Jennifer Saunders gets the all clear from cancer!

[twitchy2.0]

Healthy Jennifer Saunders shows off her new elfin 'do three months after getting the all-clear from cancer


By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:53 PM on 20th September 2010

A happy and healthy Jennifer Saunders showed her hair is growing back as she started the Chariots Of Fire race in Cambridge on Sunday.

The 52-year-old actress and comedienne showed off the flattering elfin haircut as she fired the starting pistol at the famous relay race, which attracted more than 2,000 runners.
Saunders was given the all-clear from breast cancer in June.


All smiles: Jennifer Saunders looked relaxed and happy as she started the Chariots Of Fire charity road race on Sunday

'I'm not running today as I'm training for the 2012 Olympics,' she joked as she started the race.
Saunders had taken to wearing a blonde wig during her grueling chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment, and never spoke publicly about her illness.




Puppy love: Saunders brought her whippet puppy Olive along with her to the event

However, she stopped wearing a wig in July, when she was pictured at Tracey Emin's 47th birthday party with very short hair.
The Absolutely Fabulous star discovered a lump in her breast in October, but the tumour was caught early on.


Public appearance: Saunders continued to make public appearances while undergoing treatment for cancer, but until July she wore a wig

Saunders also took her new hairstyle to the front row at London Fashion week on Sunday.

She sat with her close friends Miranda Richardson and Tracey Emin to watch Betty Jackson's show at Somerset House.

Saunders is a long-time fan of the British designer's clothes.


Front row: Jennifer Saunders sat with friends Miranda Richardson, left, and Tracey Emin, right, for Betty Jackson's London Fashion Week show


Just Fab: Jennifer Saunders is best known for her role as fashion victim Edina in BBC comedy Absolutely Fabulous, pictured here with her on-screen best friend, Patsy (Joanna Lumley)

Read more: Jennifer Saunders shows off new haircut 3 months after getting cancer all-clear | Mail Online

[sluce]

I will say it before Novice does - I HATE IT when they say someone was given the all clear. There is never an "all clear" with cancer. All they are saying is that is looks like they got it all this time. It does not mean a cell did not escape and begin to grow elsewhere. It gives such a false sense of security.

[Lily Bleu]

That is great news, I am happy for Jennifer.

[LynnieD]

Made my night seeing this....

And while Sluce is right, at least she isn't getting worse! *cheers Eddie*

[gas_chick]

Glad she is doing better!

[VenusInFauxFurs]

Huzzah! I'm glad to hear. I'll keep my fingers crossed for her. Love this chick.

[witchcurlgirl]

Yay Eddie! I'm on my over with the Bolli.

[Novice]

I will say it before Novice does - I HATE IT when they say someone was given the all clear. There is never an "all clear" with cancer. All they are saying is that is looks like they got it all this time. It does not mean a cell did not escape and begin to grow elsewhere. It gives such a false sense of security.

Hon, you forgot to add that she's rocking the pixie, so much better than the blond wig!!!!

[Annika]

i'm glad she's well. i don't mind the hairdo but i don't like the grey, it makes her not look like eddie anymore and i want her to stay that way forever! wahhh!

i hate that time goes by.

[AliceInWonderland]

CONGRATS YOU SEXY BITCH!

[sherbear905]

Goodness she's pretty! I never noticed how much so until these pics.

[Honey]

While his wife Jennifer Saunders has been enduring a 'brutal' course of treatment for breast cancer over the past year, Adrian Edmondson has been desperately trying to support her and their three daughters. And the hardest part, he reveals here, is how helpless he feels.
Ade Edmondson wants to get something off his chest. No one, he says, 'battles' cancer. Neither is it 'a rollercoaster ride'. 'It's just a long, slow, miserable grind,' and he wants me to quote him on that verbatim.
Oh, and while he's at it, no, his wife Jennifer Saunders, who is suffering with breast cancer, has not been given the all-clear.
'No one gets the all-clear,' he says. 'The treatment lasts five years and we're only a year into it. The big chemotherapy's finished and the radiotherapy's finished. There's this low-level treatment that carries on for five years, but you know from the beginning of the treatment when it's going to stop.

