Property expert Sarah Beeny has said she and her husband are “hanging on by [their] fingernails” to their marriage after she finished her treatment for breast cancer earlier this year.
Asked by Gabby Logan on her podcast The Mid Point how Beeny and her husband still look like they are in the first throes of love, Beeny replied: “No, we’re hanging on by our fingernails.”
Beeny, who has been presenting Channel 4 shows since 2001, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022. She has gone through chemotherapy and a double mastectomy with reconstruction, with her treatment finishing in January. She told The Times last month that she doesn’t like to use the term “all clear”, but feels very well.
Beeny, 51, who has been married to Graham Swift, 50, an artist, for 21 years, told Logan: “I mean, it’s not easy, is it? Graham always said, ‘The day we have to work at our marriage, I’m going to leave’. And I was like, ‘Really?’ But I think he has had to work at it to be honest.”
She admitted that she had been “particularly horrible” in the last couple of years, and her husband eventually told her that neither was prepared to leave and have their four children half of the time so they were going to stay together.
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She said: “He said ‘You wanna be happy or unhappy, because either way we’re still going to live together’, so I was like, ‘OK, we’ll do happy then, shall we?’ He was like, ‘What a good idea. Maybe you should be a bit nicer?’ I was like, ‘Yeah alright I will.’ So logical, isn’t it?”
Beeny added that when she had complained to her brother, Diccon, about her marriage, he told her: “I get it Sarah, it must be horrendous being married to him. The only thing I think that could be worse is being married to you. So I suggest you go and make up!” “So all is well,” she concluded.
Beeny explored the parallels between her and her mother’s medical treatment in a poignant documentary Sarah Beeny vs Cancer, which aired in June on Channel 4. Her mother, Ann, died aged 39 after six years of illness and Beeny has said her own diagnosis was something she knew would eventually come.
On the podcast, Beeny also revealed she had not wanted to mention her cancer in her new memoir The Simple Life because she did not want cancer to be the “defining thing” in her life. The book is about all the homes she has lived in — many of which she renovated herself.
