“Cancer consumes 24 hours of my day,” says Dai Henwood, looking into the camera at the beginning of his three-part documentary. “It’s just in the background as white noise. I think so often … what did I think about before I had cancer?”
That’s not actually the very start of the show. The opening seconds are a blooper: Henwood walks briskly into the room, sits down to deliver his very serious piece to camera, bumps his head on the boom mic and cracks up. Because he is still, through all this, a comedian.
Henwood was diagnosed with incurable stage-four bowel cancer in April 2020 and kept that a private matter for nearly three years, as he slogged through chemotherapy, radiotherapy and multiple surgeries to fend off the cancer’s spread through his body. Then in January 2023, in “a bit of a heavy post” on social media, he went public about his health.
He’d had plenty of time to think by then, and Live and Let Dai is as much about what has happened in his mind as his embattled body. Director Justin Hawkes has made documentaries with personality presenters before – Patrick Gower on weed and booze, Dark Tourist with David Farrier – but this feels different.
The usual grammar of factual TV is often forgone in favour of something more internal, the way a mind might wander. Somehow, only 90 seconds in, we’ve absorbed the bad news and we’re dropped into an emotionally visceral scene in a temple in Japan. There’s no explanation of what’s going on, just a title graphic reading “Winter”, although it will be important in the third episode.
“Cancer doesn’t all have downsides,” Henwood then tells a stand-up audience at a gig in Devonport. “I’ve never been given so much weed in my life.”
Even after the narrative reaches the harsh punctuation of the life of anyone living with cancer – the three-monthly scan – the aftermath, not the news itself, has Henwood thinking out loud that, “there’s more cancer, but it’s not as bad as it could be. I really will need to process the fact that I’m going back into chemotherapy. Because it’s really hard.”
We get to see quite how hard later in the episode. In a documentary that focuses a lot on its subject’s face, his expression as he arrives for the latest round of chemotherapy is glum (“Sometimes the hardest part of chemo is getting out of the car,” he observes). Six hours later, he’s out in the fresh air at Piha beach. “I feel sad, I feel broken, I feel so sick,” he says, but his face has already told us that.
There’s more processing in scenes with his daughter, and with his mother, retired judge Dame Carolyn Henwood, as she packs up her house – and his past – in Wellington in preparation for a move to Auckland to be closer to her son.
He reflects on his late father, the actor Ray Henwood. Cancer-related psychotherapy often focuses on helping terminal patients perceive not just their current reality, but the arc of their lives and the connections it has grown, and it’s what he’s doing here.
Only the first episode of Live and Let Dai was available for preview, but its three parts, screening on consecutive nights, are clearly of a piece. The tropes of cancer on screen – the hero narrative, the language of battle, the hope for a cure – are either absent or worked around into something more considered, something that will be of more use to others facing mortality and their families than anything with the word “brave” in it. In quietly standing against an inexorable tide and contemplating the ocean, Dai Henwood has done his best work.
Live and Let Dai screens on Three over three nights (September 30, 8pm; October 1, 8.10pm; October 2, 8pm) and streams on ThreeNow from September 30.