Adrian Edmonson with wife Jennifer Saunders who has breast cancer
'So, there is no battle. I hate the word battle. You just get battered with a load of drugs. People want the words "trauma", "battle" and " life-changing", but it's not a great three-part TV drama full of moments, it's a long grind, like a slow car crash that will last five years and then, hopefully, we'll get out.'
Jennifer, the brilliant creator of Absolutely Fabulous, was diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago, but neither she nor Ade have spoken about it publicly.
Indeed, Jennifer, 52, says she never will. Ade doesn't really want to either. But he's sick to the back teeth of the nonsense that has been written, particularly reports that his wife has 'won her battle' and is 'cured'. He wishes like hell she was.
'Something like 140 women a day learn that they've got breast cancer,' he says. 'If they knew more about the disease, rather than having to read all this nonsense about battles, then they'd be able to accept what they're in for and be better prepared to face it.
'I personally know five people who have had breast cancer and it's just miserable. It happens slowly. You don't suddenly ring someone up and say: "I've got cancer. I'm going to die." You ring up and say: "They've found a shadow. I've got to go and have another test."
'It's hard to bolster someone and say: "You're looking great today," when their hair's falling out. It's hard to convince them they do look great, even though they do to you'
'You don't find out the worst until...' he pauses. 'They find a shadow in a picture. Then people look at it a bit more. They test it and say: "We think it's this. We'd better do another test."
'They grab a bit and think it might be bad so you might have to have a bit of radiotherapy. It's all very incremental.'
Ade was on tour with his folk band, The Bad Shepherds, when Jennifer phoned to tell him that doctors had found a shadow on her breast during a routine mammogram last October.
Tests eventually revealed the shadow to be several malignant lumps, so Jennifer was started upon a 'brutal' course of chemotherapy. She lost her hair and, at times, her sense of humour; she felt wretched, sick.
Ade, 53, and their three daughters Ella, 24, Beattie, 23, and Freya, 20, tried to be supportive. But it wasn't always an easy undertaking.
'It was horrible for her and for us, because it's very hard to support someone and make them feel better through that misery,' says Ade. 'It's hard to keep them cheerful.
'She tried to stay positive, but it's hard to bolster someone and say: "You're looking great today," when their hair's falling out. It's hard to convince them they do look great, even though they do to you.
'But neither of us ever really thought death was a likely prospect. They were quite small lumps and were of a certain grade - and the prognosis was very, very good from the start. It's just that the amount of treatment grew as they found slightly different grades of this or that. So, no, we weren't blubbing, thinking: "Oh no, she's going to die."
'I've had other friends die. I know what dying is. This was just a really inconvenient, horrible kind of treatment. It was a miserable business and extremely undignified.'
I first met Adrian almost a decade ago and I know that he absolutely adores Jennifer, his wife of 25 years.


Brutal treatment: Adrian Edmondson with his wife Jennifer Saunders, who is suffering from breast cancer

Indeed, the last time we spoke, he said: 'The nightmare scenario is, what would happen if Jennifer divorced me?' I'm sure he never imagined this.
'You do have time in between all the tests and treatment to imagine the worst, the best and the in-between,' he says. 'Of course, you think of everything.'
Jennifer's cancer finally became public in July when she attended her close friend Tracey Emin's 47th birthday party in the south of France without a wig.
'She just decided it was so f****** boring putting a wig and hat on the whole time,' says Ade. 'And it was really, really hot. She had also got used to what she looked like. By that time she had some hair back and wasn't as bald as she had been. She looked lovely, didn't she?
'It was a nice soft way for it to come out - and we were so used to it by then. It's a bit like trying to get a series on the telly. By the time it gets there everyone is surprised, but you think you've been working on this for years.'
Ade doesn't intend to be glib, but he's said all he's going to about his wife's cancer. We're actually here to talk about the ITV series Monte Carlo Or Bust, in which he heads off across the channel with Jack Dee in a VW camper van competing with Jodie Kidd, Julian Clary, Penny Smith and Rory McGrath to discover what makes the French tick.


Close family: Ade with Jennifer and their newly-married daughter Ella
Ade's not supposed to tell me who won, but let's just say he's looking rather pleased with himself.

He's also looking astonishingly fit. It turns out that this several-bottles-of-wine-a-night comedian is on the wagon. And no, he tells me, it's not because Jennifer's 'battle with cancer' has been 'life-changing'.
'My daughter [Ella] got married last weekend. I didn't want to look like a porker walking down the aisle,' he says. 'I stopped drinking about two months ago - not entirely, but I stopped it being my main hobby.
'You reach an age where you have to make a decision: am I going to be a slightly chubby-faced person who feels ill in the morning, or am I going to wake up thinking: "Hey!"
'I don't think I was an alky, but I was just drinking too much and having fun doing it. It's when you have children that you start drinking. You have that large gin and tonic when you put them in the bath - which is large enough for your weekly allowance. Then, when you've got them to bed, you uncork a bottle of wine. Match Of The Day comes on and you crack open another. That would make you an alcoholic in the eyes of the medical profession, but it's just regular living for most people. And then, well, you know I've got a band?'
I didn't until he tells me this. The last time we met two years ago he'd found a new writing partner, Nigel Smith, after ending his long partnership with Rik Mayall - with whom he appeared in The Young Ones and early 1990s sitcom Bottom - and was firing on all cylinders having written the ITV1 comedy series Teenage Kicks. It wasn't re-commissioned.
'The band started as a hobby,' he says. 'Now it's a big hobby. We do about 100 gigs a year. It feels like it did when Rik and I started because you're doing what you enjoy doing, you're able to keep doing it and eventually it becomes your job. Touring is a nice way to earn a living.
'Our family's always been very close. We didn't need cancer to know we all love each other. The girls have always been there, but they did come round a lot more and were a great help'
People pay to come through the door to see you and you get a cut off that. There's no advertising revenue, no BBC licence fee, no Arts Council. It's just a clean deal.' Which seems to suit him.

