Sir Cliff Richard has revealed he has been quietly battling prostate cancer for the past year.
During a conversation with journalist Dermot Murnaghan on Good morning Great Britain, The 85-year-old veteran singer said doctors identified the cancer while he was undergoing health checks ahead of a tour of Australia and New Zealand.
‘The lucky thing was that it wasn’t very old, and the other thing is that it didn’t metastasize. Nothing had gotten into the bones or anything like that,” Richard said.
The Summer vacation hitmaker added that he has now completed treatment and the disease is currently ‘gone’.
Richard stressed the importance of regular checks, saying: “I don’t know if it will come back. We can’t tell you things like that, but we absolutely, I’m convinced, have to go there, get tested, get checked.”
During the discussion, the Ocean deep crooner called the lack of a national prostate cancer screening program “absolutely ridiculous.”
“We have governments that have to take care of our country and those who live in that country, so I don’t understand how you can say, ‘Oh, we can do this, we can do that, but we’re not doing this for these people,’” he said.
“We all deserve the same opportunity to get tested and then start treatments very early. It seems to me – I’ve only been dealing with cancer for a year now, but every time I’ve spoken to someone this has come up and that’s why I think our government should listen to us,” Richard added.
