British broadcaster Adrian Chiles used to knock back 100 units a week. He knew he couldn't quit alcohol, so he came up with a more realistic way to live.
Do you open a bottle of wine with good intentions? You'll just have the one glass but, oops, look, now most
of the bottle's gone. Yes, you know the NHS guidelines suggest 14 units a week and, yes, you're regularly busting that, but 14 units is nothing, right?
Besides, you're not busting it by that much. Sometimes, though, usually in the morning, a thought will niggle — am I overdoing it, is it possible that I am an alcoholic? But then the thought vanishes with the headache. After all, everyone else drinks a bit too much, don't they?
Well, no, they don't. One in five adults in England don't drink at all, and although 23 per cent of adults are knocking back more than 14 units a week, the key takeaway is that 57 per cent of adults are managing to stick to those puritan 14 units. Moderate, safe drinking is the norm, so that puts you in the minority.
Don't blame me for ruining your Sunday. Blame the broadcaster and columnist Adrian Chiles, who has set out this argument in his new book, The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less, which is part memoir, part guide to moderating your alcohol intake. I was surprised when Chiles, 55, suggested we meet to discuss the book in a west London pub, but I soon realise it's a ploy. He's keen to demonstrate his new-found zeal for moderation.
He arrives in black leathers, having ridden over on his motorbike, looking greyer-haired and leaner than I remember from his days on The One Show, but he has retained that squidgy-cheeked boyishness. Once he has peeled himself out of his leathers to reveal a white shirt and jeans, he orders a half pint of beer mixed with soda water, served in a pint glass. (I tried it later at home — it's an acquired taste.) "That's 1.2 units," he says in his gruff Brummie accent. So far, so sensible.
At his booziest, just a few years ago, Chiles was knocking back 100 units a week. That's 10 bottles of wine or almost 50 pints. "How can I possibly say I haven't got some level of addiction or dependence if the thought of going a day without alcohol alarms me?" he wondered at the time.
"I never got into trouble," he tells me. "I wasn't waking up in shop doorways or fighting. I wasn't misbehaving." When I ask him to name the worst thing he has done while drunk, he's flummoxed. He finally dredges up the hazy memory of a dinner at Chequers. Tony Blair had invited him, Lorraine Kelly, John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, an MP and a judge for dinner and while on the tour of the house afterwards the armagnac suddenly "went to my head". Did he lunge at Lorraine? Did he blaspheme at the archbishop? No, it turns out his crime was "just talking at [Blair] … and I've got no idea what I said". On nights like this he was often guilty of "talking a load of shit … not making sense" and "being boring. I never did anything really bad. That was almost the problem," he says.
His period of self-reflection came in the wake of a rollercoaster ride in his personal and professional life. After a number of years fronting BBC TV programmes such as Working Lunch and The Apprentice: You're Fired, he hit a career high in 2007, presenting The One Show with Christine Bleakley. With their "girl next door, boy next door" appeal and its blend of light, factual entertainment, the weekday programme was a ratings success, drawing a regular audience of four million.
In 2010 the BBC brought in Chris Evans for the Friday shows, with Chiles fronting the show Monday to Thursday, so he defected to ITV for a rumoured £6 million, four-year deal. "I didn't hold it against [Evans] … as miserable as I was," he says.
Chiles and Bleakley, who followed him to ITV, were placed at the helm of Daybreak, the channel's new breakfast show, and he was made chief presenter of football coverage on ITV Sport. "That was fine for a bit, and then it wasn't," he says with understatement. The duo's on-screen chemistry had somehow failed to migrate with them and they were axed as hosts after just a year. The debacle led to the derailment of Chiles's TV career.
His personal life was also in turmoil. In 2009 he had to bat away unfounded rumours of an off-screen romance with Bleakley, as his 11-year marriage to Jane Garvey, the host of Woman's Hour at the time and a recently announced presenter for Times Radio, came to an end.