He tells me he doesn't want to sound like an 'old git' but he's had it with telly. Jennifer, who is currently writing the script for Mamma Mia! producer Judy Craymer's Spice Girls musical, seems to have, too.
'She's having a ball,' he says. 'Who would write for telly when it's so bloody difficult. She was hot property when she was doing Ab Fab - although that wouldn't get made these days - but was treated very badly over her WI sitcom, Jam And Jerusalem.
'They kept on changing the slot - moving it from an hour to half-an-hour. She was bending over backwards to make it work, then it was: "Can we have the same again but cheaper? Do you have to have everyone in every episode?" The audience was still growing despite all this, and then it got cancelled.
'Writing for telly is mind-numbingly humiliating and undignified. You're never told anything. You feel like a naughty schoolboy. At the BBC things get made and broadcast, but no one tells you if it's liked or disliked. I don't have the patience any more to come in and out of the door of executive TV land. It's a blur of idiots.
'When we first made The Young Ones there was only one person who had to say yes or no. Now you have to go through about ten people, and because they're changing channels so quickly, the executives are all just whizzing around trying to make a name for themselves. They hate anything that anyone who was there before had going. They have no interest in TV at all. They're all career people.'
A while ago, I suspect, discussing his TV nightmares would have sent him flying off the handle, or spiralling into one of his 'gloomy' moods. But he doesn't really do gloom any more. And although he'd probably be furious with me for saying it, I suspect his wife's cancer has had its part to play, in making him keep things in proportion.
And one mustn't ignore the importance of his daughters, either. After being sent to boarding school himself at the age of 11, he was determined their childhoods should be different to his, so he pretty much built his life around them when not touring.

The last time we met, the girls were leaving home and Ade was missing them desperately. He said it was like 'a bereavement' and, yes, it made him sad. So he and Jennifer, whom he met in the early 1980s when they were both working at the Comedy Store in London, began to spend less time in the family's 400-year-old home in Devon and more in London, until the 'miserable grind' of cancer intervened.
'Our family's always been very close,' says Ade. 'I don't think we needed cancer to know we all love each other. The children have always been there, but they did come round a lot more and were a great help.
'It's weird the thing that happens with sisters. Between the ages of eight and 14, they're giving each other the evils at breakfast, but by the time they get into their late teens they generally get on with each other. It's a lot nicer.
'I do still miss the girls. I miss the ordinary things: cups of tea and sticky buns after school - just sitting round the table, chewing the fat and bitching about their teachers. But it's a lot better now than it used to be. You find yourself useful in other ways.
'I suppose we all want to feel important - that's the thing. When you have a little baby, of course you're the most important thing in the world to them. When you leave the room they cry and that's lovely. But when they grow up and are able to choose who they like, then you've got to fight for them a bit more. They leave home at 18, then return and find out you're not as bad as they thought you were.'
Which takes us back to his daughter's wedding. 'It was a cracker. We had it at home in Devon with about 200 people. It was very happy. There's also this idea that there might be grandchildren, which we'd like some of.
'It was the best wedding I've ever been to. I drank a steamboat full of liquor and my speech descended into a blubbery mess. I made myself cry and I made everybody else cry, by telling the truth in a beautiful way.'
Then he looks up from his lunch and says: 'I do hope you'll quote what I've said about cancer. When you have it, you actually feel quite well. It's the chemotherapy that knocks you out and that's just brutal. You're hooked up to drips and things for three or four hours once a week.
'It wasn't remotely funny - there isn't even any black humour in the situation. It's just grinding. It's horrible. And, the hardest thing was, there's nothing I could do to take that misery away from her.'

Monte Carlo Or Bust, ITV1, Thursday, 9pm.

Read more: Our year of hell: Adrian Edmondson on the anguish of struggling to help his wife Jennifer Saunders through her cancer ordeal | Mail Online

[Sarzy]

I like his honesty. I wish her all the best.

[penname]

Ditto.

[Novice]

I'm amazed that the paper printed what he said about it but it's the truth. Of course newspapers are looking for a soundbite, a quick quote that sums it up, but the truth is the whole treatment is made up of little battles, little victories and little losses. Good for him for trying to set the record on that straight. I wish them both well.