The comedian Fred MacAulay has enjoyed a long career making people laugh.
Renowned for his quick wit and observational humour, he’s been a familiar face on our screens for the past three decades.
But MacAulay made news of a different kind last year when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The 69-year-old faced a difficult decision: cancel his sold-out tour and Edinburgh Fringe show or keep pushing on.
He chose to step back while doctors monitored his slow-growing tumour. Macaulay opted for MRI scans rather than just the standard PSA test, putting himself in what he calls “Snipers Alley.”
Speaking to Scotland Tonight, he said the waiting period between biopsy and diagnosis was the darkest time.
“There is a dark period between the sort of biopsy and the diagnosis because you don’t really know what’s coming around the corner,” he said.
“You don’t know what stage you’re going to be at or anything like that. So, that was it was at that time that I decided that I would cancel the fringe and cancel the tour.”
When his urologist delivered the news, there was a crucial word that changed everything. “He sort of said, ‘You have cancer, but…’ and as soon as he said ‘but,’ I thought, well, this is not going to be as bad as I feared,” explained MacAulay.
“He said ‘you’re going to be put on active surveillance’ and that was a lifeline.”
Now checked every three months, Macaulay hasn’t required surgery or treatment, and he’s using his platform to deliver an urgent message about early detection.
“The key to prostate cancer, just to get diagnosed early because it kind of saves your life,” said MacAulay.
“And hopefully it saved mine,” he says, while citing Chris Hoy, who was diagnosed at stage four despite being incredibly fit. “We still need to get more people to get themselves tested in Scotland so that we don’t get them into the later stages,” he added.
Return to the stage
MacAulay is now back doing what he loves most – and what he says he needs most – making people laugh.
His determination to return to the stage echoes the decision he made decades ago when he left his career as an accountant to pursue comedy full-time. At 30, watching a decade slip by, he realised he couldn’t wait any longer.
“When I was 30, I thought, oh my goodness, ten years have gone by. Kids are coming along. And I thought it would be very sad if I waited till I was 40 and still hadn’t given it a go,” he recalled.
But leaving a stable job with a mortgage and young children wasn’t simple. Being an accountant, he prepared a financial statement for the bank.
He said: “I had to clear it with the bank. I mean, they held the mortgage, and I was giving up, you know, a full-time salary. So I had to prepare a statement, and I thought, I can make this much money. So thankfully, they said yes.”
By February 1993, he went full-time, and by 40, he had his own BBC radio show that would last nearly 18 years. But the overnight success wasn’t quite what it seemed.
“Behind all that, there was the hard work of going up and down to London and doing, you know, some things,” he says. “You’re doing five or six gigs a night, crisscrossing across London. So that was that sort of hard graft.”
“There is nothing better for a stand-up to get back on stage and just hear the laughter come back, because it just enthuses you. It just makes you want to get out and do more, you know?”
The Glasgow Comedy Revolution
Macaulay was part of a pivotal moment in Scottish comedy history. In the 1980s, he joined The Funny Farm, a comedy collective that created opportunities where none existed.
“There was no circuit in those days in Scotland,” he explained. “Craig Ferguson had been doing stand-up and Billy Connolly, obviously, but for gigging comedians, there was nothing really.”
Today, Scotland’s comedy scene is thriving. “You just have to look at the Glasgow International Comedy Festival, the number of Scottish comedians that in the King’s Theatre, it’s phenomenal,” said MacAulay, crediting Billy Connolly’s legacy as the foundation.
“I think if you asked any stand-up comedian whose hero was, it would be Billy.”
MacAulay’s current tour, titled “Good Evening”, will see him performing at venues across Scotland. He’s already back to work-in-progress gigs such as the Glasgow Comedy Festival and Perth Festival of the Arts as he builds material for the autumn run.
His wife Aileen keeps asking if he’s thinking about slowing down, but his answer is unequivocal. “If you could feel the energy coming up from an audience, you think, no, I could do this again and again and again.”
When asked if he ever looks back on that pivotal decision to leave accounting, Macaulay reflects on what truly drives him. “I think stand-ups maybe want the laughter. Some of us need the laughter.”
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