Richard Herring said taskmaster viewers are seeing his latest health fight in public: he has been diagnosed with incurable blood cancer called hairy cell leukaemia. The comedian said he has started chemotherapy and described the disease as treatable, even as he called it incurable.
“Let me give you the bad news first. I have cancer again. Not ball cancer this time, I can’t afford to lose another one of those (though I will be doing my show 'The Male Eunuch' if it does happen),” he wrote on Substack.
“This time I have blood cancer. And God is determined to make sure I get the funniest cancers possible and this one is called hairy cell leukaemia. The other bad news is that it is incurable.” He added: “The good news is that it’s entirely treatable and will not kill me (the treatment has a tiny chance of killing me, but so has loading the dishwasher, so don’t worry about it).”
Bone marrow cells 12 years ago
Herring said doctors found a few of the cells in his bone marrow about 12 years ago, then tested him for five years before telling him it was probably going to be OK. He said he had “sort of forgotten about it” until he spoke to the doctors again, a reminder that this diagnosis did not arrive out of nowhere.
He also said the blood cancer is not linked to his previous testicular cancer. That separates this from his earlier illness and keeps the focus on the new treatment burden he is now managing.
Taskmaster winner, 2020
In 2020, Herring appeared in season 10 of Taskmaster and won the tenth series. He also won the second Champion of Champions special the same year, adding another televised credit to a career that has included 14 one-man shows and co-writing the sitcom Time Gentlemen Please.
He has over 10,000 followers on Substack, which gives his announcement an audience that goes well beyond his live comedy work. He has also appeared on Have I Got News For You and in The Great Celebrity Pottery Throwdown this year, keeping him visible across panel shows, competition TV and his own writing platform.
Chemotherapy starts now
Herring detailed his first day of chemotherapy in the post and said there were no immediate problems. That is the practical takeaway for readers following his situation: the treatment has begun, he says it is manageable, and the next stage is simply the one he is already in.
He wrote that he feels “a bit embarrassed about it,” but his own account points in the opposite direction. This is a comedian with a public audience, a previous cancer history and a current diagnosis he says is incurable but treatable; for him, the story now is not the label, but whether the treatment stays as straightforward as day one.
