The John Diamond cancer industry rolls on, with a little of what Diamond himself called “a squalid and self-referential cynicism.” First the newspaper column; then the book C. Because Cowards Get Cancer Too, the television documentary, and the stage play; and last month, posthumously, another book (about alternative medicine) and a television dramatisation.

When Diamond, already an award winning journalist and broadcaster, first discovered a lump in his throat in March 1997, he wrote about it in the Times, in the entertaining but often trivial regular column that at that time went under the banner “Something for the weekend.” After the lump turned out to be a cancer he wrote column after column about its—and his—progress.

In 1999 the writer and radio and television producer Robert Katz got the idea of reading some of the original columns on stage. Victoria Coren adapted the material, and in February 2000 Katz performed it in the 50 seat Grace Theatre above the Latchmere pub in Battersea Park Road, south London.

Now Coren has devised a new version for television, using some material from the original play and some from the 1999 television documentary, fragments of which were interspersed in the dramatisation. But whereas Katz simply stood in the theatre reading rather than performing, on television Neil Pearson, as Diamond, enacted the material with a mixture of straight to camera and voice over, aided by sundry other actors and extras. And whereas Katz's stark rendition let nothing stand between Diamond and the audience, the television dramatisation intrusively interposed itself, turning verisimilitude into verismo. For instance, when Diamond recounts an argument with a nurse, during which she said that she appreciated his anger and heard his shouting, we understand that she said nothing of the sort, but that Diamond is using artistic licence to paint a picture of her placatory attitude; when, in the dramatisation, we hear an actor actually say the words, we begin to wonder how much is true and how much fictional. In another telling detail, the actor playing Diamond's doctor looks forbidding and wears spectacles to match; in the documentary his original does not. Of course, as I have suggested elsewhere (BMJ 2000;321:1599-1602), there is probably as much fiction in autopathography as there is autobiography in fiction, but Diamond's style is so vivid and immediate that on the page you think you can distinguish the two, whereas on the screen it was doubtful.

Of course, if it helps support people with cancer and enlighten the rest of us, that is all to the good. But in the end this amusing dramatisation did not give me the lump in my throat that I got from hearing Robert Katz read the same material on that cramped little stage in Battersea.