‘We were asking a lot from people who were still raw in their grief’: The making of Dame Deborah James – BowelBabe in Her Own Words

As the BBC airs a documentary chronicling James’s five years as a cancer campaigner, Ellie Muir speaks to the film’s director and friends of the ‘You, Me and the Big C’ host to find out how the project turned into something very different than expected

James’s positivity until the end was inspiring (BBC)

If you were told you had a short time left to live, how would you spend your remaining days? Dame Deborah James, the woman who campaigned tirelessly to raise awareness of bowel cancer until her death last year, decided that her priority was to tell everyone to examine their number twos. Under her bold moniker, BowelBabe, she started blogging about her journey online after she was diagnosed with incurable stage four bowel cancer in 2016, aged 35. She quickly became the voice of bowel cancer activism, known for her tagline “Check your poo”, and for her work as a co-host on the BBC podcast You, Me and the Big C.

James died aged 40 on 28 June 2022, after going into palliative end-of-life care at her parent’s home. She lived one year longer than the doctors initially predicted. And now, her five years of campaigning are documented in the shattering BBC Two film BowelBabe in Her Own Words.

The documentary follows James as she authors two books, runs the London Marathon, launches a clothing line and receives a damehood – all while undergoing treatment. In that time, she set up the BowelBabe fund, which, thanks to her huge social media following, has raised an incredible £11.3m for Cancer Research UK. Her impact was so huge that Andrex put the symptoms of bowel cancer on its loo rolls to honour her campaigning.

But it was never the plan to make a posthumous film of James’s life. Before her death, she had been working with the BBC to create a documentary with the working title “Can Science Save Me?”, exploring how her life expectancy could be extended by new developments in cancer treatment. The film’s director, Sara Hardy, started filming James at her appointments at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, and captured different clips of BowelBabe going about her life with her two children, Hugo and Eloise. As James’s condition started deteriorating last summer, Hardy and her team realised they would have to make an entirely different film.

James, in true BowelBabe style – brave and determined– had given an edict for the documentary to go ahead without her. “Debs had sent this message just before she died, really to say, ‘Come on everybody, get together and make this film,’” says Hardy. “And we felt that when Deborah had died, there were a lot of people talking about her, but maybe we should let her say it.”

BowelBabe in Her Own Words is told entirely in James’s voice throughout the 90 minutes. The BBC team, sifting through hundreds of hours of archive footage – including 100 hours of recordings from the Big C podcast, along with James’s Instagram and TikTok videos, text messages, voice notes and old home videos – were able to piece together the story of James’s life and cancer journey without recording anything new.

Luckily, it wasn’t hard to find new material – James used her “phone as her confidante”, as Hardy puts it, and had recorded hours of footage with updates and diary entries. The BBC team also asked James’s family and close friends to dig into their phone camera rolls, photo albums and take screengrabs of text exchanges with James. “For some of her close friends and family, it was really hard to go back to that footage so soon,” says Hardy. “We were asking a lot from people who were still raw in their grief. But she’d given [the] people [around her] a project. It’s like, ‘I know you’ll miss me and you’ll be grieving. But here’s a project.’”

Dame Deborah James had asked for the film to go ahead without her (BBC)

James’s father, Alistair, gave director Hardy two canvas bags bursting with VHS tapes that had been rotting in the garage at their home for the best part of 40 years. “When he handed them over, I picked one out and thought, oh my gosh, it looks a bit mouldy,” she says, laughing. “We ended up with 25 hours of material. Some of it was [recordings of] films like Goodfellas, but some of it was absolutely precious footage of Deb’s family – her parent’s wedding, her mum pregnant with her, Debs as a baby.” Slowly, James was telling the story completely on her own.

But the documentary was never just about James. She was a “medical geek”, according to her good friend and fellow cancer campaigner Vicki Woodall, who runs the children’s cancer fundraiser George and the Giant Pledge. The film was James’s way of showing that yes, you can live – a very full and laughter-filled life – with cancer, but it also allowed her to push her campaign’s educational message. She was obsessed with making sure people knew about the facts. “Debs would be fuming with me if we didn’t get the statistics in there,” Woodall laughs. The documentary is as much a celebration of Deborah’s life as it is a guide to the symptoms and signs of bowel cancer – the second biggest cancer killer in the UK (Woodall says James would want you to know that, too).

‘Cancer can be such a taboo, and it is a desperately, desperately sad and difficult thing to live through. But Deborah showed that you can live with cancer’ (BBC)

And yet, the overriding element of the documentary is not cancer, nor death, but James’s extraordinary character. Woodall describes her late friend as “as mad as a box of frogs” and, judging by the laughter bellowing from the family and friends of BowelBabe at the premiere of the documentary, she was a natural entertainer. “She is the kind of person that everyone would love to be friends with,” says Woodall. “She spoke in soundbites and she showed that no matter what challenge you face, you can find your own personal way to navigate through it.” In James’s case, that was dancing around the Royal Marsden during chemo, wearing a full face of makeup to the hospital, or running through the BBC studios dressed in a poo emoji costume.

She is the kind of person that everyone would love to be friends with

Vicki Woodall

One clip in the documentary sees James pulling out her Yves Saint Laurent lippy from her bag mid-treatment. “Cancer can be such a taboo, and it is a desperately, desperately sad and difficult thing to live through. But Deborah showed that you can live with cancer,” says Woodall. “Debs just gives people energy. I think a lot of people see her and think, ‘Who is this woman and where did she come from?’ [because] she’s such a force of nature. [In the documentary] you really get a sense of her and her silly side, the caring and catastrophic side that she had to live through.”

James’s husband Sebastien gave the BBC permission to film at the funeral, but the team made the decision to let James sign off at the end of it instead. “We finish the film when she records her last podcast and that’s where it ends,” says Hardy. Calling into the Big C from her parents’ back garden, James sounds frail and heartbroken as the birds chirp in the background. Before the final frame shows, she says, “I suppose that’s it from me… I can’t believe it. All I want right now is more time, and more life. Oh, and also… check your poo. Come on, I can’t leave on any other word than check your poo.”

‘BowelBabe in Her Own Words’ airs at 9pm on BBC Two on Monday 17 April