He dated the comedian Catherine Tate for a while, but then met Katharine Viner, editor of The Guardian. He joined the paper as a columnist in 2019 and shortly afterwards was summoned to her office for a meeting. "We met and we instantly got on, and then that was that." Chiles starts to squirm like a schoolboy in his seat. What's it like going out with the boss? "Well, it's a big organisation. I'm a long way down from her, so I don't answer to her, really." Then he throws his hands up in the air. "Don't ask me any more, please. Have pity on me," he pleads. "I'm quite squeamish talking about that stuff. Kath would murder me if I say more or less anything." But he relents just enough to add: "She's incredibly intelligent, kind, good-looking and good fun."
Contentment, then, on the home front, but the adjustment to life after decades working in live television has been more difficult. "I had nearly 20 years, most of which I'd been on air six days a week. Since the end of 2014 I've only had an earpiece in twice." He started feeling "really bloody miserable".
With time on his hands, Chiles tried to tackle "20 different things at once", but nothing stuck. He went to his GP and was prescribed the antidepressant citalopram, "and that helped a bit. I still take that." He also had therapy, but the turning point came when his clinical psychologist diagnosed him with attention deficit disorder and put him in touch with a psychiatrist, who prescribed an amphetamine. "I instantly felt transformed, almost to a worrying degree." In what way? "Just elevated mood, focused more."
With his mental health in better shape, Chiles, a father to two grown-up daughters, began to assess his drinking. Although he didn't fit the stereotype of an alcoholic, he realised his life revolved around booze. He worried he was damaging his health and believed there were millions of others like him. That realisation led him to make a BBC documentary, Drinkers Like Me, in 2018. He had his liver scanned for the programme and the results were "deeply shocking". The doctor "wasn't saying I had cirrhosis, but he was saying 'you're on the way there' ".
Thanks to a variety of lifestyle changes (see his 12 steps below), he has now whittled down his drinking to between 10 and 30 units a week. "I'm not going to stick around for another bottle of wine. I've learnt to just walk away. I never get home or wake up in the morning and think, God, I wish I'd drunk more last night."
His book, he says, is an antidote to "quit lit". One chapter sets out criteria — devised by an expert in the field of alcohol harm — to help readers identify whether to attempt moderation or abstain completely. If you don't have a family history of severe alcohol problems and can forgo drinking for a week or two without suffering physical withdrawal symptoms, then moderation is worth a go.
"There are certainly some problem drinkers for whom the only answer is to stop drinking completely," Chiles writes. "But I believe there are many more who don't seek help for their drinking precisely because they're frightened of being told that abstinence is their only option. This is a tragedy because, unable to countenance the prospect of life without alcohol, they just continue as they were."
Tips in the book include downloading an app to count your units (which Chiles found "painful" at times) and drinking wine out of a sherry glass. Would he ever take things further like his teetotal friends, the comedians Lee Mack and Frank Skinner? He fears the impact on his social life, but doesn't rule out giving up completely. "If all your friends drink, and that's what you do, you meet for a pint, you go out for a meal and you drink. It could be dumb but I think [by going teetotal] I'd be making it quite hard for myself."
Many teetotallers tell him life can be dull without alcohol; Skinner, for example, says he misses the "white heat" of the craic when drink is involved. "I think that's the thing to get over," Chiles tells me.
Nowadays he's busy with his column for The Guardian and his Radio 5 Live show, but his lack of TV presence still stings. He recounts a conversation with a passenger on a train, versions of which get repeated often. " 'You're not doing much telly now,' he said. I've heard it a million times. 'No, I'm not. Mainly radio. A bit of this, that.' Then he went, 'Oh well, you tried your best.' He was being nice, but if I could've opened the door of a moving train, I might have thrown myself out. What do you do with that? You're defined by what you used to be, and that's a problem. It turns out you can't switch the fame off. You're constantly having your limitations pointed out to you."
Chiles is also embroiled in a gruesome battle with the taxman that has limped on for eight years. In the most recent instalment, which came in February, a judge ruled in Chiles's company's favour, concluding that previous work contracts with the BBC and ITV were for services and not contracts of employment, but HM Revenue & Customs has appealed the decision. "It's a nightmare, but don't let me go there because I'll just say the wrong thing. It's going to ruin us financially and psychologically whichever way it goes now," he says, darkening.
