WHEN Calendar Girls the movie is shown across Britain's cinemas this month the £1 million barrier raised for Leukaemia Research looks sure to be smashed.

It's a fantastic achievement, which has earned the WI ladies praise and admiration across the globe. But among the glittering premieres, the photoshoots at the Cannes Film Festival, the stars' limousines, the television appearances and the press attention it would be easy to forget just what the whole episode is about. But John Baker's widow, Angela, is determined that won't be the case.

Behind the fun, frolics and the attention of the world's media, Angela and her fellow Calendar Girls can point to some real progress in the way leukaemia and its closely related blood disease lymphoma, which actually killed John Baker, is fought and, increasingly more often, vanquished.

A good place to start to see just how the thousands of pounds raised in that battle is the John Baker Unit at Leeds University.

Professor Gareth Morgan is part of a team of some 20 researchers, 12 consultants, 25 nurses and other staff at Leeds looking into leukaemia and lymphoma.

It studies survival rates, treatment, side effects for those who suffer from the ailment and uses similar techniques to try to identify why people develop tumours in the first place.

The unit is funded by the NHS, but money raised from the Calendar Girls project takes that further.

"The money provided by the Calendar Girls has provided us with a good infrastructure within the lab," said Prof Morgan. "It makes the environment for the patient so much better, so that we can look after the patients better."

So the money provided by people is directly helping research into the disease.

But will there ever be a cure?

Prof Morgan hesitates.

"The kind of work we are undertaking is to discover how to use the current treatments better and also identify better treatments.

"There is no question that there are a lot of new treatments based on the research we are carrying out.

"It is making people's lives better and allowing them to live longer. So it is very important work."

Every year 24,500 people in the United Kingdom will develop leukaemia but Douglas Osborne, chief executive of the Leukaemia Research charity, said that one day there would be a "cure" and the efforts of the Calendar Girls was bringing that day closer.

Mr Osborne said that when the charity was founded, back in 1960, if someone contracted leukaemia the approach was to try and make their remaining days as comfortable as possible. Today eight out of 10 children with leukaemia will make a full recovery and more adults are beating the disease.

"It's a very personal disease, what works well with one patient might not be effective with another and the research aims to ensure that we can quickly and effectively work out what treatment is best in each individual disease. In effect we are treating the patient, not the disease," said Mr Osborne.

The unit at Leeds is also trying to discover what causes the disease in the first place.

Mr Osborne said it did not appear to be handed down from one generation to the next but there was no evidence to isolate one particular lifestyle.

"A lot of interest was focused on people living near nuclear power stations but we cannot make any scientific connection between the two," said Mr Osborne. "It is also more prevalent in some areas of the country, for example in Cornwall or Cumbria, where they are on granite."

Everyone who contracts leukaemia or lymphoma (a disease of the blood which is closely linked to leukaemia and is within the remit of the Leukaemia Research's work) fills in a detailed questionnaire to try to pin down the cause of the disease. John Baker was part of that process which has now been expanded as a result of the fund raising ventures.

Mr Osborne is full of admiration for the Calendar Girls and their work and said it had caught the public's imagination. He tells an amusing tale of an elderly lady, some 90 years old, contacting Leukaemia Research, wanting copies of the new calendar.

"She said she thought the WI ladies were marvellous and wanted three copies," he said. "When I asked why she needed three copies she said they were for her boyfriends!"

But Mr Osborne also knows that behind the fun and the publicity, there is a very serious motive. And it is to avoid the loss of as many John Bakers as possible.

"It is a fact that John Baker's legacy is that the work carried on in his memory is undoubtedly helping others to survive the disease," said Mr Osborne.

"It is of course very sad that John did not survive. The Calendar Girls have ensured that his death was not in vain. Sometimes I think he is still around, somewhere up there, pushing them on."