While filming her new show about the state of Australia’s health, Magda’s Big National Health Check, Magda Szubanski began getting chest pains. “I’ve been dreading having a heart attack for years – everyone looks at me like I’m a walking heart attack,” the 61-year-old says now. Helpfully, the pain occurred while she was filming a segment with Dr Sandro Demaio, the CEO of VicHealth, who drove her to hospital himself. “You’re a national treasure,” he tells her. “I’m not going to risk it.”
It turned out Szubanski was fine and hadn’t had a heart attack – but then her brother did. “My brother has such a high pain threshold, you could stab him and he probably wouldn’t notice,” Szubanski says. “His symptoms were absolutely bizarre – he felt this zap in his jaw. His main artery was completely blocked. It’s really lucky he didn’t die; he had a quadruple bypass. It’s so bizarre that while I was getting my heart checked, he had the real event. And my brother’s not overweight – if you stood the two of us side by side and asked which sibling will have the heart attack, you’d pick me. So what lies beneath? We don’t know.”
What lies beneath is the subject of Magda’s Big National Health Check, a three-part ABC series exploring the state of the nation’s physical and mental health. Half the population has at least one form of chronic disease – diabetes, heart disease, cancers, mental illnesses – which are responsible for 90% of Australian deaths and are often largely preventable. But if they are preventable, why do so many of us have them?
Szubanski has osteoarthritis and autoimmune arthritis, and in the first episode, learns she is on the precipice of developing diabetes and high cholesterol. That is a tough thing for anyone to hear, let alone on camera, I say. “Look, it was tough,” she says. “Part of you goes, is this a good idea? But that was the whole point of the program, it feels almost mean not to share. And it actually shifted the fear for me – whether I had heart disease or not, knowing was better. That gave me the option to do something. When you don’t know, you’re in this sort of suspended helplessness, the anxiety gnaws away at you. So I’m really glad I did it. And honestly, since I came out – I was so, so private for decades and now I don’t really fucking care.”
For someone who describes themselves as private, it’s interesting that Szubanski also clearly has an impulse to share when she thinks it can help, whether it was coming out on television, speaking about her struggles with dieting, writing her memoirs or letting us see her vulnerable in a hospital bed. “I’m a compulsively honest person – there is a lot of Sharon Strzelecki in me,” she says. “But fame can be tricky. I’ve been addressing some of the health issues that have come up since during the show, but I won’t say more, I don’t want everyone in my business,” she adds – though she often lets us in anyway.
Szubanski has struggled with diet culture her whole life and has “tried everything” to lose weight. “That’s why I think it’s useful having someone like me do this show, because I have been trying extreme wellness since I was six and that’s just set me up for failure repeatedly,” she says.
“A lot of people come at me with online with wellness tips – that is not helpful for someone like me because I have actually done it and it didn’t work. I’ve tried all of those things. The interesting thing is, we all know what to do – so why are things so bad?”
Magda’s Big National Health Check explores how junk food advertising means children can recognise brands from the age of three, to how our postcodes are an easy marker of how healthy we are, determining our access to things such as exercise and fresh food. Szubanski often travels with the calm and wise Demaio, who she clearly adores: “I love him. He’s just so kind. It was so nice for me to be around that energy because I’ve had arsehole doctors say cruel and stupid things that left me feeling more hopeless and helpless than ever. The medical profession needs people like him.”
She hopes the show will disrupt the thinking that makes some people blame others for developing chronic illness. “It is true that quite a percentage of it is preventable, but making that leap from it being preventable meaning it is therefore your fault is very flawed thinking,” she says. “We know that this is the state of the nation, and we know that shaming and blaming does not work.”
Meeting regular people who were working to better the health of those around them, including giving away excess vegetables from their gardens or setting up programs in schools, made her feel hopeful. “I was in a bit of a trough when we started, I didn’t know which way to turn. But that really made me feel much more proactive. One person’s spark can start a bonfire and that is amazing. We should never underestimate that.”
After filming ended, she says, “I started taking my chronic health conditions more seriously, because I tend to just ride roughshod over them. But I’m a long way down the path – I don’t know whether I can turn around or not, to be really honest. I certainly haven’t given up. But how we set our youngsters up for the best possible life they can have, that’s very important to me.”
Szubanski will next be on our screens in the new Kath & Kim, which will air in November. “I’m gonna be everywhere, you’ll all be bored of Magda soon! It has been 11 years but it was like we’d never been apart. It’s hilarious, but also really poignant because of Shane,” she says, referring to the late Warne, who played Sharon’s husband Wayne Shaun, a Shane Warne impersonator. “There’s a lot of stuff people haven’t seen, it’s amazing. All I can say is that I felt the same as when we were making the show way back when – it felt funny to me!’”
The first episode of Magda’s Big National Health Check airs on 1 November on ABC TV and iView at 8.30pm.