Chiles grew up with his younger brother, Nevil, in the village of Hagley, "a pretty perfect place" in Worcestershire. "You've got the countryside on your doorstep, lakes, big cities, Black Country," he says. "People call it a posh bit of Birmingham." To sum up his upbringing, he sweetly recites an inverted version of the opening lines of the Philip Larkin poem This Be the Verse. "Somebody wrote an antidote to that which goes, 'They tuck you up, your mum and dad,' " he says.
The roots of his drinking can be traced back to his childhood. His English dad, who ran a scaffolding company, drank a lot — a bottle of wine a day and a bottle of whisky a week — his Croatian mum less so, daily shots of slivovitz, a plum brandy. At 13 he had his first surreptitious drink at a family party. The following year he was prescribed glasses and the bullies had a field day. "I couldn't deal with it. I felt like an idiot and I let that get to me. Things went to pieces a little bit. But by the time I was 15 or 16 I was fine."
A schoolteacher told his parents, "He might go on to be a journalist because he's good at English," and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. About a year after he started work experience at the BBC he was doing stints as a presenter on Financial World Tonight. "Everyone said, 'How'd you get to be a presenter?' Well, you only need one thing — somebody mad enough to give you something to present."
His faith is important to him. While studying English literature at Westfield College, which is now part of Queen Mary University of London, he befriended a student who, to Chiles's amazement, combined his Catholic faith with a love of beer and football. That friendship led him to convert to Catholicism 20 years later. He was always a believer, "but never had a way of expressing it because my family were complete nonbelievers. I was fascinated by believers, kids at school, some of them were churchgoers, then I went to university and met committed Jewish people and Muslims." He started attending Mass and "felt at home there, like the people were the kind of people I could see myself hanging round with".
That initial sense of comfort has given way to the behaviour of a long-suffering Catholic. "My friends say, 'You've been a proper Catholic five minutes and you're already hunting around for who does the shortest Mass and beating yourself up if you don't go." Perhaps the Catholic guilt morphed into more general guilt about his drinking.
Whatever elements sparked his lifestyle overhaul, today he is healthier and — given that pint of watery lager — really rather sober. The most revealing thing about Chiles is that he had a urinal installed in his flat. Worse, that urinal is overlooked by a stained-glass rendering of the West Bromwich Albion crest. Was this a decision made at the height of his boozing? "I had the flat done and thought, well, it seems to be startlingly obvious. It's at the right level [for ease of use] and it just goes in." He mutters something about splashes. I must look appalled because then he says, "It's a bit like Brexit — one side of this argument can't understand the other. But why wouldn't you? Most of my toilet use is done standing up."
It sounds outlandish, but given all the watered-down lager he's drinking it was probably a wise investment.
• The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less by Adrian Chiles is published by Profile Books
Adrian's 12 steps to moderate drinking
1. Download an app to count your units
The main reason I've managed to cut down is because I know how much I'm consuming. Before you even attempt to moderate, download an app such as Drink Less and use it to help you count your units. This is key. It is boring and annoying but you must do this. Don't judge yourself, just be honest. After a few weeks have a look at your numbers and consider which of all those drinks you could have done without.
2. The Lee Mack rule of two
Try making your first two drinks of an evening alcohol-free. It's a tip the comedian Lee Mack gave me. In his case it set him on the road to quitting completely, because after the two alcohol-free drinks he found he was having a perfectly good time anyway, so why bother with the booze?
3. Find a trick that works for you
If you're a speed drinker, slow yourself down. Identify the slowest drinker in your group and only sip when they sip. With wine, drinking from a small glass can help. A friend of mine provokes derision from his kids by sipping wine from a sherry glass, but, as he says, what do they know? What works for me is refilling my wine glass with water and finishing that before pouring more wine. I then alternate water and wine for the rest of the evening. If beer's your thing, try halving your units by drinking pints of half beer, half soda water. Cut out high-alcohol beers altogether. There are lots of bitters and IPAs that come in at less than 4 per cent volume. Four pints of 3.6 per cent beer contain fewer units of alcohol than three pints of 5 per cent beer.
