could well have been incurable.
Sean says it took him a long time to realise just how lucky he had been to have been diagnosed and treated so quickly. 'In the five years after my melanoma was removed I heard of more and more cases and it wasn't just young people. It was happening to older people, more of whom were retiring abroad to the sun, particularly to Spain. But it was only when a friend of my parents died of lymphatic cancer that the full impact of what could have happened hit me and I knew how lucky I had been. From then on, I started being very careful. I never go in the sun without a shirt on and always use a moisturiser with an SPF every day on my face. I always wear sunglasses and often a panama hat, even if I'm just walking in the park, if the sun is hot.'
Sean says he is even more conscious of the health risks of the sun now he has two daughters, aged six and four, and a one-year-old son. 'My partner Anoushka is very good about sun protection and if it's hot she makes sure she puts SPF50 cream on the children before they step out of the house. Now I know how important it is to be aware of how damaging the sun can be, and everyone should regularly check themselves for any moles or odd-looking patches of skin and get someone else to check areas they cannot see themselves. There are some good websites that show pictures of different types of skin cancer which can be useful.
'I never saw Tina again, but if I happen to bump into her, the first thing I'll tell her is that she saved my life ...'
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