The Hairy Bikers: Coming Home For Christmas review – What an inspiration to see Dave Myers revving up once again following his cancer diagnosis, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

The Hairy Bikers: Coming Home for Christmas 

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So many telly presenters and reality stars share every detail of their medical history, the line between celebrity and privacy isn’t so much blurred as obliterated.

But since his cancer diagnosis last year, Hairy Biker Dave Myers has maintained a dignified reticence about his fightback from serious illness. Aged 66, he’s of a generation that feels uncomfortable trading real trauma for shallow online sympathy.

So he was doubly courageous, teaming up with his great friend Si King on The Hairy Bikers: Coming Home For Christmas (BBC2), in allowing the cameras into his hospital room.

Until now, Dave has revealed almost nothing about his treatment. He still, with admirable fortitude, refuses to say what type of cancer he has. He doesn’t want to read speculation about how long he might have to live, he explained.

But both he and Si admitted that, at one stage, the outlook was very bleak. ‘It’s a Christmas I never thought I’d have,’ he said, ‘the dinner I didn’t think I’d be alive to eat.’

Since his cancer diagnosis last year, Hairy Biker Dave Myers (pictured, right) has maintained a dignified reticence about his fightback from serious illness

He was doubly courageous, teaming up with his great friend Si King on The Hairy Bikers: Coming Home For Christmas (BBC2), in allowing the cameras into his hospital room

Until now, Dave has revealed almost nothing about his treatment

There were no tears. The two friends pride themselves on being old-fashioned English working men, with their love of good food and loud bikes.

Still, you could hear Si swallowing the lump in his throat, as they set about preparing a gigantic sirloin of beef on the bone with all the trimmings. It was obvious that this was a scene he too feared would never happen again.

The banquet was staged as a thank-you to the medics and friends who have sustained Dave and his wife, Lil, through the past 18 months. Special care went into a noodle dish with pork and veg, called pancit and inspired by a Filipino nurse called Gia.

‘I’m slicing the cabbage finer than a hummingbird’s toenail clippings,’ announced Dave cheerfully. No one can doubt how much joy he takes in cooking — or simply watching other people cook, as he did at a Birmingham bakery where cheesy Brummy bacon scones the size of ostrich eggs were being kneaded.

He was equally thrilled to take delivery of a new Royal Enfield bike, though chemotherapy — a gruelling 37 bouts of it — has left him with a wobbly sense of balance. He practised for sitting on the bike by perching on a balance ball, yawing from side to side to control a video game.

Cancer can eat away at the soul as well as the body. At one stage he was too weak to ride, and chemo temporarily robbed him of his trademark beard and locks. But Dave has refused to relinquish his title of Hairy Biker. To see him revving up again, in every sense, was an inspiration.

Inside McVitie’s At Christmas 

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The festive recipe was less mouthwatering on Inside McVitie’s At Christmas (Ch4), an extended infomercial for the biscuit manufacturer and its new product — a white chocolate digestive.

Channel 4, once a bastion of first-rate documentaries, is now reduced to filling the schedules with hour-long adverts for supermarkets, fast food and nibbles. 

Earlier this week, we were subjected to Aldi’s Christmas Secrets, pushing pigs-in-blankets ice cream down our throats.

The corporate jargon is stultifying. Sophie, a ‘lead product development manager’, tested the blond biscuit and said, ‘We need to really understand how we can really optimise our overall eat experience.’

A few worthwhile factlets emerged. Apparently variety tins are still filled by hand, a technique I supposed had been replaced by automation decades ago.

And it was fun to see a commercial filmed with Sir Trevor McDonald indignantly confronting an impressionist, before biting into a biccie. That’s a proper advert, one that’s over in 30 seconds — not 60 minutes of primetime tedium.

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