4. Examine your thinking around drinking
Roy Keane, the formidable former footballer — and former drinker — pointed out to me how if you're a boozer you'll always find an excuse to drink. If you've had a good day, you want a drink. Or if it's been a bad day, you deserve a drink. And likewise, a boring day. Going to a wedding? Great! A fine excuse to drink. A funeral? Not so great, obviously, but still a great excuse to drink. A night out, a night in, or whatever, whenever. That was me: always finding an excuse to drink.
5. Take a break
There is some consensus that staying off alcohol for three months can help you reset your thinking. The question to ask yourself during this time is, essentially, what kind of drinker do I want to be? The answer I got to is that I wanted to be the kind of drinker who enjoyed alcohol more because I was drinking less of it.
6. Don't be pressured, or pressure anyone else, into drinking
Alcohol is the only drug you seem to have to apologise for not taking. This needs to change.
7. Try a visualisation technique
When it's hot, you might struggle to resist the temptation of a cold beer in a pub garden. Force yourself to focus on an alternative image of the pint glass. Don't think about an ice-cold lager garlanded with condensation; imagine instead a glass containing what's left of a fourth or fifth pint. It's half-empty, warming rapidly and smudged by greasy fingers or lips. A wasp or two might be buzzing around it. Focusing on this image instead of the first is a help. It's a trick I play on myself from time to time.
8. Go urge surfing
Try this mindfulness technique. When you notice an urge, rather than fighting against it, imagine you're on a surfboard riding with it. Notice the shifting sensations, how they rise and fall, come and go. One hot summer's afternoon when the desire for a cold lager in a pub garden all but overwhelmed me, I got on my mental surfboard to ride the wave of my lager urges. I closed my eyes to visualise the scene, but all I could perceive was the front of my surfboard arrowing through a cold sea of Stella Artois. I tried some fancy surfing tricks but secretly I was hoping to take a tumble and fall right into this sea of lager. And in I fell; I couldn't help myself. When I opened my eyes the thought of a pint of Stella seemed as nothing compared with what I'd just been through, thrashing around in a sea of the stuff. The thirst for that pint had faded away. My urge-surfing had worked, albeit not quite in the way it's intended to, but there you go. Worth a try.
9. Listen to the science
You know that feeling of relaxation when you take that first sip of a drink after a long day? It might be a con. This is certainly the view of Lee Mack and it's one I'm coming to share. "It's medically proven that alcohol doesn't instantly get into your bloodstream," he says. "It takes 10 minutes. So that feeling cannot be the alcohol. Something else is going on." David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, has an explanation for this: "Over time people learn to associate the brain effects with the state. So that the taste of alcohol — which is usually aversive to start with — becomes more and more liked, as it gets associated with the later predicted positive effects of alcohol."
10. List the reasons you might regret drinking to excess on a night out
Set down how you know you will feel tomorrow, the regret you might feel about something you said or did, how sick you might feel, whether you will lose motivation to continue that healthy eating or gym regime, the knock-on effect on your mental health. Write these down in notes mode on your phone and set an alert to look at the list when you go to the loo at a party, otherwise you won't remember that stuff because alcohol's very good at shoving it to the back of your mind.
11. Disrespect the guidance (sort of)
If you feel you can't get your drinking down to 14 units a week — I for one struggle — then that is not a reason to give up on the whole idea of moderating. Any reduction will benefit you because the risk of harm falls dramatically if you can switch from heavy drinking to moderate drinking. Cutting down from 50 units a week to 35 will do you more good, relatively, than reducing from 30 to 15.
12. Less is more
If you lined up all the drinks I've drunk in the 40 years since I was 15, that line would be roughly three miles long. This is shocking enough, but what bothers me is how few of those drinks I really enjoyed, wanted or needed. I reckon it's much less than half of them. Mostly I was drinking alcohol for the sake of it. To cut down, all I've done is to restrict myself to the drinks I really want and not bother with the rest. We all know the best drink is the first drink. It makes you feel good. To my mind, every subsequent drink is an attempt to recreate the feeling that the first drink gave you — and it doesn't work. With each additional drink the benefits diminish and the potential harms increase. These days I just try to restrict myself to the first one or two, and enjoy them all the more.
Written by: Audrey Ward
© The Times of London